43 Things I Know for Sure About Small Business Marketing
Today I turn 43. For me, birthdays always feel like a good excuse to take a step back and to take stock. So this year, my 25th working in the media world and my 43rd around the sun, I decided to put down 43 honest opinions about small business marketing and social media.
After more than a decade in social media strategy and six years building this agency, these are the things I've actually landed on. Some of these I'll defend loudly. A few might ruffle feathers. Here they are, in no particular order:
There's no secret "best time" to post. Showing up reliably matters infinitely more than hitting some mythical golden hour everyone swears by.
You don't need to be on every platform. Doing two or three really well beats doing six halfway.
If your only goal is the fastest possible growth, posting more often genuinely can get you there faster. It's just rarely the sustainable path.
Reach matters more than follower count. I'd rather put something great in front of 10,000 people who don't follow me yet than have 10,000 followers who never see another post again.
A shocking amount of the "growth hack" advice circulating online is made-up nonsense with no real basis in how the algorithm, or actual humans, work.
I can't stand the "I grew from 0 to 100K in 30 days with this ONE trick" posts. That's marketing about marketing, and it's almost never honest about the whole picture.
An intern cannot do the job of a social media strategist, no matter how much time they've spent on their phone. Being fluent in an app is not the same skill as building a strategy.
Trends are a launching point, not a script. Copy-pasting someone else's format without making it your own defeats the entire purpose of using it.
The Catholic Church needs a bigger, better presence on social media. There's real hunger for that content and far too much empty space where it should be.
Catholic content creators and influencers owe their audience real clarity about when they're sharing personal opinion versus actual Church doctrine/dogma. Blurring that line does genuine harm.
We would probably all benefit from less time scrolling and more time outside. Myself very much included.
Kids shouldn’t have smartphones or social media before 16.
But I do think they should have both before they leave for college, so they can practice using them under supervision, in the safety of home, before they're navigating it entirely on their own.
Saves are one of the most underrated metrics in the game. Likes tell you almost nothing about whether something actually worked.
A social media audit is worth doing at least twice a year, not just every January when motivation is high.
If you dread opening your own business's account, that dread eventually shows up in the content itself. People can feel it.
AI is a genuinely great tool for speeding up the busywork. It's a terrible replacement for your actual voice.
If a caption could have been posted by any other brand in your industry, word for word, it isn't doing its job.
The best UGC doesn't look produced. That's the entire point of it.
A product that's been performing steadily for years doesn't need to be new to perform like new. Sometimes it just needs new proof around it.
Batching your content protects your energy. Batching your brain out of the process entirely removes the exact thing that made people follow you.
Hiring a social media manager isn't a luxury tier. It's a bandwidth decision, the same as hiring for any other role you're maxed out on.
Small business owners chronically undervalue their own expertise as content. You know more than you think is "obvious."
Not every post needs a call-to-action. Sometimes the job of a post is simply to be liked, not to sell.
A hard sell works better in small, occasional doses than as a constant drumbeat.
Hashtags matter far less than they used to. Obsessing over the "perfect" set is often time better spent tightening the caption.
A good caption doesn't need to be long. It needs to say one thing clearly.
The algorithm changes constantly. Good storytelling doesn't.
Screenshots of real reviews and DMs are some of the most persuasive content a small business can post, and most owners are sitting on dozens of them, unused.
You will always be a little embarrassed by your content from a year ago. That's a sign you're actually improving.
Video doesn't have to mean "produced." Some of the best-performing videos are unscripted and a little rough around the edges.
Consistency isn't about posting every single day. It's about not disappearing for a month or more without warning.
A content calendar should have room to change. The best ones are a starting point, not a contract.
If your captions read like they were written by a robot, they probably were, and people can tell.
Community gets built in the comments as much as in the caption itself.
Growing slowly and organically isn't a consolation prize. It's often the healthier, more durable path.
Reposting content that did well 6 months or a year ago, even with very few edits, is smart! People forget what you posted minutes after they see it.
Repurposing one piece of content into five different formats isn't lazy. It's smart.
Burnout is a real risk of running your own social media, and ignoring that doesn't make it any less true.
A platform being popular doesn't automatically make it right for your business.
The best marketing often doesn't feel like marketing at all.
Every business has at least one great story sitting untold, because the owner assumed nobody would care. Someone will.
And forty-three years in, I'm still figuring a lot of this out, which, honestly, is exactly how it should feel.
