Ep 12: 10 Hard Truths about Local Marketing

Welcome back to Hometown Advantage — the podcast for local business owners who want to market smarter, not harder. I’m Nicole Eldridge, Facebook & Instagram ads strategist for local businesses, and today we’re diving into 10 brutally honest marketing truths I wish I could send to every small business owner’s DMs.

🎯 If you’ve ever felt like:

• You “just can’t be consistent” with marketing
• You’re boosting posts and getting likes, but not leads
• You’ve hired cheap help and gotten cheap results
• You don’t have time to learn ads (but also don’t want to waste money outsourcing)

…this episode will change how you think about marketing forever.

✨ Highlights:
 0:00 – Why consistency isn’t your real problem
 5:42 – Why likes don’t equal sales
 9:15 – What to do if your content isn’t converting
 14:22 – The truth about cheap marketing help
 19:40 – Why learning ads yourself is the best ROI
 24:10 – What makes a good hook (and why it matters)
 28:15 – The $200/month secret to buying back your time

📌 Ready to stop spinning your wheels with content and finally make your marketing work for you?

Check out my program Hometown Advantage, where I teach local business owners exactly how to run simple, low-cost Facebook and Instagram ads that actually bring in leads and sales — even if you're not techy and hate social media.

🔗 Join here: https://hello.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/1400
 📩 Questions? Email me at support@nicoleeldridgemedia.com or DM me on IG: @nicoleeldridgeads

If this episode hit home, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and share with another local business owner who needs to hear this!

