So you’ve opened up a pizzeria or Tex-Mex fusion restaurant in your local neighborhood and you’re raring to go with it. After finishing up all your paperwork and hanging the “Open” sign on your entrance, it’s time to figure out how to market your pizza place or whatever.
In between custodial duties of sweeping up the place and taking care of your walk-in customers, it’s important to realize that your city has a chamber you can go to in order to help out when it comes to marketing your establishment.
Enter the Local Chamber of Commerce
Whether you should join the Chamber of Commerce or not is ultimately your choice. It’s defined as a chamber designed to promote the local business community so that said community isn’t left high-and-dry with promoting itself or themselves.
- Why People Don’t Like Cooperating with the Chamber of Commerce: Some business owners would rather depend on walk-ins, positive word-of-mouth, posters, print ads, and online self-promotion than ask the Chamber of Commerce for help. It’s because it involves membership fees and no immediate return of investment in kind.
- The Limitations of Chamber of Commerce Marketing: Even though the existence of your local Chamber of Commerce is a welcome one for the most part, it still takes time and effort to advertise your eatery or dining hall with it that you might want to otherwise spend on self-promotion. It also features instable assistance, limited leads, and potential conflicts of interest.
- Why People Love Cooperating with the Chamber of Commerce: It might be a good idea to cooperate with your local Chamber of Commerce and pay for its membership fees in light of its ability to give actual exposure to your business. It’s also a regular place for networking opportunities. You can get grants and funding from it as well as mailing list access.
- How Does It Expose Businesses to the Wider Audience? It’s the job of the Chamber of Commerce to promote local businesses. They’re funded by local businesses for the purpose of serving as their marketing agency. They bring together professionals in town for local business interaction and networking opportunities with fellow businesses.
- Combining Cooperative Business Networking with Self-Promotion: You can still allocate your funds to traditional means of advertising, from newspapers to magazines to digital marketing and TikTok. At the same time, you can create business opportunities with other professionals, like doing catering jobs for office parties or availing of printing services locally.
- Businesses Can Help Lift Each Other Up: A local Chamber of Commerce shows that businesses need not adhere to the dog-eat-dog mantra they’re infamous for. They don’t have to be crabs in a bucket dragging each other down either. They can cooperate with each other to get bigger and better business for the both of them.
