Tag: Small Business Marketing

How to Set a Small Business Marketing Budget in Texoma
Ask ten business owners in Sherman or Denison what their small business marketing budget is and you’ll hear two answers more than any others: “Nothing, it’s all word of mouth,” and “Honestly, no idea.” Both cost money. Spend nothing and you disappear the first month referrals slow down. Spend without tracking and you’re probably paying for things that don’t work while starving the ones that do.

So here are some actual numbers, and then the part that matters more: the order the dollars should go out the door. For a local business, sequence beats size.

A starting number for your small business marketing budget

The rule of thumb you’ll see everywhere is 5 to 10 percent of gross revenue. It’s a rough guide, and the right number depends on your margins, your industry and how hard you’re trying to grow. For local service businesses we’d break it down like this:
- Around 5 to 6 percent if you’re established and mostly protecting what you have. On $500,000 a year that’s $25,000 to $30,000, or roughly $2,100 to $2,500 a month, just to stay visible.
- Closer to 8 to 12 percent if you want to grow: a second crew, a new service line, a new town. You’re buying attention you don’t have yet.
- Higher still in year one, measured against the revenue you’re aiming for, because nobody knows you exist. Underspending early is one of the easiest ways for a good business to lose ground to a louder, worse one.
If those percentages made you wince, look at it from the other side. The real question is what a customer costs you to win and what that customer is worth. If $100 in marketing reliably brings in a $1,500 job, your budget isn’t the limit. Your calendar is.

Where the money should go first

Dollar one does not go to ads. There’s a priority order for a local business, and skipping steps is how budgets get burned.

1. Your website and Google presence

Almost every marketing dollar you spend ends with someone looking you up. Usually that happens on a phone, and more often now it runs through Google’s AI answers or an assistant like ChatGPT, which pull from your website and your Google Business Profile. If they land on a slow site that’s awkward on a phone, or a Business Profile with three photos from 2021, you paid to lose that customer. Fix the destination before you pay for traffic.

This used to mean a big upfront check for a new site. It doesn’t have to. Our Website Lease is $500 a month with nothing upfront, which lets a business get a modern site live without draining cash it needs for trucks and payroll. If you’d rather buy outright, we broke down the options in how much a small business website costs in Texas.

2. Reviews, email and social

These cost little and pay off more every month you keep at them. A steady stream of Google reviews, a customer email list you actually send to, and a social feed that proves you’re still open raise the return on everything else you do. Picture a Denison homeowner who sees your ad, looks you up, and finds 80 detailed reviews and posts from last week. Now picture them finding four reviews and a Facebook page that went quiet in March. Same ad, very different phone call. Or no call at all.

3. Paid ads, once the foundation converts

Now ads make sense. Google Local Services Ads and search ads catch people with a problem right now (“emergency plumber Sherman TX”). Facebook and Instagram ads build awareness and push offers. Many Texoma service businesses can get real traction on somewhere around $500 to $1,500 a month in ad spend, partly because there are fewer advertisers competing here than in Dallas or Plano. Start small, watch what each dollar produces, and scale what works.

Track it before you raise it

Before you increase any line in the budget, answer one question: when the phone rings, do you know why? Ask every new customer how they found you and write it down. Put a tracking number on your ads. Tag your links. After 90 days you’ll have something most of your competitors don’t, which is a ranked list of what actually brings in customers.

Then budgeting gets simple. Cut the bottom, feed the top. It’s common for a business that does this to find a line item that’s been producing nothing for years, like the directory listing someone renewed on autopilot or the radio spot nobody remembers hearing. We walk through the setup in connecting marketing and sales data, and our analytics reporting shows who visited, how they found you and who called.

A sample budget for a $400,000 service business

Say you run a $400,000-a-year HVAC or plumbing company and settle on 7 percent. That’s $28,000 a year, about $2,300 a month. Once the website and Business Profile are in good shape, a sensible split looks something like this:
- About a third to paid ads
- About a third to ongoing SEO and content, so you keep showing up for “[your service] Sherman TX” and in AI answers
- The rest to the stuff that holds it together: asking for reviews, email, social posts, and tracking
The mix will shift with your trade and the season. A pool company front-loads spring. A heating company leans into October. But if your current spend looks nothing like this, say 90 percent of it in one radio contract or one ad platform, that concentration deserves a hard look. One channel going soft shouldn’t be able to empty your schedule.

