How can you draw more visitors to your business when you’re in a remote rural location?
Increase your pulling power. Join with other similar rural businesses and promote yourselves as a group. Instead of just one rural business located ‘way out in nowhere,’ you can become a destination worthy of a planned day trip.
Collaborative Marketing is working together with others to sell what you make. It’s a concept that farmers have traditionally used more than artists and crafts artisans. But wherever there is common ground - a common market or a common product - there is an opportunity to achieve more together.
My area of western North Carolina is known for handmade arts and crafts, and it’s not surprising that some of our best artisans have linked together to attract visitors to their out-of-the-way rural locations. Two groups of potters have agreed to work together to market the the crafts they produce, and organized themselves by their geographical locations. Some of the studios represent the work of one artist, while other studios showcase multiple artists. With so many studios geographically close to one another, it becomes quite natural to market them as a group. And it also makes it easy for visitors who love handcrafted pottery of all kinds to see all the studios while enjoying the beautiful mountain landscape.
Each of the groups has created a website with a detailed map that lists all the artists and their studio locations, along with photographic samples of each artist’s work and links to their individual websites. Print brochures with the same information are available and waiting to be discovered by those visitors already in our area and looking for interesting things to do. Attractive and consistent signage at each studio location allows visitors to casually - but confidently - meander their way through the curvy mountain roads.
Here are links to each group for you to take a look at their collaborative marketing efforts:
Potters of the Roan is a guild of emerging and professional potters living and working in the Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina.
The Penland Potters is a group of seven clay studios located within a three mile radius of the Penland School of Crafts in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.
Are you ready to make this kind of shift in your thinking, and include some type of collaborative marketing in your promotional arsenal? It’s a tough question but one you must think about thoroughly before you join together with others. You are still an independent business, but interdependent in some ways. Finding businesses that share common ground is the first step, and then you can organize your marketing efforts around a common theme.
Would collaborative marketing work for your rural business?
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