In the world of travel, a destination is defined as a place or area where people travel to for recreation, relaxation, and enjoyment. How great would it be if your business, or better yet, your area of businesses, were to become known as a destination for those purposes?

Becoming known as a destination may not be as difficult as you think. How many businesses are in your area? Your area could be just one block of a street or a couple of block, a shopping plaza, a mall or even a town. The idea here is for the businesses within your area to partner for the purposes of creating yourselves as a destination, a place for people to hang out, relax, and enjoy.

Let’s say that your area has a couple of restaurants, a couple of boutiques, and a night club. Maybe you define yourselves as a destination to shop, enjoy good food and night life. Or, maybe your area has restaurants, a spa, a hair salon and a nail salon. So you could define yourselves as a destination to get pampered in. It can be done no matter what the type of businesses are. It’s a matter of being a little creative in your marketing.

A destination has the ability to attract far more people than one business can. The more people there are in the area, the better the chances of them stopping in your store are.

Talk with the businesses in your area to see how you could partner to become a destination. It’s an exciting concept and has the potential to be more profitable as well as a lot more fun, not only for the customers but for the businesses involved as well. I’ve said it before, two heads (or better yet, 10 heads) are better than one. One person may be able to do some great work but a small group can do some amazing things.

Steve and I are working on a project now to help small businesses create a community. It’s something that we both very strongly believe in and are very excited about the opportunity to help businesses with this. If you are interested in learning more about this project and receive updates, please sign up above to receive our free report and we’ll keep you updated on our progress.

Photo credit: ap.

This morning I read an article by Pete Cashmore of Mashable about group buying.  I’m sure that most of you have seen advertisements where something can be purchased at a really great price if a certain number of people commit to buying it.  If the specified number of sales is not reached, the deal is off.

This is a great way for individuals to get good deals on products.  It’s also an excellent marketing tool for businesses.   (We’ll talk about the marketing side of this in another post.)

For this post, one of the big factors at play here is that the more product a business buys, the cheaper they are able to buy it.  We all know that this is why chain stores are able to sell at lower prices than small independent stores.  Price is by no means everything, but it doesn’t hurt.

What if, however, a group of small businesses got together to purchase in larger quantities?  Wouldn’t they be able to purchase at better prices?  Wouldn’t they then either be able to offer better prices to their customers or increase their profit margin?  Or, maybe a little of both.

What would it take to accomplish this?  It would take a group of businesses working together for the betterment of all of them.  Some might say that this won’t work.  To that I have to say why not?  Who wouldn’t want to work with a group of business people that are all interested in the same thing – the success their business.

I ask you to think about this concept.  It can be taken much farther than just buying power.  Not that buying power is a small thing but if you think about it, it could be so much more.

We’ll talk more on this in future posts.  For now though, what are your thoughts?  Is this something that you feel could work?

Photo credit:  didimkaem