Why join a business directory?
Business Directories are outdated in this day & age of social media, right?
Except that they are not! While social media makes our lives a little easier (or it serves as a wonderful distraction from what we actually need to do) the digital age is a better time to be listed in a local directory than ever.
We have collected the top 5 reasons why it makes sense to be listed in a directory. Let us know your opinion in the comments!
1. Local Visibility & Exposure
It is simple math that the more people who know about your business, the higher your chances are for them to purchase something from you or make use of your services.
Your business probably checks all the boxes: you have your website, social media accounts, and are registered on Google Maps, right? That is a great start, but unless you are doing worldwide sales, you also need to go where your audience is: Your own city.
Getting listed on a local business directory lets you benefit from the 100’s or 1000’s of visitors that a directory gets each day.
Boost your business by making your company a house-hold name in your city, instead of getting lost in the unlimited realms of social media. Make sure the locals see you and check you out. Everyone in your city is a potential customer.
2. Brand Awareness & Credibility
A commonly heard phrase is: “I can find everything I need on Social Media and Google”. You certainly can, but the real question is: Can people find YOU?
Business Directories make it easier for people to find you, since they are usually sorted by business category and allow for tags and keywords, making it a breeze to find you. The visitors or users of the business directory will associate your brand with these keywords and after they have seen your logo a few times, maybe their next search will lead to a purchase?
As a business, credibility and trust are two invaluable characteristics that people should associate your business with. Business directories offer authentic, local reviews by other businesses in your city. If the business members trust you, then the broad audience will, too.
In addition, the business directory owners will put a huge focus on the credibility and integrity of their directory, so just the fact that you are in it speaks for itself.
3. Traffic & Getting Discovered
As stated before, business directories get 100’s or 1000’s of visits each day. By linking to your website and using the keywords, tags and SEO that match your business, you will appear in more searches and get a higher ranking in online searches.
Most people tend to over-estimate how well-known their business is and under-estimate that we as human beings are attracted to things that we were not originally looking for.
We browse shops, libraries, online streaming catalogs, the same is true for browsing businesses. When we started making our business directory, we were not aware of 90% of the businesses that are now our members. That is incredible! Because the operators of the local directory are potential clients, too!
4. Cost-effectiveness
A Business Directory combines all your contact data in one place, making it a breeze for you to keep your information up to date. Money spent on flyers or hand-outs (not to mention the time spent on the creation and distribution) can be saved or reduced by combining all your information where your local audience can easily find it.
Social Media demands you re-post your business regularly to stay on top of the results. In a professional directory your business, services and products are always available when visitors search for your keywords or just browse the directory.
On top of that, you do not need to worry about the technical maintenance, updates or promotion, since all these tasks are taken care of by the operators of the directory.
Fukuoka+ offers members local visibility, exposure, enables brand awareness and credibility through our frank review system, delivers traffic to your listing, and helps the discerning public discover you.
Further, through our unique Fukuoka+ PLUS Shop, you get our entire trusted community’s eyes on your listing AND your PLUS. This and more is offered to businesses that meet our criteria for a proposed ¥91/day (or use the completely free version with limited features).
That is extremely low for an advertising spend that can lead to sales not only to the public, but within the ranks of other member businesses, a natural outcome of using our PLUS Shop.
5. Membership Benefits
Local Business Directories usually offer special perks and benefits to their members. These could include discounts at local eateries or shops, special events for members or other unique benefits.
Since such directories are interested in welcoming a large number of local businesses, they are highly likely to offer lots of benefits to your membership.
Beyond all these benefits, Fukuoka+ Members can further sample each other’s good and services at exclusive rates, not only saving you money and time, this opens the door to partnerships and alliances, so that larger scale projects come within your reach.
As more and more of our new members add a PLUS, the total value of benefits grows. It will be well over ¥1 Million by the time we have added all 100 member companies’ PLUS items to the shop.