The Local Marketing Handbook
Refine Your Pitch
You cannot be found by everyone. Pick someone.
The most common mistake I see is keeping the audience big. On Shark Tank, when a founder says they are going after a hundred-billion-dollar market, the sharks shake their heads. Who cares? Nobody buys from a business that is for everybody.
Draw the silhouette
Take one sheet of paper and draw a head-and-shoulders silhouette. It takes two minutes and it works.
- Above the head, write your town, state, and neighborhood. Not just "Springfield" but "Springfield, MA, the Sixteen Acres neighborhood."
- Inside the body, write three to five specific traits. Not "women." Write "mothers of young children who work from home."
- To the left, write the single problem they have. One problem. Not your service list.
- To the right, write your single solution, as concretely as you can. Not "computer support." Write "same-day in-home computer repair, no appointment needed."
Now read it around in a circle and you have your target audience in one sentence: We provide work-from-home parents in and around Sixteen Acres with same-day in-home computer repair.
Turn it into a pitch
Answer five questions in writing. Who are you? What do you do? Why should this specific person care? What makes you different in a way you can prove? What is one true story you can tell about it?
Then stitch the answers together and say it out loud until it stops sounding like a brochure. This paragraph becomes the source material for your website, your profile description, your review requests, and every ad you ever run. Write it once, use it everywhere.
AI Assist: 10 minutes instead of an afternoon
Demographic research that used to mean digging through census tables is now one prompt.
Paste this into any AI assistant:
I own a [type of business] in [town, state]. Give me a demographic snapshot of the population within a 15-minute drive: age distribution, household composition, median household income, and how people typically commute. Then suggest three distinct customer personas I could realistically serve, and for each one name the single most urgent problem I could solve. Be specific to this area, not generic.
Do not accept the output as gospel. You know your town better than any model does. Use it as a first draft you argue with.
Your 30-minute task
Draw the silhouette. Fill in the four sections. Write the one-sentence audience statement and tape it to your monitor.
Everything else in this handbook gets easier once this exists.
