Boost Your Visibility | Grow Your Business with Brenda Eckhardt
Resource for creative entrepreneurs seeking to grow their product or service-based businesses while prioritizing family and well-being. Hosted by Brenda Eckhardt, a successful photographer and brand strategist, this podcast offers the latest strategies and how-to's to increase online visibility, work smarter, avoid burnout, and find inspiration for both professional and personal growth.
Boost Your Visibility | Grow Your Business with Brenda Eckhardt
How To Grow Your Local Business Fast When Traffic Is Down
Are you stuck trying to figure out how to grow your local business? Has foot traffic been down? Just posting on social media isn’t enough anymore—but don’t worry, I’ve got you covered!
In this video, we’re diving into simple strategies that actually work to market your business and attract local customers.
✔️ Transform your entire marketing strategy in just one hour a month
✔️ Game-changing approach to content creation that fits into the busiest of schedules
✔️ Feel more confident in organizing your digital content
✔️ Turns heads on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube Shorts.
Whether you’re just starting out or ready to take things to the next level, this video is packed with actionable tips you can use right away.
Hit play to learn how to grow your local business and start seeing real results! Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share—let’s grow together! 🚀
Key Moments:
00:00 - Introduction
Marketing your local business: What’s the key?
00:48 - Overwhelm in Marketing
Acknowledging the challenges of juggling it all.
01:00 - The 1-Hour Content Plan
How spending one hour a month can revolutionize your marketing.
01:27 - Creative vs. Analytical Approaches
Tailoring content creation strategies to your strengths.
02:50 - Organizing Content for Success
Using folders to simplify and strategize your visuals.
04:00 - Capturing Great Photos and Videos
Practical tips for creating calming, engaging visuals.
05:50 - Choosing Your Platforms
Where to start: Instagram, Facebook, and beyond.
07:00 - The Power of YouTube Shorts
Why YouTube is essential for local visibility.
08:29 - Leveraging Pinterest for SEO
How Pinterest can save you when Google reshuffles.
09:30 - Google Business Basics
The importance of optimizing your Google Business profile.
09:50 - Bing and ChatGPT Integration
Why Bing matters for local search visibility.
10:19 - Repurposing Content
Making your photos and videos work harder for you.
10:48 - Planning for Seasonal Success
Preparing during slower seasons to stay ahead during busy times.
11:23 - Closing Thoughts
Final tips and encouragement to take action.
---
🚨 Feeling stuck when it comes to finding new clients? 🚨
Discover a fresh approach in my video, "How to Get Unstuck: Mindset Shift." I'll show you how to transform your FREE content into a steady stream of high-paying clients using a game-changing framework for lead generation.
👉 Watch now and start seeing results: https://youtu.be/6fB5ssqy5Ws?si=fyhnAzEpGOVA_KBM
---------
About Brenda Eckhardt:
Brenda Eckhardt is a seasoned photographer and marketing strategist with over 20 years of experience helping individuals and businesses shine. Known for capturing timeless senior and family portraits, Brenda’s work goes beyond photography—she empowers small business owners and social media managers to confidently grow their online presence. Through personalized consulting, captivating content creation, and strategic guidance, she combines creativity with proven marketing techniques to deliver results. Brenda’s mission is to build meaningful connections, inspire clarity, and help you lead with confidence in your work while finding a healthy balance.
#localbusiness #marketing #contentmarketing #socialmediatrends #socialmediatips #contentcreation
Please give a thumbs-up & subscribe!
===
Free Guide
===
Instagram
Marketing your local business? How do you grow? What really is the key? If we had to put everything through a sifter and shake it all out and say, okay, what is the one thing that I really need to do? That's going to move that needle, that's going to help me to get things going, get more feet in the door or more orders through my Shopify account. What is it? What can I do and what is reasonable within your already constrained time? Because I get it.
Speaker 0:You're probably already feeling like you're doing all the things. Your brain is probably very full at the end of the week, if not the end of the day, or driving in on Monday to wherever you go to your business, or getting your laptop out. You're already feeling that overwhelm. I acknowledge you and I get it, because that is very real and it can be paralyzing. What I believe will be left if you shake it all out, sift it through, is one hour of content capturing per month. You will revolutionize your marketing for free. All it costs you is your time. So what does that really mean? Do you need to be a photographer, a creative person? No, you don't. You don't have to be any kind of creative person. If you're a creative person and you're watching this video and thinking about how can I grow my business, I would bet that your camera roll already looks like you have all kinds of hodgepodge videos and pictures from your business, your people, your product and your behind the scenes. If you're not a creative person and you're more scientific or more like spreadsheet kind of a thinker, you probably don't have a ton on your phone related to your business. Both are okay.
Speaker 0:If you're that creative person, you just need to spend time, and probably that hour of the first month, organizing things into Google Photos based on topic. Maybe allow yourself to have 10 pictures and videos per folder. Let's say that you are in a interior design business. You would do only living rooms in one folder or one home with a lot of different angles and photos and videos of that living room. If you're in a sell candles, let's go back to the candle topic. Have a video of candles that are per season or your new line, or only a certain size, only a scent family in one, maybe to give as gifts ideal for mom, perfect for a friend. Just make subfolders, even if you don't put anything in it yet, but that relate to what that post could look like who that will appeal to, and that's how you start to idea generate.
