You can do your own marketing. Plenty of owners do, and a lot of what matters most costs nothing but an hour. The real question is not whether you can. It is which jobs are worth your evenings, and which you would rather hand to someone else.
Marketbase is built for both answers. Sort it yourself, or we'll do it for you.
In this article
- 1. What you can sort yourself this week
- 2. Where doing it yourself gets hard
- 3. Two doors, and how to pick yours job by job
What you can sort yourself
The jobs that make the most difference to a local business are often the plainest ones. None of them need a marketer:
- Claim your Google listing and check every field: name, phone, address, hours, categories, description.
- Text every happy customer your review link the day the job is finished, and reply to every review, good and bad.
- Add real photos of your work, your team and your premises.
- Set holiday hours before Waitangi Day, Matariki and Christmas, so nobody turns up to a locked door.
Done well and kept up, these cover most of what a customer judges you on once they find you. That is the "look good" half of local marketing, and it is yours to win.
Where doing it yourself gets hard
The doing is rarely the problem. Knowing what to do, and in what order, is.
From one phone you see the few businesses Google shows you on one evening, not your whole market. You can tell a rival has more reviews, but not whether your count is low for your trade in your town or just behind that one business.
Without the whole picture, effort goes where the worry is. The owner on a 3.9 rating spends on SEO. The one on a 4.8 loses sleep over a single bad review. Neither is the move most likely to get them the call.
Keeping up is the last hard part. Your market keeps moving: new businesses open, competitors collect reviews, Google changes what it shows. A check you did in March is out of date by winter, and repeating it properly every month is a few hours most owners never find.
Key point
Invest in what gets you the call. The right fix depends on where the bar sits in your market, and that changes from trade to trade and town to town.
Some jobs are also just fiddly. Getting your details to match across every directory you are listed on, from Finda to NoCowboys, takes hours. Speeding up a slow website or fixing how it reads on a phone usually needs someone who does it for a living.
Two doors
Marketbase does three things. It tells you what to do, in order, starting with whatever is costing you calls right now. It shows you how, step by step, for every finding. And it does it for you if you want.
The steps are written so an owner can follow them without help. That is deliberate. The gap between you doing a fix and us doing it is mostly your time, so the choice is genuinely yours, one job at a time. Every priority on your roadmap carries the offer to hand it to us.
| Sort it yourself when | Hand it over when |
|---|---|
| It takes minutes and only you can do it, like asking for reviews | It needs a skill you do not have and do not want, like website fixes |
| It is about your voice, like replying to customers | It is hours of repetitive admin, like matching your details across directories |
| You enjoy it, and it keeps you close to your customers | Your evenings are worth more spent on the business or off it |
Picture this
A hair salon owner in Christchurch has been checking her competitors by hand for months. She knows who has nicer photos. She did not know that her listing had no description and that she was shut on Saturday afternoons, when most people in her market look for a salon.
She writes the description and changes her hours herself, in an evening. Matching her details across a dozen directories she hands over. Both doors, one roadmap.
Pick your door this week
10 minutes today
- Search your trade plus your town and note where you sit in the map list
- Check your hours and holiday hours on your Google listing
30 minutes this week
- Write down the three things you think are holding your marketing back
- Open your free Marketbase report and see whether it agrees
Ongoing this month
- Do the quick jobs yourself, starting with reviews
- Hand over the one you have been putting off longest
Where Marketbase comes in
We have already checked every business in your trade and city. Find your business and your free report shows what is working, what could move and where you stand, no card and no setup.
Seven days' free access then opens the how for every finding, in order. Sort it yourself, or we'll do it for you.