Transcript

0:00

Hello. Hello. Welcome back to Hometown Advantage. This is a podcast specifically for local business owners that want to learn. An effective way to market their business that doesn't take all their time and doesn't take all their money and actually works, right? So my name's Nicole. I'm a Facebook and Instagram ad strategist that specializes in helping local businesses. If you don't know me, and I'm so excited to be back today, if you do already know me, man, I have fallen off my podcast game. But just like everything. When you're trying a new marketing tool or anything new in life, it's gonna take some time to work out the bumps, not only with the results you get from it, but just with the systems and the way you make it happen in your life. I think that some people think that if they're gonna commit to learning something like ads, they need hours a day to figure it out, and it's simply not true. I started this podcast in February. I've never done a podcast before. I've been on a couple podcasts, but I've never had one on my own. I just started it. And I started it because I knew that other people in my industry have had good results from it. I knew that it would be fun for me'cause I love to yap about ads and I love to make sales in my business and I just knew it was time for something more. My goal was to get one out a week, starting in February. Has that happened? Not even close. Do I feel bad about it? No. I have been work, work, working and doing my best, learning more along the way, changing up my strategy, changing up my systems, my schedule. So that I can get closer to the goal of once a week. I'm not expecting myself to get it right away, and not even right away. It's July, I started in February. How many months is that? I, six months. Oh my gosh. That's crazy. Six months of the podcast. Okay. Anyways. I'll get off my little motivational mindset soapbox. Today I'm really excited because I made an Instagram post. If you don't follow me on Instagram, I'm Nicole Eldridge ads, and I basically just RIFed on 10 things that I wish I could tell people in my dms. Obviously in the nicest way possible, but these are things that are always coming up, problems that people are always facing when they come to me. I. And if I could just give you the gosh honest truth from the start, these are the things I would want to tell you. Okay. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna elaborate on some of these so I can explain my point of view. And I would love if any of these resonate with you for you to send me a DM on Instagram. Like what is setting in here? So the very first one. Is you don't have a consistency problem. You have a systems problem. Okay? This goes back to my little riff at the beginning. You're not lazy, you just don't have a setup that keeps you consistent. I wanna put consistent in like air quotes, consistent because here's the thing, I get so many local business owners telling me like. I just can't be consistent. I just wanna be consistent. Like I struggle so much with consistency. And if that's you one, no, you're not alone. Two, here's what I want you to know. You don't actually have to be consistent. This is your permission slip. Okay? I wanna think about why we feel like we have to be consistent with our social media posts. One is definitely because all the marketing experts and social media experts out there say, you need to be consistent. You need to be consistent, right? So there's that. The problem with that is when we fall off, at times we end up convincing ourselves that trying to get back on is pointless because we know we'll probably fall off again. And if we can't be consistent and post however many times you're trying to post forever an eternity, then what's the point? Okay. And then two, here's why. Those people, those marketing experts, people you talk to about social media, here's why they will push consistency. One, they're gonna use it as an excuse. Four, why your marketing isn't working and why you need to hire it out. Two, back in the day, showing up consistently was important because of something else. What's actually important is getting in front of your audience multiple times. In a certain span of time, right? So people are thinking like, oh, get in front of your audience three days a week, post three days a week. And yeah, that is the key here. The problem is even posting three days a week won't get you in front of your followers three days a week because we know that our organic social media only gets shown to two, three. 5% if you're lucky, of the people who follow you. I don't know if you have heard of some of these marketing gurus like Gary V and Dan Martel, but I've heard them talk about how they're changing the word or the phrase social media to interest media because we're getting to a point. Where it does not matter how many followers you have, it doesn't matter how consistent you are. Everyone's feeds are curated to their own interests, whether they follow these people or not. So as a local business, that's a little tricky. We can only be so interesting and we're not signing up to be these crazy entertainers on the internet, right? We have a different goal, which is exactly why you need low cost Facebook ads, because then you take complete control over who sees your stuff. That hour you spent on creating a video or a post doesn't just get shown to 110 people and then it's gone forever. I have people using their visibility ads for months and months at a time, and thousands of new people in their town are seeing it anyways when it comes to consistency. The only thing I care about is that your last post isn't from six months ago. We want your posts to stay updated so that you look open when people come to your page, right? Other than that, when it comes to just being visible, that's where your ads come in When you run ads, you don't have to be consistent. You can get into your busy season. You can go on vacation with your family. You can be out sick with your kids or for yourself or what have you, and your marketing doesn't miss a beat. Let's go to the next one. More likes does not equal more sales. That's why boosting random posts is a waste. Unless the post is built to convert, it's just money down the drain. A lot of people say, well, you say I shouldn't boost posts, but when I do, I get a lot of likes and I get followers. That's amazing. I love that for you. But unless you keep boosting posts over and over and over again, we're missing our last point of staying present of having multiple touchpoint. And unless your content is created in a way that it drives action. You're never gonna know exactly what those posts are doing for the bottom line of your business, exactly what that boosted post money is making you, if anything. All right. Next marketing truth I want you to know is if your content isn't converting, it's probably not saying anything people care about. Keep it simple, but make it resonate. People need to know why you are the go-to. I just talked about this with a client on a one-to-one call yesterday. She is a accident attorney. Injury attorney. And I was auditing her ads and I saw that most of her ads have two sentences of copy. And this is so common for a lot of my clients. A lot of people want to post one sentence in their caption or two sentences in their caption with a couple of sentences in the real, and then they're asking why they're not making sales. You're literally doing the least, if you were doing in person marketing and sales, would you expect to go up to someone, say two sentences to them and have them be like, yes, sign me up, I'm buying it. No, you have to sell it. You have to sell yourself, your business, your service, your offer. You gotta tell us why it's so great and you gotta tell us over and over and over again. That's actually a great thing for you.'cause it means you don't have to come up with thousands of different things to say about your business. Come up with five different things to say and say them over and over and over again. I actually just added a module inside the program all about messaging and I created what I call a what to say workbook for my clients, and it touches on six different aspects that there must messaging should be touching on in their content. And then I actually gave'em a chat, GPT prompt, where all they have to do is like bullet point out. The different prompts that I'm giving them, they're not thinking of full sentences, anything like that. They're just like spit balling things. And then the chat GPT prompt gives them their summed up message that they're gonna wanna write in their content. All right, let's go to the next one. One of my favorites. You get what you pay for when it comes to marketing services. Cheap marketing services equals cheap results, period. If you're hiring a social media, if you're hiring a social media marketing freelancer, which I think is great. And they cost less