Speaker 0:What content should I capture in that hour per month? If you're more of a scientific person, that's also a really great place to start, because you need to have some context if you think more in a spreadsheet way in your brain, to know what to photograph and what to take video of. So the example I'm using is this home that I photographed and took video of for a local remodeler and I spent less than an hour in the home and all I did was do walkthrough videos and as I was walking through I remember thinking that when I've worked side by side with business owners, there's a lot of like nervous energy and a lot of quick panning and kind of jerking the phone a little bit because you're excited and you're kind of having fun being the photographer, videographer. Think of it as your customer needs a calming feed in this very noisy world. Slow it down, just take slow pans of the room. If you're taking video of your product, just do kind of a 90 degree pan around the product and be really slow about it. Go up and down and just get great angles of whatever that product is, and that's a real waiting to happen or a TikTok waiting to happen. So those photos and videos then go into those subfolders and, as far as the platforms go from there, like, where do you take all this? What do you do?
Speaker 0:First, I like to think of Instagram and Facebook first. It's just we're all the most familiar with because they've been around the longest. So Instagram, start with Facebook and Instagram and make sure those are connected so that when you post to Instagram or in Business Manager on Facebook, that it saves you time because the post, one post will go up simultaneously to both platforms. So Instagram and Facebook. Next is, I believe, in order of importance, is YouTube Shorts.
Speaker 0:If you don't have a YouTube account, I don't care what business type or industry you're in, I recommend getting one because it is searchable in local Google searches. If you go to Google right now and you search your business type and location for me it would be, let's just use the example photographers, madison, wisconsin You'll see videos show up in the feed on the main page and then, if you click on videos, a lot of those videos are all populated from YouTube, especially YouTube Shorts, that they're being pushed out right now and you want to hop onto that because those reach a lot of people and they can be really narrowed to your location by using the right keywords. You get a very small amount of words allowed in YouTube Shorts, but if you do it correctly, to your location, with a unique word and something that sparks somebody's interest, it's gold. So YouTube Shorts, pinterest. If you're in a creative business, you can definitely keyword your posts to local searches.
Speaker 0:I had amazing luck with Pinterest when Google has reshuffled in the past. I don't know if you've ever experienced that, but when Google reshuffles it can be earth shattering for a one person, local business Because if you fall off the map or not really off the map, but if you fall off the first five or six listings you're probably not going to be busy. So thank goodness for me that I've always used Pinterest and used it for SEO, so you can connect your Pinterest to Instagram now and have those posts go up also simultaneously, whether it's reels or your static posts, your carousels. If you look on my Pinterest Brenda Eckhart photography and creative media you will see my posts go up. Now I haven't optimized a lot of those, but in the dark winter, when it's very quiet for me, then I go back and start keywording specifically in a way that Pinterest likes and you can research that to adjust your keywording for those particular pins Pinterest can be really powerful. Don't sleep on Pinterest.
Speaker 0:Next would be in my mind, tiktok. If you do a lot of behind the scenes and like this face to camera short although they are pushing out more 10 minute videos but if you use TikTok, that's a whole separate content creation type. I don't believe that Reels or Facebook kind of videos short form YouTube shorts perform well on TikTok. I've just never seen it. But next up would be Google Business for SEO purposes and for people to find you locally. So take 10 or 20 of the photos that you took and videos and upload them just to your Google business profile. You don't have to do anything special, you don't even have to caption them if you don't want to. They go in your account and if your account is already optimized to your location, you're just kind of feeding the Google machine. If you're a main street business, google business should jump to number one above Instagram and Facebook, and Instagram and Facebook should be number two, by the way, because you need that foot traffic.
Speaker 0:So then, on Google Business, secondarily to just adding your photos, do a post once a month. You can do posts on Google Business and keyword it to the season, the time of year, or you can even keyword it to cities that maybe are nearby that you want to tap into or a style that you want to jump on that trend and get people to come to you. Let's say it would be decks. If you're a deck builder, springtime you're going to want to. Well, wintertime you're going to want to say, hey, get on my schedule for a deck this spring, or get a quote, whatever wording you would use. But then put the locations that you want to target in that caption for that post on Google business and do that once a month.
Speaker 0:Bing should be connected to your Google business. It's easy to do. If you go into your Google account and your Bing account, you make sure you're signed into both. You can connect them so that whenever you do anything in Google business, it automatically, the more that it is now searching the web for answers to give you sourcing, like if you ask who's the best detailer for cars in my area, it will search Bing, not Google. It's a Bing platform, so you'll want to make sure that you're not sleeping on Bing and not updating that, and if you don't have a Bing account and you're a local business, that's really critical that you do that, because more people are now using ChatGPT as a search engine than even Google.
Speaker 0:So things to think about. I hope you're taking notes if this is a lot of new information to you, and if you did, I don't want this to overwhelm you. Take notes and then just highlight what you think you should be doing first and don't let yourself get overwhelmed because I'm throwing a lot of information at you. So that about does it. As we end this video, you'll see all the different ways that I have multi-purposed photos and videos from that home that I spent less than an hour in and they can be reposted every few months in different ways for different topics. Again, thinking back to the Google folder concept, that is a great way for you to find different ways to repurpose the same photos and videos, and people forget, they don't always see your posts, so don't be afraid to do that.
Speaker 0:Just keep rotating through, and I know that business can be very seasonal depending on what you're in, and it's important in the busier months to really pad that photo, that camera roll, so you have a lot to work with in the winter, when you actually have time to go through, and or summer, depending on what season your business is seasonal in to be able to organize and really get things scheduled out so that when your busy season comes up again, you don't really have to think about it as much. It's kind of on autopilot, or at least it's very easy to access to quickly get posts ready and out. I hope that this helped you. I'd love to hear your feedback. Please subscribe and like this YouTube channel. I would love it if you followed me and I would love it if you gave a review and if you're listening to this on the podcast. All right, well, have a great day and I'll talk to you next time.
