Small Business Saturday 2026 is Saturday, November 28, the day after Black Friday and two days after Thanksgiving. If you run a local business, that gives you about six weeks to get ready. The plan below breaks those six weeks into one or two jobs a week. American Express started Small Business Saturday in 2010,…
If you want to hire a social media management company, most of the guides you will find are about something else: hiring one person, either a freelancer from a marketplace or an employee from a job board. That is one way to get your social media handled. Hiring a company is another, and the process…
Somewhere in your town tonight, someone asked ChatGPT to recommend a [your service] near them. It gave them three names, and yours wasn’t one of them. The quality of your work probably had nothing to do with it. AI tools recommend the businesses they can find, read, and trust from the information already online, and…
Most social media marketing mistakes come from posting without a plan, then wondering why the likes never turn into phone calls. Every mistake on this list has a fix you can start this week. Here are 10 of the most common ones local businesses make, and what to do instead. 1. Posting Without a Clear…
Most people decide whether to read your caption in the time it takes their thumb to move. The photo gets them to pause. The first line of the caption decides whether they tap “more” or keep scrolling. For a local business, that one line can be the difference between a post someone forgets and a…
Social media trends move fast. A sound takes over Instagram Reels for two weeks, a new feature shows up in your app overnight, and by the time most business owners notice, the moment has passed. Staying current does not mean jumping on every trend. It takes a short weekly habit: spot the useful trends early,…
Most advice about paid social stops at “know your audience” and “use good photos.” That advice is fine, but it will not tell you why one local business gets steady calls from a modest monthly ad budget while another spends twice that and hears nothing. The difference is usually in the setup: who sees the…
Here’s the dirty secret nobody in the marketing industry wants to admit: most of the advice out there is written for people who have time to follow it. Post every day. Respond to every comment within an hour. Send a weekly email. Update your Google Business Profile. Film three videos a week. Run Facebook ads….
For a local business, being good at what you do only gets you so far. People still have to find you—and increasingly, that discovery starts with a Google search. Every local business wants to show up when someone searches for exactly what they sell. “Plumber near me.” “Best family dentist.” “Roofing contractor in Minneapolis.” Those…
Most local businesses treat social media like a bulletin board. Post something. Hope people see it. Wait for the phone to ring. The businesses actually generating customers from social media right now aren’t doing it that way. They’ve figured out something most local business owners completely miss: social media isn’t just a marketing channel anymore….