How to Market Your Small Family Business

If you’ve just started your small family business, or if you’re just considering it, the marketers who have your information DON’T want you to know some important secrets about how to market it well.

Today, I’ll give you all their secrets and tell you how to market your small family business like a pro. Use your marketing budget better, not faster!
00:00 Intro

00:00 Intro
00:38 Topic Intro
01:14 Focus Local
03:11 Google is Your Friend
06:00 Face-to-Face and 1-on-1
07:57 Pamela Slim – The Widest Net
09:49 Desiree Adaway – Case Study
11:22 The Recap

When you start your family business, you’ll find out how quickly your information gets sold to every marketer out there, and every one of them wants your startup budget.
There are a lot of secrets to marketing really well on the budget that you might be working with.
But whether that budget is small or large, you want to be smart with your investment.
So don’t give your money to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that sends you an email or blows up your phone, trying to get you to spend money with them for SEO services, website building, app development, etc., etc.

Instead, here are the three things that will make your marketing a hit no matter what.

Focus Local

The very first point is to focus local.
This applies no matter what your product or service is, whether it’s digital or physical.
I know you want to get everybody in the world on your mailing list and on your customer list, but for now, focus local with your plan.
Think about “how can I get my product in the hands and awareness of the people in my neighborhood, community, and places I’m already at?”

Geo-Targeting and Geo-Tags

As you consider how to implement a local-based strategy, think about geo-targeting as your go-to tool.
“Geo-Targeting” is ad targeting based on geographic location, so you use it to show ads to people that are near your business or near some specific location (like a trade show you’re at, or a city you service).
“Geo-tagging” is adding your business address into every profile and piece of content you have online or “tagging” your content with your geographic location.
Those two tools work together to alert local people to your product or service and they see, “oh, I like this product” because you’ve marketed well to them as a potential customer, but also “they’re right around the block from me”.
That gives them a feeling that they can come to see and interact with you in person which feels safer and more trustworthy.

It’s also important to remember geo-tags when you’re making and interacting with content on all the social media and online platforms.
For example, if you’re creating YouTube videos, a blog, or an Instagram post, add in the location tag or “geo-tag” at your business or city. You can also do things like “checking in” at your business when you make a post or leaving your business as a recommendation in a comment by tagging your business with the @ sign.

Local Strategy from the Ground Up

The point is to develop your whole strategy from the perspective of how to reach local individuals who might be purchasers of your product or service. If you create a strategy that works at this level, you’ll be able to find ways to scale it up when the time is right.

Google is Your Friend

The second thing to think about in marketing your family business is maxing out what Google can do for you.
Google is running the world in terms of data, maps, and search right now. You may as well use it to your advantage.
You don’t have to pay someone a lot of money either, you just need to know what EXACTLY to do. Yes, there’s a lot of words like SEO, SMO, CTRs, CTAs, and more acronyms that the marketers would love you to get confused about, but the thing exact things you need to do is Be Authentic and Be There.
Authenticity is going to get you all those things and more.
When you market by bringing the truth about yourself, your product, and the needs you meet or problems you solve for your clients, you’ll naturally build and develop all of the things the algorithms are trying to find.
It’s not about trying to game the algorithm, but there are a lot of ways to use it to your advantage.

SEO Strategy

Take the time to come up with keywords (including “long-tail” keywords) that represent the words and phrases your customers are searching for when they need the solution you provide. 10 – 15 keywords or phrases should be plenty, but it’s crucial that you avoid the temptation to use words that describe you instead of words that describe your clients’ pain points.

If you need help with that process, there are resources including myself, but generally speaking, you know that content, the expensive marketer is just going to pull it out of you. Think about your Frequently Asked Questions and 3-star reviews if you’re not sure where to start.
Then put that SEO strategy to work and use those keywords throughout all the content or marketing assets you create, whether it’s advertising, postcards, in a blog post or newsletter, in a newspaper article about your business, social media content, additional revenue streams, partnerships, etc.

Content and Asset Creation Strategy

Use those keywords to create content and marketing assets, then get them out there. Get them on the appropriate social media, Google, and hopefully on your website, because that helps Google know, “here’s where we send people who are looking for that”. Your SEO strategy should inform your decisions about every other piece of copy that you or your team write for your business, both on and offline but it won’t matter if it just lives in your brain or at your office and doesn’t make it out to the people who need you.

