Ep 24: Local Marketing Predictions for 2026 | Part 2: You can't outsource your ads...yet

In this episode, I’m sharing part two of my 2026 local marketing predictions, and we’re getting very real about why outsourcing your marketing without owning the strategy almost always leads to wasted time, money, and frustration.

I break down what actually happened when I was troubleshooting a Meta ads bug for a client (yes… on Christmas Eve), why no agency, freelancer, or tactic can save your business if you’re not leading the strategy, and how this same mistake shows up for so many local business owners trying to grow.

We’ll talk about:

• Why marketing only works when the business owner takes ownership of the strategy
• The difference between outsourcing execution vs. outsourcing responsibility
• Real client examples of firing agencies, lowering ad costs, and getting better results
• How to think about ads as a skill you build — not a gamble or a guessing game
• Why 2026 will reward local business owners who simplify and lead their marketing

This episode is honest, a little tough-love, and exactly what you need if you’re tired of throwing money at ads and hoping something sticks.

And if you want to learn the local ad strategy I teach — the same one my clients are using to get consistent leads without massive budgets or complicated systems — you’re invited to my free Local Ads Strategy Session.

You can register here:
 👉 www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/localads

Inside the workshop, I’ll walk you through what actually works for local Meta ads right now, how to set them up simply, and how to turn ads into a repeatable system for your business.

If you’re ready to stop outsourcing your growth and start owning it, this episode is for you.

