Marketing from the Car

Time to Take Back Local - Do Your Marketing from Your Car, Episode 1

• Brian

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0:00 | 8:42

Think local marketing has to be complicated? Think again. 

In this kickoff episode, Brian Ostrovsky (creator of Marketing 3-4-5™ and founder of Locable) introduces the simple Marketing 3-4-5™ approach that helps local leaders and doers take back control - without burning out.

This episode covers:

  • The 3 reasons you do marketing
  • The 4 reasons people choose to work with you
  • The 5 ways you reach people today
  • 🎯 Why overthinking kills action - and what to do instead

Whether you’re running a Main Street, Chamber, DMO, nonprofit, or small business, this podcast is built for you.

🔗 Mentioned Resources




Learn more about Locable and see how your community can become a Locable community.

Join our #TakeBackLocal community of local-doers here >>

Who This Is For

Why Marketing 3•4•5 Exists

The “Three”: Goals You Market For

The “Four”: Why Choose You

The “Five”: Reach People Where They Are

Activating Local Networks

Action Over Perfection & CTA

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the Marketing from the Car podcast. I'm your host, Brian Ostrowski. I'm the founder and CEO of Locable. I'm also the creator and author of Marketing 345, the Business Owner's Guide to Effective Local Marketing in 15 Minutes or Less. This podcast is meant to take all of the lessons learned as we created the book and the program, uh, and really all the things we do at Locable and give you actionable, bite-sized activities you can do to be more effective. So I hope you'll probably learn something through this, but really my goal is that you'll take action. This podcast is being created for the local leaders, which for us means the main streeters, the chambers, the DMOs, economic development folks. It means your board, as well as local businesses and nonprofits who want to take a little more control over your destiny and are willing to make an effort. Nothing we talk about in this podcast will be hard, but it will all need to be done. It will need to be intentional in most cases, uh, and it takes a few minutes. The reason I've called it marketing from the car is that so many of you have meetings or you meet with customers or whatever, and you're in the car, and I want you to be able to consume this in a single sitting. So I'm gonna endeavor to have these episodes be three to eight minutes. And I also want you to be able to do most of your marketing from the car so that I'm not giving you more homework, but I'm giving you more results, perhaps, more outcomes, a little bit more empowerment. So, with that, I want to introduce you to the basic concepts of marketing 345. And if you've read my book, if you've attended any of my in-person workshops or sessions at conferences or webinars, you've heard me say this. But marketing 345 came about because in graduate school, my focus was marketing strategy. And I was learning what Amazon and Microsoft and Starbucks and all these big companies do. And it was the Great Recession. And small businesses that I was friendly with were struggling. Not only was it the Great Recession, they were always bad at marketing. And then uh mobile phones came out, the smartphone, the iPhone, et cetera. Facebook opened up for like normal people, and it made it worse. And it's gotten more work, more worse. It's gotten worse, worse. It's gotten just bad. And so, what I really want to focus on are things you can do to not uh be beholden to the treadmill that is social media, uh, to not chase fads, maybe capitalize occasionally, but really to stand out, to answer the question, why you? Why should I work with you? Why should I care? And then help me actually know you exist. So often we talk to people and they've been around a while. In fact, I was talking to a woman in Arkansas recently who said, I've been here 30 years. I run a floral business. And people still walk in and go, Oh, when did you open? 30 years later. So marketing 345 takes everything I learned and tries to boil it down into something actionable. Now, the three, it stands for the three reasons you do marketing. Obviously, most people want more customers, but really they need to be the right customers, the right type of customers. More of the wrong customers probably doesn't help you very much. Now, you also do marketing to grow your team. If you're nonprofit, that means volunteers and board members, maybe donors. If you're a business, it might be staffing up. And maybe you're not in that position right now. Okay, but maybe you will be. And the third reason you do marketing is to positively impact your community. No one supports everyone, but everyone supports someone. Could be a local business, could be where you get your hair done, could be your favorite place to eat, could be the nonprofits you care about, like the food bank or the animal shelter, or if you're in the south like me, it could be the booster club for the local high school sports team. I don't know what you care about. I don't know what your goals are. And candidly, I don't really care, but I do want to help you get there because effective marketing unlocks all of your dreams. Ineffective marketing or no marketing means that you are hoping and praying. And while I endorse both of those things, they are not a marketing strategy. So the three is what your goals are, and they may change over time. The four is why people work with you. Well, you know, hopefully you're competent, but that's hard to evaluate. You know, if I'm looking for a plumber, I don't know how to tell a good plumber from a bad plumber. I kind of assume and hope that they all can do it. So the question is why you? Well, it's your unique experience and expertise. Is that relevant to me? Can you convey it in a way that I, a lay person, can understand? It's also your likability. Which, if you're a plumber, might be, you know, you leave my house clean. Do I feel comfortable with you in my house? Are you friendly? If you're a realtor, it's do I want to spend the afternoon in a car with you? You might be a lovely person, but if we don't get along, now if you're a restaurant, that could be the ambiance and the the type of service you provide. If you're a community, so what's it like when I roll up? Main streeters, you follow the four points approach. So, you know, design and historic preservation really matter, but how do you convey this? And finally, your values are we on the same team? If I love Habitat for Humanity and you support Habitat for Humanity, I'm probably gonna pick you if I know that you do. So the four is why people work with you. Now, the five, this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where we're gonna spend a lot of time in this podcast, which is reaching people where they are. That's why I'm doing a podcast and it's being recorded as a video and audio because you're in the car. I wrote a book, but a lot of people tell me I don't have time to read. So I'm trying to encapsulate that in audio. And it'll be a blog post at marketing345.com so that Google can see it. And so obviously, referrals are best, and there's things you can do to cultivate that. We'll talk about some of those things that you can consistently drive referrals and recommendations, but you know, you don't want to feed your family based on the unmotivated goodwill of others. So then we have advertising and promotion, which is this big bucket, and social media falls into this, but so does you know, ads in the newspaper or the radio or um the local magazine, all of which I like if they're used effectively and appropriately. And then you have email newsletters, which is so powerful because if I subscribe to your newsletter and you send an email, I get it like every time. So we want to cultivate that where we can. It doesn't work for every business, but for most. And then Google, of course. Although now, since I wrote the book, we have AI. Same basic consideration. So we'll talk through that. And then referrals. And I don't mean referrals from customers, I mean tap it into your local connections. If you're a member of the chamber, get more. If you're on Main Street, get more. If you have a networking group, get more out of that. We're gonna talk a lot of about a lot of the things you can do to activate that, both for your own benefit, but also the benefit of others who you care about and not for nothing, but uh locables most unique thing that we do is we give you free ability to cross-promote if you're in a locable community. So as we go on this adventure, I'm gonna refer back to marketing three, four, five. And my goal is to uh eliminate the need for you to think. I don't mean that as an insult, but so often you read these books that are insightful and thought-provoking and and really intriguing. And then you have to figure out how does this apply to my life and my situation and my challenges and my industry. And I hope to skip that part. So, here as I've run over on my first episode, I uh invite you to uh subscribe to our newsletter where we'll be distributing this. Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform, follow us on social, whatever your thing is, do your thing. I probably should have mentioned this earlier. This is gonna be a largely unscripted, maybe occasionally outlined, uh very limited editing. I want to show you that this can be done effectively and that even with my misspeaks, that it probably doesn't undermine your value very much. And I want you, if you're a perfectionist, to realize it's better to do something than to wait to do it perfectly. So on that note, uh I look forward to working with you and your community, at least via this uh podcast, to take back local. Until next time.