Alan presents the second in our three-part series of how to increase customers and footfall to your retail business. Filmed in on Location in Leeds City Centre during our Leeds Event.
Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present.
This is the second in a series of videos that are giving you top ways to increase footfall to your business or bring more people into your business. And in total we have 15 different ways that you can drive footfall and increase your business. And this is primarily designed for retail shops. However these ways a lot of them who work for small businesses that are online as well. So we’re creating this video whilst we’re running the pop up business school in Leeds that is sponsored by Leeds City Council, Leeds beds, and Hammerson who Victoria Leeds. Number six is an outrageous free offer. We’ve seen lots of examples of this, Waitrose is free offer was come for free coffee. When you come into Waitrose, there’s free parking. Less outrageous, but it’s still a free offer. We’ve seen running shops that will run free workshops, we see running shops that do free running events to get people in making outrageous free offer. That doesn’t cost you very much that gets people into your store and into the centre. Number seven is loyalty schemes. people’s wallets, and purses are packed full of loyalty cards. So if you shop in a particular place, you get points for if you buy 10, you get the x one, three. And the reason for that is loyalty schemes drive loyalty, and bringing people back to you. So nectar points, change people’s behaviours, the buy 10 Get One Free changes people’s behaviours. How can you implement a loyalty scheme for your business, that we get your customers coming back, coming back and coming back. Because we spend so much time and effort getting them there in the first place, we need to hold on to them once we’ve got them. For number eight, we’re going digital again, and it’s all about Twitter hours, every city or town seems to have a specific period of time during the week that’s dedicated for people from the local area, talking about that area. So go to Google search Twitter hours list, and you will find a list of all the different Twitter hours that are out there. Find the one for your local area. Or maybe there’s several that are around your area, get onto Twitter and start talking to people that are in that local area, engage with the communities, engage with the people and start to have a chat about what they’re up to what you’re doing, and bring them into your store. Number nine really struck me when I was hanging out with a local business in popper sold fabrics. And what we did was we went onto Google, and we searched for fabrics, East London, and fabrics Poplar. And what popped up on that search on the maps were all of his competitors. He was nowhere to be seen. He’d not listed his business on Google maps have not updated his profile, he had not submitted any details. And what really hit us was that business was digitally invisible. So one of the best ways to get people to come into your store to increase footfall is to make sure when they’re searching for stuff, they find you update your Google Maps listing, put the correct photos on there, get people to put reviews of your business online, and make sure that when people are searching for businesses like yours, you are the one that shows up. And number 10 is again digital. And it’s about filling out your profile details. Simon and I were looking for cafes in Birmingham, and a lot of the cafes didn’t have the opening hours, they didn’t have customer testimonials. They didn’t have the full details on that. And that put us off going to them. The second part of this is that quite often, your Facebook page, or your Twitter bio will rank higher on Google than your own website. So make sure that all of your profile details are filled out the full details on Facebook and get your customers posting stuff. Get the full details on Twitter and get people posting stuff. Fill out your full profile details so that when people check your pages, they can properly find out about you and know when and where to come to your business. So those are the second five ways that you can grow your business. If you missed the first five, subscribe to the YouTube channel and check out the video and next week there will be the last five of the 15 tips on how to increase footfall and traffic to your business.