Breaking down the value of our Local Essentials Package
Our Local Essentials Package of services is what we primarily recommend to most new and growing businesses we meet. We believe it’s the most efficient, cost-effective, and holistic way to approach forming a solid marketing foundation you can build upon.
To understand why this is the ideal set of services for you, we’ll first explain the problems with the way other agencies typically structure their services, then describe how we approach marketing from a different perspective, and lastly walk through the typical process.
The problems with many marketing services
Marketing can be bewildering for small business owners. There’s a seemingly endless list of things you could be doing.
Meanwhile, most marketing agencies only offer certain types of marketing services, e.g. website design, SEO, social media, advertising, media relations, etc. A talented web designer starts a web design agency, or a PR specialist starts a communications firm, so they specialize in those services.
But, if you don’t know where to start, who do you call? For instance, you would need to first know that you need social media support in order to reach out to a social media firm. And of course the social media firm will agree you need social media. It’s a bit like when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
That’s if you can even afford an agency, because all agencies are incentivized over time to pursue larger clients who can afford higher rates and heftier retainers. Hence why practically zero agencies target small businesses - they’re all competing for medium-sized to large companies who can afford to pay monthly retainers starting at $10,000.
This all makes perfectly rational sense from the agency’s perspective. You sell your best services at the highest rates possible, and larger businesses are more likely to have marketing professionals who know what services to look for. The problem is that this means the huge majority of businesses - small businesses - can’t afford a marketing agency.
The result is that many small businesses then have to figure it out themselves, or wing it with a freelancer. Either way, you’re taking a risk and likely wasting time and money.
Our approach to local business marketing
Recognizing how common this problem is, we decided to take a more client-focused approach. By focusing specifically on small local businesses, we start from the perspective of what they truly need, which we believe boils down to two categories:
Efficiently creating the truly essential elements you need to start communicating about your business effectively.
Quickly launching the communication platforms and channels that get you the most results for the least amount of time and effort.
More specifically, after decades of experience working with dozens of businesses of all sizes and complexities, and seeing the results from behind the scenes, here are the six things we’ve found that almost all local businesses need that deliver inarguable results:
Branding, namely a logo, consistent colors and typefaces.
Content, specifically compelling text and professional photography.
Website, which is professional and technically sound, but also as simple as possible.
Email, both branded email addresses and a newsletter that matches your branding.
Google Business Profile, if you have a physical business location.
Social media and search advertising accounts, namely Facebook, Instagram and Google.
Is there more a business could be doing to be successful? Absolutely, there’s really no limit, and there are certainly examples of small businesses that have grown by trying all sorts of creative ideas. But, those are the clear exceptions to the rule. For every business that goes viral on TikTok, there are thousands more losing potential customers because they haven’t claimed their profile on Google Maps.
Let’s walk through why we consider these services to be essential.
Branding & Content
The first step of any marketing is branding. Every business needs a name, visual identity, and story behind it, because it’s nearly impossible to communicate effectively without those elements. That’s true for both global enterprises and local mom and pop shops.
Of course, for local businesses this needs to be nowhere near as complex as the design system of a multinational corporation. Some enormous brands have infamously spent millions on even small tweaks to their logos. When a local business is just starting out, though, what’s most important is simply presenting yourself professionally and consistently, and we provide the essential elements to do that without taking months and charging tens of thousands.
Those critical assets include logos and a simple style guide with colors and typefaces, as well as text and photography.
Our experience have taught us that creating a simple text document that perfectly describes who you are, what you do, and what makes you special, makes creating all other communications more consistent and efficient to create. You simply copy and paste the text you need, and you avoid reinventing the wheel.
Similarly with photography, having professional photos of yourself and your business in action makes it really easy to create compelling communications in the future. When you move to the next step of developing a website, social platforms and ad accounts, it now takes far less time because you already have all the materials you need.
Website & Email
Like branding, website projects exist on a spectrum, and small local businesses need far simpler sites than large corporations.
In fact, customers don’t want complex websites - the easier it is to find the information they need the better! So, we recommend sites with the minimum number of pages, and for many companies a one-page site with the essential information a shopper is seeking is certainly good enough to start bringing in customers. What’s important here is answering your users’ questions, appearing trustworthy, and avoiding many of the technical mistakes people make when they build their first website.
The other thing we believe is important with a small business website is ease of management. A local business owner should be able to easily update their website whenever they like without needing a web developer on standby. For that reason, we primarily recommend and use Squarespace, which is the software underlying our own site. A basic informational site costs a couple hundred dollars a year, branded emails and newsletters functionality comes with it, you can add more functionality like e-commerce and scheduling without much hassle, and it’s very easy to update (or relatively difficult to screw up).
Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile is simply the account you set up to manage your company’s presence on Google Maps, which also appears prominently in Google Search results. It’s pretty easy to update and optimize, but lots of small business owners don’t even know about it or don’t know how to update it.
This is crazy, because you could argue this is even more important than your website for some businesses. Lots of customers see this information first when searching for your business, and might never even visit your website afterward. They’re really intertwined, because a detailed Google Business Profile is a prominent factor in search rankings, so not optimizing your profile could make it less likely that people find your website.
If you don’t have the correct address or phone number, let alone a good description and quality photos of your business, you’re clearly not setting yourself up for success. Since Google is still by far the most popular search engine in the United States, and Google Maps is the most popular mapping app (Waze is also owned by Google and uses Google Maps data), setting this profile up correctly is simply a must-have for brick-and-mortar businesses.
Social Media & Search Advertising
Once you have these platforms set up, you need to get people there. That can be a years-long process by simply relying on word of mouth. With digital advertising, particularly through search engines and social media, you can be reaching new customers within minutes for only a few dollars a day.
When it comes to search advertising, also known as search engine marketing or SEM, we recommend starting simple. We help you set up a Google Ads account, create ads using much of the text created previously, and set those ads to show up for the most relevant search terms in your targeted geographic area. You pick what you want to spend on a daily or monthly basis depending on your budget or how many customers you’d like to attract. Ultimately, it’s one of the cheapest, easiest and most direct ways to make sure that people looking for your products or services nearby find your business immediately at the top of search results.
It’s a similar story for social media advertising. We recommend starting with Meta Ads, a.k.a. Facebook and Instagram ads. These ads can be targeted incredibly well at your ideal customers in your geographic area, often at an even lower cost than Google Ads. We help you get your ad account set up and build your first campaign, again using the photos and text already created previously. This is especially effective to help grow awareness if you’re offering a service people don’t even know exists or aren’t typically searching for.
Now, there are alternatives to spending money on ads on these platforms. The technique of getting sites to ranking higher in search results is called search engine optimization or SEO, and often involves a mix of technical improvements and content creation, like blogging. Likewise, to reach people on social media without running ads, you need to post frequent, consistent, high-quality content.
However, neither of these options are truly free. You’re either spending your limited time and money to do it, or you’re paying someone else to do it, and it takes way more time and effort to see the same level of increased traffic that an ad can bring tomorrow through the same channel.
That’s why we recommend starting with search and social advertising. If you like blogging and posting to social media, then absolutely do it, it can’t hurt and absolutely does work eventually if you’re publishing interesting or entertaining content. But, we don’t include it in our Local Essentials Package because we can’t promise it will deliver results and it simply isn’t sustainable for many businesses.
The typical process of working with us
We like to start any of these engagements by meeting you in person. To save you the most time, we ideally like to accomplish three things:
Have a detailed conversation about yourself, your business, your challenges, and your goals. That serves to inform your visual identity as well as the text we’ll create for your platforms and communications.
Get photos of you and your business in action, whatever that means in your situation, e.g. working out, cooking food, making candles, whatever.
Claim and create your various accounts, such as your website, Google Business Profile, and advertising accounts. Setting these up usually requires an annoying back and forth of sharing credit card information and verification codes, and getting this administrative work done in one fell swoop upfront can save a ton of time down the road.
With much of that discovery, administration and initial content gathering done in one fell swoop up front, we are off to the races, and can typically turn around drafts for your review within a few days.
From there, we allow for three rounds of feedback and edits, which we can also typically turn around quickly. Once approved, we push your new presences live!
Note that this package does not include the actual ad spend for your accounts, i.e. the money you pay Google and Meta to run your ads. We typically recommend starting with a reasonable amount, testing messaging and imagery, and then running with what works best.
In the best case scenario, we can complete this package in a single week. We would meet on Monday, in-person, for a thorough interview and photography session. By Wednesday you’d have logo and websites drafts, and text and photography to review. With fast feedback and approval, you could have your new branding, website, Google Business Profile and ad accounts all set up by Friday.
Most often, it takes a bit more time for clients to organize their schedule, review materials, and provide feedback, and that’s perfectly OK. Most of the folks we work with are busy running their business, or working another gig while trying to launch their business, so it’s totally understandable. Just know we can typically accommodate whatever schedule you’re working on.
Have any other needs or questions? Reach out at any time at hi@mountwell.marketing.