Ep 23: Local Marketing Predictions for 2026 | Part 1: The death of consistency

Join the 2026 Local Ad Strategy Session here: www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/localads

If you’ve ever told yourself “I just need to be more consistent on social media,” this episode is your permission slip to stop believing that.

In this episode of the Hometown Advantage Podcast, I’m breaking down why consistency as we’ve known it is officially dead for local businesses in 2026 — and why that’s actually great news for you.

I’m sharing real client stories, real ad results, and exactly what I’m seeing work right now inside local ad accounts. We’ll talk about why organic posting alone isn’t designed to bring in consistent local clients anymore, how the algorithm has changed, and what local business owners should be focusing on instead.

You’ll learn:

• Why posting more is no longer the answer (and never really was)
• How ads can replace the pressure to “show up every day”
• The simple local ad system that brings in clients without constant content
• How to think about your social media pages as a digital storefront
• Why even $2–$10/day in ads can outperform hours of posting

If you’re a local business owner who’s tired of feeling behind, overwhelmed, or guilty for not being consistent — this episode will completely reframe how you think about marketing going into 2026.

I also share details about my free Local Ad Strategy Session, where I walk through the exact ad campaigns my clients are using to get consistent leads and clients without posting every day.

🎧 Press play if you want a simpler, smarter way to grow your local business with ads.

