Small town real estate agents can compete on personal service and sharing their knowledge. Photo by Becky McCray.

By H. E. James, MBA

Rural businesses occupy a unique place in their communities.  If you own one, you know that you have a corner on your market while possibly having a market on the corner.  This is especially the case for niche businesses like real estate agents.

In small towns, there is unlikely to be more than one real estate office, let alone more than one agent.  However, having a corner on the rural real estate market doesn’t mean you can sit back and let business just come to you.  In today’s real estate game, even rural agents have to work to keep their businesses fresh and appealing.

Go Digital

Real estate buyers, from the commercial to the residential, have much better access to the wide world of property than ever before.  This is especially true for rural residents.  They have less access to metropolitan areas and service providers.  Internet use is key to how they research, shop, even live.

The real estate industry is changing rapidly in many ways, and the most significant is the use of mobile internet.  This allows users to conduct their own research and price comparisons before even selecting an agent.  If your rural real estate office wants to be that agent, you have to make your listings digital.

You don’t have to create your own mobile interface, but if you don’t have a website, there’s no time like the present.  If your office is small and a bespoke website isn’t in the budget, post your listings on a national site like Land and Farm or United Country.

These sites allow both independent agents and larger offices to share their listings around the country and the world.  It also allows potential clients nearby to get a glimpse of you as an agent and your community before investing in either.

Be Personal

Large real estate firms typically churn buyers and sellers.  They have multiple agents who have multiple clients.  For a small rural office like yours, one of the best ways to stand out from the bigger firms, especially when listing online, is to offer personal service.

When possible, focus on one buyer or seller at a time, avoiding conflicts of interest.  During the house-buying process, I was often frustrated at the time it took my agent to get back to me, and I ended up being the one who found my house’s listing, via the Internet.  The same has happened to my parents, who moved from one small town to another.  They went through multiple rural agents before finding one who could cater to their needs, both residential and commercial.

Personal services are a great differentiator because you are often working with customers who only have a few pieces of a puzzle.  Offer education on things like capital gains and tax deductions.  These can often be news to a first-time seller and can cost her a great deal of money if she isn’t prepared for them.

Multi-Task

This may seem counterintuitive to offering personal service, but wearing more than one hat as a rural real estate agent can help you offer that assistance and education.  If you focus on rural commercial real estate, such as what my parents own, it behooves you to be a master of codes like state taxes and local commercial building requirements.

I spent a number of years working in planning, zoning, and building for my city, and I regularly encountered experienced real estate agents who know nothing about taxes, building codes, and permitting in their markets.  This recurrent theme cost customers a lot of money in fees, which ultimately led to the agent losing business.

Small businesses such as rural real estate offices cannot afford to lose customers because of these kinds of oversights.  Broaden your horizons into real estate taxes or renovation services in order to stay competitive in the digital world.

Your office may have a corner on the rural real estate market, but that doesn’t mean you’ll always have it.  Stand out from the crowd by offering digital listings, a high level of customer personalization, and an abundance of services.

Marketing a rural business is never easy. Standing out from the crowd of larger businesses with bigger budgets isn’t easy, but social media has made the marketing world a much smaller place. At the same time, it may feel that there are too many social media platforms to choose from for marketing your business. You may be right. Choosing can be overwhelming.

Starting with a Facebook page and a Twitter feed is a great starting point, but don’t overlook some of the more niche social media platforms. Pinterest is the perfect alternative or even addition to Etsy, as it allows for more immediate social interaction, broadening your customer base. For video creation and sharing, look no further than Vimeo, the perfect alternative to YouTube for business owners doing video creation themselves. Let’s examine how these two platforms can be best used by rural businesses.

Pinterest

You may think Pinterest is fun to play with, but won’t help drive business to your site or to your store. That’s just not true. The platform began as a social media bookmarking site and tool. Most of the first registered users shared recipes, clothes, and artwork they found online.

