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Try These 5 Affordable Marketing Ideas for Bike Shops

Try These 5 Affordable Marketing Ideas for Bike Shops

When you operate a small retail business, it’s easy to believe you can rely on foot traffic and word-of-mouth, but don’t underestimate the power of marketing. Marketing lets your bike shop communicate with your audience, and build a solid, supportive customer base. In fact, marketing is one of the essential pillars that supports a company’s success.

While some businesses invest thousands of dollars and countless hours into their marketing strategy, you may not have those resources. Continue reading as we discuss five affordable marketing ideas for bike shops. 

1. Get Involved in Your Community

Set up a tent at a farmer’s market or street fair, and offer your products and services to attendees. Getting involved is a great way to start a conversation on social media. Post about your participation before and during the event and use hashtags to get people buzzing about your bicycle shop.

2. Stay Active on Social Media 

Try These 5 Affordable Marketing Ideas for Bike Shops

It’s easy to put social media for your bicycle shop on the backburner when you’re handling the ins and outs of running your business. However, one of the keys to success in social media marketing is posting consistently. Social media is a helpful, low cost tool that can greatly grow your business. Let’s examine some ways to use social media effectively.

Provide high-quality, valuable content

Publishing useful content can help you grow your social media platforms and, in turn, your business. Share your insight on must-try local bike paths or navigable, low-traffic streets. Post helpful tips for novice and advanced cyclists. Keep your followers aware of current promotions and company news. Sharing valuable content establishes your expertise, making you the go-to resource for new and existing customers. 

Engage with your customers 

Try These 5 Affordable Marketing Ideas for Bike Shops

When a business interacts with them on social media, consumers spend 20-40% more. Use a marketing automation tool to help you efficiently communicate with your customers, improve their experience, and save yourself time, money, and energy. 

Maintain a consistent posting schedule. Interact with your customers in the comments. Always respond to messages, and use automated messaging tools to improve the process. Some social media platforms, such as Facebook, have automated response capabilities for their business accounts. Engaging with your customers displays great customer service that can win more business in the future. 

Use multiple social media channels

Conduct research on your target audience to learn how they spend their time online. Once you’ve identified who your audience is and what social media platforms they use, you can focus your efforts more effectively. 

Speak to each audience by tailoring your content accordingly. 

3. Monitor Your Online Reviews

Yelp, Google My Business, and Facebook are three popular places customers leave reviews. Both positive and negative reviews can be a determining factor for customers looking for a bike shop. 75% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. Offer your customers an incentive, such as a discount, in exchange for leaving a review on your business page. 

When you receive positive reviews, repost them to your social media accounts to acknowledge the customer and reinforce the value you bring to your customers. Negative feedback is always an opportunity to showcase your customer service with a professional, timely response.

4. Utilize Strategic Website Content

If you don’t have the budget or time to put toward paid ads, creating content based on an SEO strategy is a great way to increase traffic to your website, organically. Over time, your SEO efforts will help your website appear higher in search results, which is important considering about 75% of searchers never search past the first page. What’s more, 93% of people looked online to find a local business — making it all the more important to optimize your website for local search.

Conduct research on what your customers are searching for and then publish content that addresses those questions and concerns. Anticipating their questions will keep them coming back well after a sale is made.

5. Team Up With the Brands You Carry

With helping customers, managing employees, handling inventory, and more, the last thing you may think of — or even want to do — is create content for your social media pages. However, posting high-quality content that displays the value and capabilities of the products you sell will put both your shop, and the brands you carry, in a positive light. 

Creating this content yourself can be challenging. A social media automation tool, like ThumbStopper, streamlines the process of content creation and publishing, saving you time, energy, and resources that you can reallocate to running your business. Connecting with your customers is essential to the success of your marketing efforts. Collaborating with the brands you carry gives you the benefits of their visibility and brand recognition, all of which can establish and foster this connection. 

Let ThumbStopper Maximize Your Efforts

Implementing the above marketing tactics are effective ways to attract more customers to your store. However, with a powerful social media automation tool designed specifically for bicycle shops, you can maximize your efforts even more. 

Thumbstopper bridges the gap between retailers and brands — helping you publish brand-curated content on a consistent basis, so that you can focus on growing your business. Get started today and learn how ThumbStopper can help you reach people in your local community and turn them into customers. 

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Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It's one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience - with your accessible, branded content - in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
What Is Social Media Automation?
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
10 Ways to Automate Your Marketing
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
How Effective Is Your Social Media Strategy
[/et_pb_section][/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_row]
[/et_pb_column]

Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It’s one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience – with your accessible, branded content – in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
What Is Social Media Automation?
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
10 Ways to Automate Your Marketing
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
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