Google My Business Page

The third part of taking full advantage of Google is to create a Google business page with your local address on it.
It won’t matter a lot for your big, national digital strategy but it will matter a lot for your local strategy, and the local strategy is important.
If you can’t execute on a local scale where people can know, like, and trust you in person, it will be difficult and expensive to execute on a national or global scale.

Face-to-Face and 1-on-1

The last thing to consider when you’re talking about how to market your small family business is a face-to-face and one-on-one impact.
How can you create a face-to-face or one-on-one impact with your local customer?
I’ve already mentioned geo-targeting and local strategy for your advertising and ad space, but even on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc., use local strategy because there are tons of people around you on the social media platforms.
Think about how that individual person will receive what you’re putting out there.

Speak to Your Avatar

Notch your thinking down from selling to everyone in the world to selling to this specific person. We call it your “avatar” in marketing land.
You’ll create an avatar somewhere along the way that is your ideal customer.
It shouldn’t necessarily be a demographic thing, although that can play into it, but often it should be based more on their behaviors, needs, and wants.

Meet Your Avatar in Person

Ask yourself what kind of conferences or local networking groups are they in? Where do they go for fun? Where do they hang out with their peers, associates, and friends? Where do they hang out online?
Consider how to reach them directly, face to face.
I mentioned the know, like, trust factor earlier. Bob Burg said “All things being equal, people do business with, and refer business to people they know, like and trust.” People like to work with people they know, like, and trust, and meeting them face to face at a conference, association meeting, or trade show can help you take care of at least one, maybe more, of those.

Watering Holes and Ecosystems

One of my mentors and coaches, Pam Slim, is releasing a new book, The Widest Net. She also wrote The Body of Work and Escape from Cubicle Nation, but her new book is all about marketing business from a community-based mindset. Specifically, she talks about “Watering Holes” and the “Ecosystem”.
The watering holes refer to places where your customers or potential clients gather together for various purposes, like getting a drink of water. The next thing she talks about is the ecosystem.
She says that instead of trying to build empires out of our family businesses, we should instead try to contribute to the ecosystem of people and businesses we already partner with. The vendors, clients, neighbors, etc. The more we think about the ecosystem we’re a part of and how to affect it in a very tangible and positive way, it benefits our business as well.
The ecosystem partners become referral partners.. When we work together and we like working together, we refer the people we like working with to other people we like working with.
It’s a brilliant marketing strategy because it opens up who you’re marketing to, from only the people you reach directly into all people your whole network reaches.

100 Random Phone Calls

Pam’s good friend and client, Desiree Adaway, did a process where she held a hundred phone calls with random people. She was at a transition point in her career and told the people she knew, “if you know anyone you think I should connect with, please hook us up for a phone call”.
She assured everyone she wasn’t writing a book or keeping notes, she just wanted to connect with people and hear what they had going on and develop some relationships. So she did one hundred phone calls with random strangers that other people were connecting her to, and as a result of that work, she was able to niche in what her business was and then explode in big ways.
Because of those networking connections she made, people thought of her when they heard about opportunities that fit her. They were calling her back to back with different offers and connections to people who needed her service.
Over the following years, she did thousands more phone calls with strangers, one of whom was me. It changed the course of my life before I ever paid her a dime. I have since paid her for several products and services.

The lesson is, think one-on-one every step of the way.

When you’re creating your content, your marketing strategy, all of the materials and assets, your website, your Google page, your business listings, etc.
Think one-on-one and in terms of the face-to-face impact on your client.
How you can make that authentic, feel good and really speak to the need you’re trying to meet for them?

And that’s all folks! Those are the secrets the expensive marketers don’t want you to know about how to market your small family business.

They don’t want you to know to:

Focus local with your marketing. You’ll reach people who quickly trust you and they will help you reach people outside of that.
Use Google to your advantage by being authentic, telling your real story, and connecting with the problem people need solving versus the thing that you’re trying to bring to them.
Keep the face-to-face or the one-on-one connection at the forefront of your marketing decisions for every decision from strategy to keywords and photos you use.

I hope these tips were helpful for you. Put them to work, see how they do for you, and let me know. I’d love to hear.
If it feels a little beyond what you’re able to do, I am accepting clients right now for consulting. You can get on my calendar at TheHartHabits.com/About, and I will be happy to chat with you about what you’re doing with your business, where you’re trying to go, and how I can help you get there.

Disclaimer –

This video is NOT sponsored. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support the channel and allows me to continue to make videos like this one. But don’t worry, it does not affect the price you pay. 😉
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