When to revisit the number

Once a year at minimum, and any time something big changes: a new location, a price increase, a key employee leaving, a new competitor opening down the road. Growth around Sherman and Denison has brought plenty of new competitors into the area along with the new customers, and a budget that worked in 2023 may just be keeping you in place now.

And if you’re booked out three weeks with a waiting list, it’s fine to pull ads back for a while. Just don’t touch the foundation. The reviews, the website and the Business Profile are what keep the phone ringing when the busy season ends.
July 28, 2026
Email Marketing for Local Business: A Beginner’s Guide
Email marketing for a local business sounds like something for online stores and national brands. It isn’t. If you’ve done work for a few hundred people around Sherman or Denison, you already have a list of people who trust you, and most businesses never write to them again.

Then the water heater dies two years later. The customer can’t remember who came out last time, so they call whoever shows up first on Google.

Why email marketing works for a local business

You own the list. Facebook can change what your followers see overnight, and Google can reshuffle the map results any week it wants. An email address someone gave you with permission stays yours, and you decide when they hear from you.

It also pays. In Litmus’s 2025 State of Email survey, 30% of companies said they get $36 to $50 back for every dollar they spend on email, and another 35% reported $10 to $36. Those are mostly bigger marketing teams, so don’t build your budget on it. But for a local company whose main cost is an hour of writing a month, the return doesn’t need to be anywhere near that good to be worth doing.

Most local businesses skip email for three plain reasons. They never collected addresses, they don’t know what to send, and they’re afraid of bugging people. All three are fixable.

Start with the list you already have

Before you build anything, look at what’s already sitting around. Invoices, your booking or scheduling software, old quote requests, the sign-in sheet at the front desk. Past customers who gave you an email for a quote or a receipt are your best list, as long as they’d expect to hear from you.

Don’t email people who never did business with you and never asked, and don’t buy a list. Those messages land in spam and drag down everything else you send.

From here on, ask every customer. “Want us to email you when it’s time for your next service?” works a lot better than “Join our newsletter.”

Give new people a reason to sign up

For people who haven’t hired you yet, you need something they want in exchange for an email address. It should answer a question they’re already asking:
- A seasonal checklist. An HVAC company’s pre-summer checklist, or a roofer’s guide to what to look for after a hailstorm.
- A free estimate, inspection or assessment.
- Service reminders. For any business with repeat work, this is the easiest yes you’ll get.
- A first-visit offer, paired with one of the above. A discount on its own mostly attracts bargain hunters.
Put the signup where people already are: your service pages, your Google Business Profile, your invoices and receipts, the counter at your shop. A short form on the pages that get traffic beats one form buried on the contact page. If your site can’t do that without a fight, it’s worth fixing the website first.

What to send

Most local businesses need three kinds of email, and one of them runs on its own.

A welcome series

When someone signs up, send a short automated series over the first couple of weeks. The first email delivers whatever you promised. The next one or two share something useful, show a real job and tell them who’s behind the business. The last one asks for the work. You set it up once and it runs for every new subscriber.

A regular newsletter

Once a month is plenty for most service businesses. Keep it short: one useful tip, one thing happening at the business, one clear way to book. A pest control company might write about what’s crawling around North Texas yards this month. A dental office might remind patients to use their insurance benefits before the year runs out. Nobody minds getting that kind of email.

Seasonal offers

A few times a year, send a clear offer with a real deadline. AC tune-ups before summer, gutter cleaning in the fall, gift cards before the holidays. Our summer marketing checklist has a simple four-email sequence you can copy. Don’t fake urgency, though. If every email says “last chance,” people stop believing any of them.

How often should you send? Pick a schedule you’ll actually keep. One email a month for a year beats four in January and nothing after. Some people will unsubscribe. That’s normal, and the ones who leave weren’t going to call anyway.