Today, Pinterest has evolved into a powerful business tool. The platform offers business accounts to users who wish to market either themselves or their businesses.

You can even track analytics data for your pins, boards, and clicks to your website. In today’s world of data-driven social media marketing, the ability to track analytics on a site like Pinterest is impressive. Business owners can drill down from impressions, what Pinterest calls views, to clicks, pinpointing locations of their customers.

For business owners like my parents, who live in a small community and use their skills to create jewelry and metalwork, marketing via Pinterest is ideal. Why?  Because of the visuals. Pinterest attracts users through images pinned from the web. If you’re a jeweler, like my mom, making your products stand out among the crowd is key: the more repins for a pin under “handmade copper jewelry,” the closer to the top of the search results it will be:

For rural artisans like my mom who are selling, pins can link either to an e-commerce site like Etsy or be one of Pinterest’s own buyable pins:

Pinterest has now set up its own e-commerce platform, allowing your customers to buy directly from you without linking to another site like Etsy. For rural businesses, this also gives customers from around the world greater access to your goods and services.

If your small business is service based, marketing on Pinterest is all about telling a story through visuals. For a rural welding service, marketing via Pinterest would be about showcasing completed projects, from the simple to the intricate.

Set up boards that showcase different stages of completion for projects. Customers who appreciate your work want to see how you do it. Hells Canyon Adventures (HCA), based in Oxbow, Oregon, and in Council, Idaho, uses Pinterest to share its customer’s experiences. It also posts videos taken on its white water adventures. Videos such as these not only show off your products or services, they come in handy for other social media platforms, like Vimeo.

Vimeo

Vimeo can work in conjunction with your other marketing platforms and channels to bring your customers to you, especially Pinterest. Vimeo has a much smaller audience than YouTube, reaching about 170 million users compared to YouTube’s 1 billion. That smaller audience, however, is a boon to rural businesses, as it is focused on people who actively engage with video users rather than simply share content.

Making your videos short and posting them on Vimeo, where you can update them if you make a mistake, unlike on YouTube, will help you stay active with your video marketing. The audience might be smaller, but depending on your audience, it might be the better choice. If you have tried even one of Heather Thomas’s 21 ways to use video, your small business will benefit from posting on Vimeo.

As Thomas points out in the No. 1 spot, you can use video to tell your company story. This is important to businesses that would otherwise be shadowed by larger counterparts. Customers return to small and rural businesses because they get to know the businesses and their owners. In HCA’s case, video shows customers what they’re going to experience. Whitewater rafting isn’t for everyone, but videos like HCA’s can show off both a location and educate customers.

For a jeweler like my mother, whose work is intricate and sometimes tedious, short videos telling of either her inspiration for a piece or a specific technique used are great ways to tell her story. One of her most popular products is a pair of etched copper earrings. Video showing how she creates the designs and the process she uses for the etching will be more engaging for customers than a set of written instructions.

You can also use your digital marketing tools to drive traffic to your retail business through promotions you can video and share via Vimeo. Are you having a sale for the holidays?  Film yourself or an employee showing off your store’s holiday decorations, its location, and some of the sale items.

You don’t have to create a video for every sale or event you have, but sharing your major events regularly shows your audience that you’re not just updating old content, you’re actively creating new content. Being active is one of the top marketing strategies of digital top performers, and it often seems like a no-brainer. However, how often do you see Twitter feeds that are a year old and have less than 10 tweets?

There’s no magic formula for digital marketing, and that’s the beauty of it. You can choose the platforms that play to the strengths of your business, no matter its size or location. Take a look at your product and your audience, and see how these two lesser-known platforms could work for you.

Images provided by the author

New EMV cards with chips have arrived in the US and even mobile systems can accept them. So why are small businesses still not switching? Photo courtesy of Square Media Resources.