Transcript

0:00

Hello, hello and welcome or welcome back to the Hometown Advantage Podcast. Here we talk all things local ads, advertising behind the scenes of me growing my online business through motherhood and healing and loving life, all the things. And I'm really excited because I'm about to dive into a little series here on. Three or four. I haven't decided yet to be completely honest. Predictions that I have for local marketing for 2026. And today we are talking about the death of consistency needed for social media. So if you're one of those people that's constantly saying, I just need to be more consistent, I just don't have enough time, you can breathe a breath of fresh air listening to this episode because I'm going to tell you why you do not need to feel that way anymore. The need for consistency is gone. Okay, so let's dive into it. A lot of people think that you can use organic social media marketing, so simply posting to your page to grow your local clientele, and that if it's not working for you, it's just because you need to be more consistent. And the reason why they think that is because that was. The case for a little while, early days of Facebook and Instagram, you could simply post, get seen by people in your community, get seen by your followers, have people cash in on whatever you're promoting and repeat. Of course people got really used to that, and people who aren't in the weeds every single day of social media still think that that can be true. So that means you end up telling yourself that you're gonna be consistent. Or you buy more programs and courses because you're trying to post consistently, and you might go good for a couple weeks, and then you fall off for a couple weeks and you think that maybe there's just something you're missing. You spend time looking at what other businesses are doing. You try to emulate it, but ultimately you just fall off because it's simply not realistic to expect yourself to wear all the hats all the time and keep all the balls in the air. I actually just had a call this morning with my lovely client, Krista, she's a travel agent, and we talked about this same thing, how it's impossible to do all of the things all of the time. When you own a business where everything relies on you, the marketing, the sales, the delivery. All of that. So I have people who listen to this podcast who are sole openers in that way. I have other people who even when their job, their sole job is the sales and the marketing and the leadership of the team, and then their team is doing the delivery, it's still a struggle to stay consistent because this is a full-time job. This is why I have my business right. My client Krista, she used to post every single day and she didn't see much from it. I have another client who actually is paying a social media agency in her area to record her videos for her and post every single day, and it costs her$1,500 a month for this agency to do this, and she has not seen. Any clients come from it, but she's been in my program for barely three months, started ads and she's gotten consistent booked calls and clients from the ads that just started. There's a reason for this. It's because of what I'm gonna talk about today. And just to take you back for a minute, my marketing journey actually started in organic social media. It was my whole job to create content for businesses to drive engagement and drive sales. And I love that creative aspect, but I couldn't keep up with it. I actually haven't looked at the breakdown of how many men versus women listen to this podcast. I'm gonna assume it's mostly women, but I'm sure there's some men too. But men can stand to hear this as well. As women, we are cyclical beings, so I'm not gonna get too woo or too technical in cycle tracking and all of these things that have actually been life changing for me on the back end of my business. I don't lead with that usually. But the fact of the matter is there are times of the month. That I simply cannot will myself into creating another post writing, another caption, and it makes it impossible to be consistent without extreme discipline. And very strategic systems. And this is not just because of a woman's cycle. This goes for everyone. When you're sick, when people quit, when shit hits the fan, or your ads are popping off and you have so many clients and you have to pick up some pieces'cause you don't have enough team to make it happen. Or like in Kris's case, her kids are super busy doing things they love and she has to support them in that. That's why we do business to have. Flexibility. And when you are expecting yourself to stay so consistent and so rigid to something and in order to see results, you're not going to get the results. So anyways, I'll get off my rant there. The whole point of this podcast is that we don't have to do that anymore. And even when we did, it sucked, right? So I was creating content. For several different companies. And I was getting so burnt out on it so quickly because of the endless need to keep up and keep creating more and more and more. When I discovered ads, my whole life changed. Here's what I realized. The reality is, you need an ad system that posts quote unquote for you day and night. No, depending on a pesky algorithm to show your content to people who actually want to see it, because it won't, no new reels every dang day, okay? None of that ads that you can launch once and they can run for months. Even if they can run for one month before you need to change it out, how much better is that to post three reels that will run for you for a month? Get in front of targeted people and if you set them up right, do what we want, which is bring in new clients. Okay, so something important. To note about why consistency is no longer needed in 2026 is because the algorithm, the organic algorithm, has completely changed. It's no longer follower based, meaning the more followers you have, the more people that will see your posts. It's now interest based, so this was born from TikTok and the TikTok algorithm. If you don't spend time there, you have no idea how TikTok works. People love it because it really doesn't matter who you follow or who follows you. You are just going to be fed content that your algorithm thinks will be entertaining or inspiring for you, which means. As a business owner and a marketer, if you want your content to be fed to people, your content needs to be entertaining and inspiring to them because it keeps people on and keeps them engaged and then pushes out your videos to more people. I don't know about you, but most of us didn't start businesses to become entertainers or motivational speakers. Right. So luckily there's a different way we can go about this other than just post constantly and pray. It gets pushed out because the fact of the matter is what we're advertising is local businesses isn't the type of content that gets pushed out. So we need a different strategy. This is the strategy that I teach my clients. Instead of posting as much as you can or as consistently as you can think of your Facebook and Instagram pages as a digital storefront. So think about it in real life, if you're walking down a street. There's going to be something that calls you to a business. It could be the window display, it could be the sign out front. Those things are your visibility ads. That's the first type of ad I teach inside my program. But when someone walks through the door, how do they feel? What do they see? What questions are answered for them? That's how your page can act. Your visibility ads are the billboard or the welcome sign outside the door. When they click on your page from your ads and come to your page, what vibe are they gonna get? How is your digital storefront portray? We can do so much with this as far as building trust. By sharing out all our client success stories, testimonials, all of these things, showing that we're real people, a real credible business in their area, that is trustworthy, that is reliable. We can answer frequently asked questions through the content on our page. So instead of someone thinking, oh yeah, I need that, but I'm wondering about this, this, and this, and they don't. Inquire yet they can get those answers right there and that can push them into the inquiry and we can just create content based around what we want people to know. Think about the stores that when you walk in and someone immediately is like, just so you know, all jeans are 50% off or. Make sure you, my name's so and so, make sure you ask If you need any help, I'm here to help you. Those types of vibes we can portray through our page as our digital store. Okay? So that might lead you to think how often should someone post? So my. Favorite golden number is eight times a month, which comes out to around two times a week, and I am a big proponent of batching that. So time management and productivity strategies are different for everyone across the board, but if you can come up with eight posts in a month, sit down for two hours, get'em written, create the reels, figure out what photos are gonna go with what captions, or what graphics or what have you get it done. Once a month to get those eight posts out. And then in my program, I teach you how to use retargeting ads. And a lot of times, whatever you're posting to your page can be used for retargeting. So it's like a two birds, one stone. You're not creating new ads for your retargeting campaign, you're using what you already created for your page. And then retargeting ads make it so that the people who do follow you, who have visited your website, who have engaged with your other ads, will actually see the content you're pushing out, so you're not spending time on content just for it to be viewed by 106 people. If you're one of those people who has tried posting in the past, tried being consistent, but ultimately it just leads nowhere. So you quote unquote, fall off. But in the back of your mind, you're always thinking I should post or I haven't posted in a while, or I hope nobody sees my Instagram page'cause it looks like we're not even open anymore. This is why you need ads. Ads make it so that you can one cut marketing time in half, but if you're already not spending time on it, you can. Ads make it so that you can ditch that mental load piece of, I need to do this. Why haven't I done this? It's done. You can move on with your life and it can actually bring you in more clients without more work. And if you're someone who's tried ads and it didn't make a difference, that's when we need to start thinking about what you were advertising and what you were saying and how your ads looked. Because if you're getting all this added visibility, we have to be strategic about that visibility, right? Visibility does not automatically mean more clients. And then lastly, if you're thinking, well, I don't want to spend money. I just wanna take a minute to talk about and remind you of the time verse, money life that we live in, right? Every new level that you wanna get to, you either need to sacrifice time or sacrifice money. This episode is pretty much telling you that sacrificing your time actually ends up being pointless because you can spend 1, 2, 3 hours every single day posting, engaging, doing all these things and still get nothing from it. Or you can literally spend$2 a day. And see amazing results over time because your ads will actually get pushed out to people who need you. So the thing with local business ads is you do not need to spend as much money as you might think. You don't need a thousand dollars, you don't need thousands of dollars. I have a lot of clients who are getting started on$2 a day,$5 a day, and seeing great results. Of course it all comes back to that time or money. The more money you spend, the faster you can get to where you're trying to go. But if you want to start saving time now and start building visibility now. Without putting in 30 to$50 a day, you can, and you need to get started now so that you can start building quicker up to that point where you can afford 30 to$50 a day if that's something that you're interested in, really scaling your local business and your local client. So the good news to recap is that you don't need to be consistent on social media that is gone in 2026. Drop it from your vocabulary, drop it from your brain. Consistency is dead. Instead, we are living in this pay to play world, and thankfully, as a local business, this is great news for you because you don't have to pay as much to see the results you want, but you do need to go at it, right? So if you're ready to stop feeling overwhelmed by what to post, staying consistent, not having enough time to make it all happen, you need to learn the local ad strategy that I teach my clients that will. Save you hours every week and save you so much mental capacity for just knowing what to do. I'm gonna walk you through the three ad campaigns that my local clients are running to get them incredible results, consistent leads, consistent new clients without posting every day or having to quote unquote be consistent on social media because that is dead for 2026. We're gonna strategize together on how you can bring these campaigns to life. The link to sign up and make sure you're on the list is in the show notes. It's also www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/local ads. Or if you go to my Instagram or Facebook page and comment the word strategy, my lovely little bot assistant will get you all signed up in the dms. That's it for this episode. In the next part, we're going to talk about the system that you need when it comes to your ads in order to win in 2026.