Transcript

0:00

Okay, I am not saying I'm proud of this, but it's literally Christmas Eve and I am just getting off of an hour with meta chat support between chat and on the phone trying to troubleshoot a bug with a client campaign. One of my done for you clients, she actually used to be. A Hometown Advantage student and now we completely manage her ads for her and we're, we run Messenger ads for her and all of a sudden the things that are auto-populating in Messenger are not what we have in the template. Like you go into Ads Manager, you see exactly what questions are supposed to auto-populate and exactly what answers are supposed to automatically be sent back. And that's not what Facebook is sending. Facebook is sending their own rogue questions. So I got on chat to see if they could help. Even though I knew chances were slim, they could not. I had to change up our strategy and just not use Messenger at all. Turn it into a different kind of ad to keep us pushing forward. So if you ever struggle with bugs, an ads manager, no, you are not alone, my friend. Now I will say that this is intentional that I'm working on Christmas Eve because I have been off with my kids for, oh, what are we on six days now? And my husband's been working and I really had intentions to work on some behind the scenes stuff during this time. And then also check in on client accounts because we can't just leave the ads going without looking at them because things like this can happen. So my husband finally has off today, so we planned to get me a couple hours of work. We have all of our presence wrapped. We just have some things that we have to build so much building. For the kids to wake up to in the morning. So I'm gonna record this and then I'm gonna be on my way to enjoy the next four days of Christmas break. So this is part two in my 2026 local marketing predictions, and it's basically going to be all about how outsourcing your marketing cannot save you. If you don't lead your own marketing strategy, no tactic will save you. No agency will save you. No human will save you, including myself. Okay, so marketing works when the business owner stops outsourcing responsibility and starts owning the strategy. Now, of course, when you grow to a certain point. You do outsource marketing because you outsource it to a director of marketing. So this reminds me of a different client we have, they're in the real estate business, and we specifically are helping with the ad strategy and the ads of a new luxury rental property. That's going to be for corporate retreats, big fancy weddings, all of these things. I work with the marketing director of this company, not with the direct owner, but I would be willing to bet that the owner and CEO of this company has gotten to where he is, because at the beginning, he owned his own marketing strategy and results. So here's the question I have. Would you hire a personal trainer? Refuse to play any part in the diet or workout plan and then blame them when you don't lose weight. I ask that because I've noticed some things over my years of speaking with local business owners about Facebook ads and marketing, and really there's two types of people out there. One the people who understand that marketing is the most important thing they can focus on to grow and even just sustain their business. And then the ones that think they don't need it or that they can simply outsource it and just expect results to line up out the door, basically, they want marketing results without being involved in the marketing. And listen, I get it because this mentality happens because owning a business involves wearing so many hats, especially a local business. Where you have to hire and fire and you have to be responsible for so many different types of jobs that at the end of the day, marketing or having time to market feels impossible. Also with the rise of social media and the importance of social media marketing. Now there comes excuses. I'm not good at camera. I don't know what to say. And since there are so many agencies out there promising all these crazy things, people believe that they can just hand over this job completely to someone else. Trust me. I get it. I've been there and I have made poor outsourcing decisions myself. So as my business was growing, I was getting to a point where I knew I could save a lot of time if I outsourced some administrative tasks to other people. So that I could focus more on what's important, which is client delivery, showing up for my clients and marketing my business. Those are the two most important things for me. But what happened was I didn't really know exactly what I needed help with, and I didn't have the systems in place to outsource them. Appropriately or for that person to be able to meet my expectations of how I would do it myself. So the end of 2024, maybe a little bit into the beginning of 2025, I hired several virtual assistants that did not work out, and I honestly started to wonder why can't I find somebody? Who's actually good at their job? Sounds harsh. After some reflection, I realized that it wasn't the virtual assistant I was hiring. It was me as the leader of my company and the one responsible for moving it forward. That wasn't going about it the right way. I didn't know what jobs they would be capable of doing, and that would be worth outsourcing for my time. I didn't have a strategy for them to follow. I didn't have standard operating procedures that showed them exactly the best way. To do it for me. They would come in, I wouldn't, honestly, I wouldn't get my money's worth, and then I'd let them go and we'd move on. It wasn't till I realized that I am the leader of my company and I am the only one that's responsible for my growth and for the freeing up of my time. That things started to change for me. I actually read the book, buy Back Your Time by Dan Martel, and I want to read it again because it opened my eyes so much to what it looks like to outsource in your business. Then I was able to come up with an exact strategy of how I wanted to implement certain things that I knew I could eventually outsource and that I wanted to outsource.'cause they weren't my favorite things. So now I outsource things like. The creation of my organic marketing. So I will write the content and I will write the captions, and I'll write what's gonna go on the reel or write what's gonna go on the carousel. And then my virtual assistant creates the reel for me or creates the carousel for me using templates and the standard operating procedures that I have place. And then she schedules it out for me. Same with my emails. I write them and then she schedules them out. So alls I have to do is show up in my Airtable base, which is what I use now to organize all my content, write my stuff, call it good. It's then created and scheduled for me inbox management. That was something that I really needed to outsource. So I had to come up with templates and common questions and different things like that my VA could follow. When people come into our support inbox, needing help with