What is a Local Marketing Coach?

It seems that there is a coach for everything these days.  You’ve got life coaches, financial coaches, executive coaches, soccer coaches (which I’m proud to be), and even Facebook coaches.  Coaches help teach people how to be better at the things that are important to them that they’re not already good at or that they think they could use some objective help with.

Small business owners are experts at their crafts–whether that be plumbing, antiques, italian food, real estate, gardening, auto repair, or whatever.  But being a small business owner requires being multi-faceted.  You need to manage your books, take care of your customers, market your business, do your taxes, comply with permits and licensing, and you typically end up spending an inordinate amount of time doing all of those things that you’re not an expert at.  One solution is to pay someone to do those things for you.  Hire an accountant.  Hire an assistant.  Hire a consultant.  Hire a website developer.  However, things are tight for small businesses and the resources to outsource those functions don’t always exist.

A local marketing coach is someone who can help you learn how to reach your local customer base, help you increase exposure for your business, and control costs at the same time.  Most small business owners focus their marketing on things that are easy and that they are familiar with like local newspaper or yellow pages advertising.  Unfortunately, these mediums are increasingly being marginalized by consumers going online to find information.  61% of consumers start their searches for local information on line (Google, internet yellow pages, review sites, etc.).  If they can’t find you, they won’t go out of their way to look for you.  Worse, if they CAN find your competition, you lose.

Online marketing can be very cost effective for small businesses.  You can pay for performance.  You can do a lot of things yourself to improve how you rank on the search engines.  You can create unique content about what you know best that helps people discover who you are and how you can help them.  And you can developer deeper relationships with your best customers.

I help small local businesses learn how all of these things work.  By understanding how search engines look for your business, how blogs help you communicate and connect with your customers, and how social media can help you create relationships with your friends and customers, there are lots of easy things that you can do that cost very little money but show tangible benefits for your business.  And by working together, we can come up with strategies on how to prioritize these things to meet your goals within the time and money restrictions that you have.  My goal as a local marketing coach is to make it so that you don’t need me anymore.

On this blog, I’ll be sharing my thoughts, opinions, and ideas on local marketing, social media, blogging, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and small business marketing that can help you understand how these things all work together to create opportunities to grow your local business.

If you’re a small business owner who would like to learn more about creating a blog, using social media, or understanding where you show up in Google (and why), I’d love to talk to you.  Feel free to email me with any questions or just leave comments here on this blog.

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens and hopefully help some people out along the way.

-Ryan