Guest post by H. E. James, MBA

Has your small business ever been dinged because of credit card fraud?  The smaller the business, the harder it is to shoulder the chargeback costs when a fraudulent transaction occurs.  Before October 2015, most of those charges were borne by credit card companies themselves rather than merchants who accepted counterfeit cards, knowingly or otherwise.

The United States has been behind the credit card times for more than a decade, clinging to magnetic-stripe cards while the rest of the world adopted EMV cards.  This is quickly changing, and if your business hasn’t made the shift, you are leaving yourself as unprotected as that magnetic strip.

Credit card fraud in the U.S. accounts for nearly 50% of the world’s card fraud, owed to the country’s continuing reliance on magnetic strips.  If your business hasn’t made the shift yet, now’s the time.  It’s easier than you might think.

Why EMV is Safer

Because of the static nature of magnetic stripe data, it is much easier for fraudsters to copy that data and then create counterfeit cards.  Last year, the U.S. lost $7.5 billion to fraud of this kind.  Fraud analytics is one of the greatest uses of data analysis in big business, for good reason.

Switching to EMV takes advantage of smart chip technology to protect both consumers and businesses.  Because each EMV transaction creates a unique identifier, it makes it more difficult for scammers to copy.

Consumers are thus less likely to lose data, and businesses, especially smaller ones, are less likely to be liable for those losses should they occur.  With the new standards, credit card fraud liability is distributed. It falls on you, the small business, if your customer uses an EMV-enabled card but you treat it like an old-fashioned magnetic stripe card.

If your small business has not yet made the transition to accepting EMV payments, it will be the party responsible for chargebacks.  While big business costs for the shift are expected to reach close to $9 billion, it will be significantly less for small businesses and be much easier.

Why EMV is Better for Customers

Most banks and credit card companies have already made the shift to EMV inevitable for consumers.  My mother, who happens to be a small business owner, panicked when her old credit card was declined because she’d already been issued a new chipped card.

Consumers with cards from forward-thinking banks and creditors now have no choice but to use EMV readers or near-field communication (NFC) such as Apple Pay.  While there are still strips on EMV cards, transactions done with EMV or NFC are faster and more secure.

I don’t have a chip card myself, but I’m more inclined to pay with my phone because of the extra security in my fingerprint.  Allowing me to do so, even at the farmer’s market, is going to keep me coming back to that seller.  The more payment options you accept, the more customers you’ll attract.  Being EMV-compliant is just another means of retaining customers.  There’s even potential for EMV cards to carry loyalty program information in the future.  If your small business doesn’t have one, now’s the time.

On the other side of the coin are businesses that have implemented new pay systems but have no proper training on how to use them, making the switch unsteady, to say the least.  Make the switch by researching how the cards are now read (the dip versus the swipe) and being sure to educate consumers who may also be unsure.

Why EMV is Better for Your Business

Of course, any time you attract more customers through more options, things get better for your business.  Some industry insiders argue that the cost of switching to EMV-compliant technology far outweighs the costs of fraud, this is not really the case for small merchants.

If your small business accepts mobile payments via a card reader or point-of-sale (POS) system such as Square, you were likely given a free reader as part of the sign-up.  Ordering an upgraded reader can cost $50 to $150, depending on your provider, and some of these include magnetic stripe readers in the bundle.  Spending less than $200 to upgrade a piece of equipment is a better investment than losing money from chargebacks and other kinds of fraud.

As it’s been nearly a year since the new cards starting shipping and the new regulations went into effect, your business may soon have no choice to upgrade to simply stay competitive.  Don’t let your small business be as behind the times on credit cards as the country has been.

Rolling pins by SJ Woodworks offered for sale at Capital City Public Market. Photo by Melissa Nodzu, used with permission.

How to Wow the Big Town Farmer’s Markets, even if you’re not a farmer

Guest Post by H. E. James

Small town businesses like yours can often be limited in audience and market.  Depending on how isolated your community is, it can be difficult to do business outside the community without simply going online.