something, a purchase or what have you, I now have a very clear document on what the responsibilities are for my virtual assistant. And I also have clear values where, no, I'm not over her shoulder micromanaging things. I don't have to be. We have the procedure set up. We know what works. She just follows it. The other thing is since my virtual assistant is more of a generalist, she charges by the hour and I pay her for her time, versus if I were to go with, say, an operational strategist, which I actually do have in my business now, so I can talk about that next. Who's coming in and creating the whole strategy, creating the SOPs, creating the systems that the VA's gonna follow. If I was going to do that, then I would need to pay a monthly retainer that's much, much higher, and I would really need to trust that person to go forth and create results for me. Now I do have that person in my business. Now, the amazing Jill is my online business manager who is stepping into that role. But here's what I've learned. She's worked with me for six months now and we're, we just resigned for another six. When I have an idea for something or I wanna do something. I've realized that I have to actually get a start on it and then let her finish it and implement it with the team. So say I want a new Airtable base that's going to track my cost per lead and my ad spend, all these things. I have to create that because I have a vision in my brain and I have a hard time explaining that and passing that off to her. So I learned I have to create it. I have to brain dump all of my thoughts, all of my reasons for wanting to do this, all of that to her, and then she can take it and run with it. So the moral of that story is that I can't simply hire an online business manager and say, run my entire business. Because she's not the CEO, she's not the visionary of the business. I am. I know what the goals are for the business. I know what the vision and the mission is for the business. I know where I'm trying to go and how I'm trying to get there. She's just here to help me make that happen. But she can't do that without me sharing all of these things all of the time, especially'cause it's constantly changing and growing. I learned that the hard way because our first couple months of working together, I was not good at sharing the vision, sharing the dream, sharing the ideas in a way that would make sense for her to be able to run with, and I just trusted that she could make it happen when the truth of the matter was she doesn't know ads, she doesn't know the ins and outs of all my clients like I do. She doesn't know what's happening in my head before I tell it to her, or what works for my business all the time, or what has worked over the past several years. So that's when I realize I cannot outsource the entire management of my business, but I can outsource the day to day. But as far as holding the vision and making. My goals come true. That's up to me. Okay, so this holds true for outsourcing your advertising to a social media or to an advertising agency. What I think the best route is for local, small business owners is to learn the strategy that works great for them and then outsource it to a virtual assistant, or even better yet. Maybe you don't learn the strategy that works best for you because you don't have time to learn the strategy and then implement it and then see if it's working. But learn a strategy that's working well for business owners or just come up with something that you want to try for. Goodness sakes, come up with the system. Use chat GPT to help you. I'm about to share on Instagram my chat, GPT wrapped thing, and it has so many. Comments about system building, because that is mainly what I used Chet GPT for this year is helping me create standard operating procedures, telling them, Hey, this is what I do. This is what I want. This is my goal, this is how I'm gonna make it happen. Can you write this into a step by step guide for my virtual assistant who's going to handle the day-to-day of making it happen? So basically learn the strategy and then have a virtual assistant help with the actual doing of the strategy. So when you come into my program and you learn my strategy, or you pay for a virtual assistant to come through and learn it and just give you the Cliffs notes, I don't really care. But you do have to learn advertising strategy. To succeed as a local business. And I'm telling you, the way I teach it is the fastest and best way to do it. But anyways, I think what's great is I have had several clients come through the program, run ads, be really successful, and then be able to outsource. Their strategies to a virtual assistant. They hand over graphics templates that are working. They give them the login information to my program. They have their virtual assistants come on calls and all of these things, and share their results, and I can help them get even better results all without the business owner being so involved in the day to day. Coming back to outsourcing to an agency. What ends up happening is you get handed to an account manager who's on 20 other accounts along with yours. The agency has trained them on a very copy and paste method that worked really well in say, 2001. And they have not had time to update their skills and their strategies, and they do not have the time or the infrastructure to consistently update their skills or their strategies based on what's working right now with ads. So you're handed over to this manager. They usually create some copy and paste static graphics for you, which are not usually the best ads to run, at least not all the time. Sometimes they are. They set up your ads. Sometimes they set them up wrong. That's what happened to my client, Alyssa, who does marketing for a home renovation company. She was wondering why their leads were so expensive. She didn't know if that was a normal cost. Her leads were costing like over a hundred dollars. She came into my program. She watched one module and she went and checked on the ads. The agency was running for them and saw that they were completely set up wrong. She changed the settings, changed up some of the content based on what I taught in the program, and her lead costs went down into the thirties after being in the hundreds from the agency. She was able to then fire the agency and really leverage herself and her role because she was able to run the ads a lot simpler and with a lot less time than she thought was needed, especially based on what they were paying that agency. So you get in, throw your ads up as quick as possible, as soon as you wanna make a change, or you decide that the certain promotion that you're running isn't working, or maybe it's working, but you just wanna try something else. It's gonna be a good four to five business days before anyone even gets back to you inside the agency, let alone gets new graphics done, and then back up in your ads manager. You are still spending time because you have to spend time communicating, sharing things again, sharing the vision, like I said, and