Marketing a Business In a Small Town, Not Marketing the Small Town

The consultant the county chamber brought in was good at her job, and her job was the wrong one. She stood in the fire hall meeting room with a projector and forty-five minutes on attracting visitors to Maple Run: the walkable downtown, the seasonal festival, the photogenic bridge. Half the room ran shops on the square and took notes. Danny sat in the back next to Walt Brennan and did not take any, because Earle & Son had never once fixed a boiler for a tourist.

"Nice presentation," Walt said in the parking lot. "About a different business than mine."

This is the single most common confusion in the whole subject, and you can watch it happen in a search engine. Type how to market a service business in a small town and most of what comes back is about marketing the small town: attracting visitors, boosting the downtown, giving the place a brand. There is nothing wrong with that work. It is just not the question a plumber, an electrician or an excavator is asking.

The other job, the one nobody writes about, is getting the four thousand people who already live here to call you rather than the outfit two towns over.

The audience is fixed, so reach is not the product

Marketing in a city is largely a numbers game about attention. Reach enough people cheaply enough and some fraction converts. That logic dies in a town where the total addressable market is a number you could count on the tax rolls.

You do not need to reach people. Everyone within twenty miles is already reachable, and most of them have already heard of you or could within a day by asking someone. What you need is to be the answer at the exact moment somebody has a problem, which is a completely different objective with completely different tactics.

That gives you one test to apply to every marketing decision, forever: does this make me more likely to be the answer in that moment, for people within driving distance? If yes, it is marketing. If no, it is a hobby with a receipt.

What passes the test in a town this size

Be findable in the moment. A claimed Google listing with hours that are true, a phone number that can be tapped, service areas named in plain words, and a site that loads before a person on a bad rural connection gives up. Nearly all of this is free and nearly all of it is wrong at the average small-town business.

Be believable once they are looking. Photographs of your own work rather than stock photos of models in clean hard hats. Reviews written by people with local names. A license number where a careful customer looks for it. Prices described honestly, even in ranges, because vagueness reads as a trap. In a town where everybody knows everybody, believability compounds like interest, and it is also the thing most easily destroyed in an afternoon.

Be present where the town already talks. The community Facebook group, the school sports program, the counter at the parts store, the fire company. Not as an advertiser. As a business that answers questions without pitching and turns up when something needs doing. The reason this works is not sentiment, it is that recommendations in a small town are made from memory, and memory is built by repetition.

Be legible at forty miles an hour. Your truck is the most-seen advertisement your business will ever own, and most of them fail a simple test: from the next lane, can a stranger read the name, the trade and the number? That is a morning's work with a sign shop and it runs for a decade.

What fails the test, expensively

Anything that buys attention from people who have no problem yet, because they will not remember you when they do. Anything that reaches outside your driving radius. Anything that makes the business sound like a corporation, because the actual advantage you hold over the outfit from the city is that a neighbor can point at a truck and name the person driving it.

And any content written to impress other people in your industry rather than to answer a question a customer actually typed.

Three readings to take this week

• Search your trade plus your town on a phone, in the position of a stranger. Whatever appears above you is the real competition for the moment, and the list is usually shorter and shabbier than owners fear.
• Open your own Google listing and check the hours, the phone number, the service area and the newest photo. Fix whatever is not true today.
• Take the last thing you spent marketing money on and apply the test out loud. Findable, believable, or neither. Neither is more common than anyone likes.
• If you want a number rather than a rule, run it through what a small town contractor should actually spend on marketing. It starts from the jobs you need instead of a percentage of your revenue.

Adapted from Small Town Strategy: Simple Marketing for People with Real Work to Do, out now on Amazon in paperback ($14.99) and Kindle ($6.99).