4 ways to grow your small business in Manchester in the downturn

The next year is going to be difficult for smaller business across the UK, including in Manchester. Rising interest rates are starting to bite, and higher mortgage costs mean that customers will have to cut their spending elsewhere.

High-street businesses in Manchester, including independent stores, restaurants or local accountancies, will be some of the first to suffer and struggle. But despite the challenging environment, there are also opportunities to grow and thrive.

Every challenge presents savvy businesses with the ability to get ahead. In this article, we explore four tactics that companies in Manchester might want to explore to continue to grow in the downturn.

Partnership marketing is a powerful tool that you might want to use to bring in new customers. It involves finding other businesses who are willing to cross-market your business to their customers in exchange for you advertising their business to your customers. Usually, this will involve you offering a discount to their customers, and vice versa.

For example, if you run a health foods store, you might want to consider partnering with locals gyms, fitness studios, and yoga centres to offer their customers a discount on their first purchases. Or, if you’re an accountancy practice, it might mean partnering with wealth managers or lawyers locally.

Often it can be a struggle for smaller businesses to sign partnerships with larger businesses, such as national chains. However, in a downturn, everyone is struggling to grow their customer base, so bigger businesses are sometimes more flexible and willing to work with local SMEs that they wouldn’t even usually consider. This could present you with a unique opportunity to sign partnership deals that might not have been possible 12 months ago.

If you’re looking to build awareness for you business locally, you also might to leverage thought leadership. Thought leadership is the process of raising awareness of yourself or your business by showcasing your sector-specific expertise and insights. This is an especially powerful tools for smaller professional services business, such as local lawyers.

For example, if you’re a law firm, you might want to consider hosting a breakfast, lunch, or round-table event about how changes in legislation might impact local firms. Rather than directly selling to new customers, you subtly position yourself as an expert by providing free insight and value.

One of the strengths of leveraging thought leadership is that it can be a very cost-effective form of marketing. You have your expertise already, so it’s just a matter of getting it out into the world. You can do that through media outreach, social media activity, hosting events, creating videos or podcasts, or something even more left-field. You might want to handle this activity yourself or consider engaging a thought leadership agency instead.

One of the interesting quirks of a downturn is that while the majority of people cut back on general spending, they usually still save cash for so-called affordable luxuries. These are smaller, affordable items that people use to reward themselves. This might be something as small as a special coffee, premium cake, or more expensive haircut.

So, when you start refining and reshaping your shop, restaurant, or small business for a downturn, resist the temptation to just strip out all the expensive items and focus only on the basics. Obviously, in a downturn, you want to offer the basics to your customers at a good price, but also ensure to keep a few more expensive, luxury category items on your product list too. You might see sales for these items surge.

In a downturn, it is important to stop yourself from simply cutting marketing and advertising costs to zero. It’s a quick way to cut your own costs, but, arguably, in a downturn it is more important than ever to get your business and brand out there to drum up new customers and interest.

In fact, in a downturn, when everyone else is cutting marketing and advertising, there could be a good opportunity to sign some attractive advertising deals at a good price while all your competitors are withdrawing from the market.

However, it would be silly to double or triple your spending at a time when your margins and profits might be coming under pressure. Is there an alternative?Consider leveraging PR. Rather than paying for advertising in the local media, reach out to journalists to see if they might be interested in running a story on your company or business.

In a bad economic environment, there is so much negative news, such as shop closures, that if you have a positive story, you might find appetite among a local journalist to profile your business and how it is valiantly fighting on despite the difficulties.

Ultimately, while the next 12 months and beyond will be difficult for smaller businesses in and around Manchester, there are also opportunities for growth if you deploy the right marketing tactics in the right way.