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- Main Street businesses are forging connections to add value to each other as good neighbors, and in doing so are finding a highly targeted means of generating visibility and additional business of their own.
- Main Street businesses are forging connections to add value to each other as good neighbors, and in doing so are finding a highly targeted means of generating visibility and additional business of their own.
A fairly new social networking site for SMBs is helping Main Street businesses work together to achieve the golden rule in business of “Who can help?” And more importantly, “Who can I help?”
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One of the resources emerging to aid these connections is Alignable, a social networking site that emerged in January, 2014. The platform serves 8,000 communities so far and supported the creation of 600,000 connections between local businesses willing to cross promote and cross refer with each other. However they occur, Main Street businesses are forging connections to add value to each other as good neighbors, and in doing so are finding a highly targeted means of generating visibility and additional business of their own.
For example, Steve Dreiling, owner of EaglesNest Wood & Pottery in Colorado Springs, Colo., has connected with local businesses to provide complementary services such as custom engravings on liquor bottles for a local liquor store and aligning with a local vacuum and sewing making repair business to re-use its discarded packing materials, saving money for himself and dramatically reducing garbage costs for the vacuum shop. He’s also started a recent partnership with a dog grooming shop to create custom dog-friendly ceramics. His motto for business and life is "information shared is information squared.”
Eagles Nest Wood and Pottery is getting PR and business by providing neighborly help. (Courtesy of... [+]
Likewise, Alex Gonzalez, Director of Sales & Marketing for Best Western in Rockville MD. has made Rockville a go-to destination for tourists by partnering with spas, doggie day cares and catering companies he can co-align with to please his customers while enriching his neighbors. Most recently he’s in talks with a limo service to devise an agreement for offering his clientele star treatment at approximately half the typical price. The efforts have currently gotten his Rockville Best Western to full bookings for the Cherry Blossom festival in D.C., despite being located in a tiny town with few tourist attractions of its own.
Here’s how the “good neighbor” agenda is working out for these two businesses so far: In Dreiling’s case, he left a corporate job in October 2015 to focus on growing his own business full time. In the six months since, he has doubled both his partnerships and the number of subcontractors who work in his shop. (He has also tripled his followers on social media since becoming active in his local community and through the localized Alignable site.)
For Gonzales, he has doubled his connections to local businesses and has significantly reduced the travel and research time required to find and connect with suitable cross-promotional partners by working through the Alignable site. With a 4-month baby, he can send connections and ideas to other local SMBs during 2 a.m. feedings and get responses by morning, he says.
Marketing expert Ken Courtright, IncomeStore.com, has used this philosophy repeatedly in his own businesses by simply thinking through what he has that would be complementary to other aligned or regional ventures. In his case, in a prior business he offered to tape 5,000 of his video store coupons to pizza boxes for Louie’s Pizza and to distribute 10,000 Louie’s pizza coupons to the next 10,000 customers who walked through his doors. Courtright’s team did all of the work. The result: even during the stagnant market for videos in 1997, Courtright’s sales rose 22%, while Louie’s Pizza achieved a 6% increase in sales for doing nothing at all.
The concept works particularly well for local partners, but extends to online business as well. For example, a business for wheatgrass kits and a company providing nutritional supplements or equipment for growing and harvesting nutritional herbs could gain additional exposure and customers by cross promoting on each other’s sites, free of charge.
For Alignable, the principle of good neighbors has been highly successful so far. The network is free to users, who are extoling the chance to accelerate their agendas together. “We organized a town event on Alignable, and each business promoted the event on their social media channels,” said Jaye Oman, owner of JoKaren Lingerie in Acton, Mass. “It was phenomenal…our sales were amazing. Over the course of the day I logged 18 new customers.”
Alignable is following the good neighbor principle in its own operation as well, through partnerships with companion companies including ConstantContact, Insightly, Fundera, and GoDaddy.com.