E-commerce sites like Etsy are a great way to get started when you’re a small town business owner looking to sell handmade goods.  My own parents live in a rural area and are jewelers and artisans who travel outside their community to market their products.  Getting offline at art shows and farmer’s markets in larger communities has proved to be great exposure for them and many others, but it does take some finesse.

Logistics

Brett “Buzz” Davis of Long Valley Coffee travels a long way to Capital City Public Market. Photo by Melissa Nodzu, used with permission.

In the case of the farmer’s markets in my hometown area, the two with the most exposure are at least 45 minutes away from most rural areas.  Set-up starts early at both of them, with loading opening around seven in the morning.  So first and foremost, you must decide if it’s worth the time and effort to visit a farmer’s market, which you should do as regularly as possible for the best return on investment.

When you’re carrying in products that require you to set up displays or require the set-up of electricity, you have to plan your day down to the minute.  For vendor BuckSnort Sodas, that was definitely the case.  Their trip to Boise, Idaho’s Capital City Public Market (CCPM) would start from more than 150 miles away in Ketchum, almost three hours from the market.

The distance was worth it, as BuckSnort can now be found alongside beers and wines at restaurants and bars all over the state and even in Oregon.  By starting small, sharing just one or two products at the market, BuckSnort was able to manage the logistics of travelling the long distance for the day.  Its success has been so great that it has now moved closer to its main market: Boise.

Another CCPM vendor who travels a great distance each week is Brett “Buzz” Davis, owner of Long Valley Coffee.  He and his son roast their own coffees and bring them to Boise from McCall, more than two hours away.

Know the Market

Secondly, you must think strategically about the market, and not just the one at which you’re going to sell your product.  If you decide to sell at more than one in a given market, be sure to look at the demographics of your target market.  Why is this important?

People in rural, suburban, and urban markets spend differently, and not just because incomes differ among them.  Urban dwellers are likely to be exposed more often to what you are offering, so you must consider your products’ prices carefully.  While you should always consider what it truly costs you to produce your work and price that work higher than expected, don’t forget to consider the wares of your competitors.  As author Rochelle Bailis advises in her article on product pricing, it’s best to compare yourself honestly with your competition.

At the farmer’s markets in Boise, there are multiple honey growers who sell multiple products.  Their prices are all relatively the same.  What differentiates them from each other are things like packaging, specialty products, and even production location.

Leverage the Story

Ernie Garvin of Homestead Brooms, exhibiting at Capital City Public Market. Photo by Melissa Nodzu, used with permission.

Like the many wineries that sell their vintages at the Boise Farmer’s Market, or the honey producers at Capital City, if you are selling among multiple competitors, you have to find unique ways to differentiate yourself.

One way is to start with your story.  Every business has a story.  For rural lavender farmer and Capital City vendor Silver Fox Lavender, that starts with the history of the farm itself.  The owners live in a century-old Sears mail-order farmhouse, and it is featured on their packaging and the banner that it is displayed at the market booth.

If your product is unique from other sellers at the farmer’s markets, make that a feature of your booth presentation.  Big Lost River Meats travels all the way to Boise from Mackay every Saturday for the Boise Farmer’s Market.  This round-trip of 440 miles is worth it because they typically sell out within the first couple of hours.  Their no-preservatives, specialty sausages and game salami can’t be found among other vendors at that market.

All About You

Taking your small business to a farmer’s market in a larger community can be a gamble if you’re not prepared, but it can pay off in the long run.  Marketing your goods online is a great way to get started as an artisan or producer.  Yet it can be an impersonal experience for small business owners who are used to interacting with friends and neighbors in rural neighborhoods.

Marketing at a larger-scale farmer’s market is a great way to translate the social aspect of small town business to big town sales and growth.  Take what makes your business unique and head to the market.  Do it right, and you’ll be successful!

Photos of vendors at Capital City Public Market, taken by Melissa Nodzu, and used with permission.