than a thousand dollars a month. They're either brand new, so they don't have the trial and error experience, and you are going to be that person for them. If you're okay with that, that's fine. Or they're a complete generalist who maybe has done things. Who maybe has a lot of experience doing a lot of different things for a lot of different types of businesses, but probably doesn't have the expertise in what your business needs and what your audience needs to convert. I have so many stories of people coming to me explaining. People they've hired, agencies they've worked with. I tell some of'em over and over again. So one is Misty, who hired someone on fiber. She spent$300 on the fiber service for someone to just set up her ads, and then her ads ran for$300 before she found me because she had zero results. No leads, no bookings, nothing. And what happened was she hired someone from overseas who knows the tech part of setting up ads, but does not understand the strategy at all. Her ads were set up that they were set up totally wrong. She joined my program, we changed her strategy, we changed her ads, and she had four to five new booked appointments within a couple weeks on less than$300 in ad spend. So we just. Quadrupled her results. If you can quadruple nothing, I guess that doesn't really make sense. Even my client, Robert, he owns a gym. His marketing agency was$1,500 a month and then they required$1,500 in ad spend. Now that$1,500 mark service fee is on the lower end, but the thing is they're trying to make up for it by getting as much budget as possible that they can throw as much spaghetti at the wall as possible and hope that something sticks. That's another thing that happens with agencies is if you're not getting results, they'll claim it's because you need to raise your budget. And that's simply not true at all. You can get good results on$5 a day, but of course, it's managing your expectations and like understanding what that might look like. Next one, want to outsource your marketing question mark. Cool. But if you don't understand how it works, how will you know if it's working? This perfectly goes off the last one. These people are coming to me, having paid for somebody to do what they said they could do, and they're not happy with the results, but they're like, Hmm, maybe this is normal, super underwhelming, but maybe it's normal. Most of the time it's not. You should be seeing some movement and traction happening within an. Within a week of your ads being up even at low budgets. So here's what I recommend for a lot of local business owners and for my clients. I don't recommend hiring an agency or hiring an ads freelancer to start. Because one, it's gonna cut into your return on investment. And two, you're not going to get as good of results with them as you will get yourself if you know what you're doing. But I'm obviously a huge proponent, but I'm obviously not against delegating. I delegate a lot of things in my business, and I want you to too. You're busy. You need to delegate. But you need to know how to delegate it. And if you don't know the first thing about social media or ads, there's no way for you to delegate that to an affordable resource. So my suggestion is to hire a va, you can get VAs on those sites like Fiverr and Upwork for anywhere from$10 an hour to$20 an hour. And what you do is you provide them with what to say in your marketing. So like a lot of times my clients provide them with. The local post prompts that I give them every single month, and then provide them with the what to say workbook. Provide them with the chat GPT prompts that I give, and then also give them videos and photos and stuff that you take or someone takes that works for you or with you. And then your VA can create the reels can create the carousels, can schedule the posts. But you're giving them specific instructions and systems on how to do that in the best way possible. Next point, if you don't have time to learn ads, you need to make time. Every thriving local business owner learns how to make their marketing work for them. Saying, I don't have time to market My business is basically saying I don't wanna run a business. Marketing needs to be the absolute top priority and investing in yourself and your own marketing skills. We'll have the biggest return on your investment of all time. This is how I have grown my business so much in the past three years, is just constantly reinvesting in learning and developing marketing skills. And of course it goes back to what I was saying before where you don't need to have three hours a day to sit down and learn ads. It's 20 minutes here, it's 20 minutes there, it's 10 minutes here, it's 20 minutes there. Maybe one day you have an hour to create everything and write everything. You get them launched and you're done. All you have to do is check in on some numbers. Make little tweaks. Don't tell me you don't got time for that. You don't have time to make sales. I think you do. Next one, if you don't know if it's working, it's not. When it is working, you'll know. There's not a lot to explain there when you know, you know. Next one, people buy from people. So if I can't find you anywhere on your feed, that's a problem, or any people in general. It's not just about you. It's about that social proof and trust that people get from seeing you as a real person and also other real people are buying from you or are working with you. Having other people in your content or yourself, one or the other, or both, is crucial to fast tracking that increase in trust and authority and leadership. It is just how the human brain works. I think we have two left. So this one's a little bit more of a technical one. The first line in your ads matters more than the rest, whether it's a real hook. So that first line that shows up of the text on top of your reel or your caption headline. So like the first sentence of your caption. If it doesn't grab attention, no one's reading the rest. Put your focus here and you'll see things improve. A lot of people write out these beautiful, elaborate captions, but the hook is so bland that the unfortunate thing is that no one's gonna read that beautiful elaborate caption. Or same with the reel. They'll create this long, beautiful reel with all these photos and texts and different things, but the hook is either non-existent or so. Not relevant to the people who we want to be watching it, that no one's gonna even stop and watch it. So a couple of pointers for your hooks. One, include your location. Location, location, location. The second that someone sees their location in text on a social media post, they are stopping because they want to be clued into their community. They wanna know what's going on, and they feel a sense of relevance oh, I live there. This is for me. Because the thing is we're inundated with so many different posts and some things that have, we do not care about at all that unless we have that relevance piece. We're scrolling on by, if you can get even more niche like women of Novi or parents of Metro Detroit, that's even better. Another thing is speak to either a problem that your audience might be experiencing or the solution that you provide in the hook Metro Detroit Moms looking for a place that will keep your kids busy on a rainy day. Oh, we have coffee too. Come visit our indoor play cafe. Here's the offer. If I read that, I am in last one. Your time is worth way more than you think. You're spending hours posting, commenting, engaging, or kicking yourself for not doing those things. When$200 a month in smart ads could get you 10 x the reach and results and buy back your sanity. Running ads saves you time and makes you money when you do it right. Anyone can learn how to do it. Don't keep putting it off because you think you don't have time or you think it will be hard. This is your sign to make the decision. That you are going to make the investment in yourself and in your business that will pay off for years to come. All of these things is exactly what I teach to inside Hometown Advantage. You learn exactly what it takes to run profitable ads all within 90 days, and that's not an hour or hours a day of all of those 90 days. It's slowly chipping away at each of the five steps I walk you through so that by the end you have your ads up and running. You're getting in front of thousands of people in your community. You're bringing in leads every single day and making new sales in your business. If you are interested in joining, I would love to have you if you wanna make sure. That this is the right fit for you. Please feel free to send me an email to support@nicoleeldridgemedia.com or send me a DM on Instagram, Nicole Eldridge ads. I would be happy to talk you through it, give you a little more insight of what you specifically could expect. If you're ready to sign up now, there's a link in the show notes. I can't wait to give you a big warm welcome inside.