Now days regardless of your business type you need to have the ability to draw unique and high quality traffic to your business via both online and offline. This increased traffic will lead your business to higher sales, greater retention, and give you the ability to connect to your target market or audience at will.
Below are a few ideas to generate this additional traffic to ones business regardless if you're storefront location, a home-based contractor, or an Internet company with either no or little cost to the business.
Social Media: Consider Social Media like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube for these platforms provides another entry point to any and all businesses. However your business needs to consider these platforms like another website or like another door to your business.
Since these platforms provide increased exposure and traffic to one's business you need to have a relevant content marketing strategy that is targeted and that will provide unique, fresh, and relevant content to your target market.
Create & Update Local Listings: This is a great and powerful avenue to not only build links and authority to one's website but this technique will also help increase the foot traffic into one's business.
However keep in mind that not all platforms are created equal. Some platforms will charge to update, change, or to create a listing while others will not. Whatever the case maybe it is good practice to try and keep all of these listings update and relevant.
Some Local Listings that you may want to consider could be Google.com, Yelp.com, YP.com, Manta.com, Superpages.com, and many more.
Content & Inbound Marketing: Personally I love this form of marketing for it enables you to create highly engaging and relevant content for one's business.
Just like the above strategies this is an ongoing process that need to be thought about, considered, and then executed to get the greatest results or return on investment.
Some Inbound or Content Marketing strategies that you can consider could be blogging, producing ebooks, publishing white papers, and creating videos.