you're still not getting results and you're paying out the wazoo. Now if we run that back the way I suggest you do it, you spend the time learning and implementing. Either way, you're spending time, right? You get support from someone in the weeds, not a big agency. Somebody who's working with done for you clients every single day and seeing ads from. Over a hundred clients this year. I know what works and what doesn't. I can give very quick feedback daily inside our Slack channel or weekly on our group coaching calls, on exactly what to fix, what to try next, all of the things. So the moral of the story is you don't have to do everything, but you do have to lead and take ownership over your own growth and skills as the CEO of your business. This makes me think of my client, Robert. He owns a group fitness studio in Arizona and he came to me because he knew the importance of advertising, knew he needed to advertise to grow his business. So he was paying an agency$1,500 a month because he is busy. He teaches classes, he runs the gym, all of these things. And then the agency actually required$1,500 in minimum in ad spend. So he was paying$3,000 a month towards this. And what would happen is they would say, here's some leads that came from the ads, and Robert would call them and nothing would ever come of it. So Robert would, he's a strategist, he is a forward thinker, he's a great business owner. He would come up with these other ideas of, Hey, can we try this? Should we do this? And by the time the agency was getting around to doing them, it's like the momentum has passed, right? So he saw my ads, he came into my program and he's you know what? I'm gonna find the time to do this. If I have time for more clients, I have time to advertise. He learned my strategies. He was an amazing student. He asked lots of really good questions. He came to all the calls, all of the things, and I have screenshot. I have a video testimonial from him on my sales page, sharing what a difference it made to run his own ads. Than to pay an agency. Not only was he spending closer to five or$600, he might have even gotten up to 1,001 month because he was able to scale things up since they were working so well, that's still less than the$1,500 minimum. He was also not paying the$1,500 agency fee. But on top of that, he saw more buzz, more leads, more old clients coming through the door than ever before. He tells a story about how January was the quietest, slowest time for his gym this year in 2025, and it made him so nervous about what the year was going to look like. He joined my program in March and in April it was like the busiest and busiest time of new people coming in from seeing his ads. Now he does have somebody who manages his ads for him. They're a freelancer. They understand ads manager a bit, but he's able to share with them, Hey, this is the offer I want. I can record some video. I can give you some. Guidance on kind of messaging points to use, but can you please go create all the ads and launch'em off an ads manager report back to me on how they're doing? Okay. So if you're one of those people who just thinks I'm just not good at marketing, I want you to think about if it was a child who was saying something like this, if it was your child, what would you tell them? You just haven't practiced very much. You haven't spent enough time doing it, you're making it harder than it probably needs to be. I'm just thinking about my own daughter. She gets so frustrated easily with things she's not good at, even though one, she's better than she thinks, and two. She's been doing it for a couple days, whether it's painting, playing basketball, all these things, marketing and social media is a muscle. You gotta work it so that it gets stronger. And the thing about building muscle is if you do it for a couple days and it hurts and then you stop, it all goes away. You have to push through the hurt, right? If you're one of those people who's thinking, I don't have time. I don't have time to learn something new, I would love to come back at this excuse objection, whatever we wanna call it, with something super insightful and super empathetic, but I have the hardest time with it. Because, what do you mean you don't have time to grow and nurture your business? Then you don't need new clients because if you don't have time to advertise, then you must not have time for new clients. Or you have so many clients lining up out the door that you don't quote, unquote need it. You do have time. Especially with ads, because things move quickly with ads, so you only have to create a couple pieces of content, get them launched, and then we know if they're working or not. Within a week. I, okay, so to recap, to take no ownership over your marketing. It means you have no leverage over the growth of your business. This one might have come out a little more tough love than I had planned it to, but I really believe that in 2026, the business owners that take ownership over their advertising skills are the ones that are going to. Skyrocket past everyone else. Is that going to be you, is the question. All right, next part we're gonna talk more about trust, human touch, and visibility in an AI world. So I'll see you there. And by the way, if you want to come learn the strategy that I teach, get the high level overview, see how it works, and start to come up with your own strategy for 2026 as far as advertising your local business. Make sure you're signed up for my local ads strategy session that I'm hosting on January 7th. It's for local, specific business owners or marketers that support local specific businesses. That want to learn how to run meta ads for their own business or for their clients in a way that actually works today. There I'll be talking more about my program, hometown Advantage, and I will be offering$500 off the price of the program that takes it from$2,300 to$1,800 or$450 for four months because you get four months of personalized support from me. Weekly group coaching calls. Slack channel to answer all of your questions, unlimited ad reviews. So we will look at your ads, your copy, and give you feedback on what you should change in order for them to convert better. And we will also do unlimited data reviews. Every seven days worth of data you have, you can submit for a review for me or one of my co-coach to come in and look at your numbers and tell you exactly what to change based on your numbers. That's all inside my program. Also for. Hometown Advantage clients only. I am going to be hosting a quarter one ad launch Sprint the first week of February where we will get on Zoom together for three days and we will create your lead generation ad and launch it altogether in three days. You don't even have to watch the curriculum ahead of time. You can just jump on with me and we'll get things launched step by step and I'll be right there to answer questions for you. So that's only going to be for people who join after this workshop. Please reach out if you have any questions in the meantime, and I'll see you on the next episode.