Be a Knock Out in Small and Local Business Marketing

In addition to running a marketing agency with customers around the globe and a seven-figure local business, today’s master is also a kickboxing champion and MMA fighter — making Jennifer Waters easily the marketer I’d least like to fight.

Though Flo from Progressive seems like she’d be a scrapper, right? It’s not just me?

But rather than spend our time arguing about which mascot would win in the octagon, today she’s here to teach you how to kill it… in small and local business marketing that is. But don’t worry; you SMB and enterprise marketers will get your kicks in, too.

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Meet the Master

Jennifer Waters
Co-founder, 7 Figure Dojo; Executive sensei, Seigler’s Karate Center

• Claim to fame: Grew her small business to seven figures (Thus the name of her agency!)
• Fun fact: She’s a sixth-degree Kempo karate black belt and purple belt in Tetsu Shin Ryu Jiu-Jitsu

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Lesson 1: Forget omnichannel. Think omnipresence.

“To survive as a local business, you need to think and market like a Fortune 500 company,” Waters says.

If that reflexively made your wallet pucker, you can relax. She means that you need to think bigger than just a few scattered Facebook ads.

“You need to do what I call omnipresence marketing. Digital marketing is just one arm of it,” Waters explains.

So while omnichannel refers to coordinating your marketing across all of your digital channels, omnipresence means you include the real world. In fact, Waters says the foundation of small-business marketing is live events.

“This is where you’re out shakin’ hands and kissin’ babies,” she smiles.

For a karate school, this might be hosting a monthly parents’ night out. For a florist, it could be weekly wine-and-design classes. (As a real-life example, the kung fu school I go to hosts a monthly classic kung fu movie night.) The exact details will differ, but the goals are the same: generating leads and building visibility.

“We want to be physically present in the community. We want to have internal events to bring people to us, to generate publicity. And because your name is constantly out there you become category king or category queen with your local business.”

Meanwhile, as your digital marketing promotes these live events, your live events provide fodder for your digital marketing. And when you coordinate them both? Voilà! Omnipresence.

Lesson 2: Relationships are everything.

Because I’m a massive dork, I can’t resist asking the cheese question: What do martial arts masters know that marketers need to learn?

Waters’ answer is anything but cheese.

“Relationships are everything,” she says. “Your relationship to the individual customer, or in this case to your martial arts student, is what is going to keep them coming back. Or feeling comfortable referring other people to you.”

Every touchpoint you have with your audience — at live events, on social media, on your website, on the phone — is a chance to build that relationship.

Imagine you see a great video ad, so you call up the company and… some rude jerk answers the phone.

“All that marketing did nothing because the relationship wasn’t there.”

This is a good time to take stock: When you reply to your emails, are you maintaining that relationship? Are you proactively reaching out to customers who talk about you on social media? When they land on your homepage, are they getting the same vibe they can expect at your live events?

Lesson 3: Cause a pause.

For Waters, the current era of marketing is all about asking, “What can we do to get this person to stop?”

Stop scrolling and watch your video. Stop clearing the inbox and read your newsletter. Stop walking and check out your booth at your local fair.

“If I’m going out in person, I’m not going in plain clothes. I’m going to throw on a karate gi and now I’m stopping traffic.”

“If I was advising a chef who was trying to get people to come over and taste the pastries, I’d say put on a chef’s outfit with the hat and everything,” she gestures at an imaginary toque like Ratatouille.

And the same principle applies online; you just have to figure out the digital equivalent of your gi. Waters notes that, since they’re still new and novel to most folks, dropping AI-generated images into your social feed is a good way to get people to stop scrolling.

The key is figuring out what makes your unique business stand out both online and off.

Now, get out there and don your gi apparel.