Subject lines that get opened

The subject line decides whether anyone reads the rest. For local businesses, plain and specific usually wins. “Your AC tune-up is due” beats “Spring newsletter” every time. Questions work when they’re ones a customer would really ask, like “Is that noise in your attic squirrels?”

Keep it short, since phones cut off long subject lines. And test once in a while. Most email tools let you send two versions of a subject line to small slices of your list and then send the winner to everyone else.

The rules you have to follow

Commercial email in the US falls under the CAN-SPAM Act, and the FTC’s compliance guide is short and readable. The basics: no misleading subject lines or sender names, include a valid physical mailing address, give people a clear way to opt out, and honor opt-outs within 10 business days.

Gmail and Yahoo also got stricter with senders in 2024, and mail that isn’t authenticated is much more likely to land in spam. Your email platform will walk you through connecting your domain with settings called SPF, DKIM and DMARC. It’s a one-time chore. Do it before your first send.

Tools for email marketing as a local business

You don’t need expensive software. Mailchimp, Constant Contact, MailerLite and Kit (formerly ConvertKit) all have free or low-cost starter plans. The limits on those plans change often, so check current pricing before you commit. Whatever you pick should have signup forms you can put on your website, automation for the welcome series, and simple reports on who opened and clicked.

If you’d rather not be the one writing and sending, we run email marketing for local businesses. Either way, the first email is the hard one. Send it to people who already hired you once, keep it short, sign it with your name, and see who writes back.
May 19, 2026
Short-Form Video for Local Business: What to Film and Why
Short-form video for a local business sounds like a job for a 22-year-old with a ring light. It isn’t. The clips that work for plumbers, roofers and salons around Sherman and Denison are mostly shot on a phone, in a truck or on a job site, by the people doing the work.

Short-form means vertical video, usually under a minute, posted as Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, TikToks or YouTube Shorts. YouTube now allows Shorts up to three minutes, but length isn’t really the point. A 30-second clip of your crew fixing a real problem earns more trust than a paragraph about how you “take pride in quality work.”

And this isn’t a teenager thing. YouTube is the most widely used platform among U.S. adults, at 84% in Pew Research Center’s 2025 survey, with Facebook next at 71%. That’s your customer base.

Why short-form video works for a local business

Movement stops the thumb. That part is simple. The bigger reason is that video lets people size you up before they call. They hear how you talk. They see whether your truck is clean and whether you explain things without talking down to them. For a business that has to be let into someone’s house, that’s most of the sale.

Polish helps less than people expect. A slick, over-produced spot can look like an ad for a national chain, and people are trained to scroll past ads. A slightly shaky clip of a real tech in a real Denison attic reads as honest.

Video also sticks around. Google often shows short videos in results for how-to searches, and a useful Short can keep getting found long after the week you posted it.

Videos that work for service businesses

Before and after

The workhorse for contractors, detailers, landscapers, cleaners and stylists. Film the mess, a few seconds of the work, then the finish. Fifteen to 45 seconds is plenty. Put the town in the caption.

The quick answer

Take the question you got three times this week and answer it on camera. “How do I know my water heater is going out?” “Why is my AC freezing up?” “When should I aerate my lawn?” One question per video. These are the clips that keep getting found months later, because people type those exact questions into search.

Behind the scenes

Loading the trailer before sunrise. The shop radio. The dog who rides along. It feels too ordinary to post, and that’s why it works. People want to know who’s about to show up at their door.

Reviews, in person

A screenshot of a five-star review is fine. A customer standing in their new kitchen saying why they’d hire you again is a lot better. Ask at the end of a job that went well; it takes 20 seconds. If they’d rather stay off camera, read the review yourself and say what the job was.

How to shoot it on your phone

“Don’t we need real equipment?” comes up in almost every conversation we have about video. For weekly posts, no. A phone is enough if you get a few basics right:
- Hold the phone upright. Short-form is vertical (9:16), and a sideways clip gets shrunk into a thin strip with black bars above and below.
- Face the light. A window or an open garage door in front of you beats overhead fluorescents every time.
- Get close to whoever’s talking, or clip an inexpensive wireless mic to your shirt. Bad audio loses people faster than shaky footage.
- Trim the first two seconds of “is it recording?”
- Turn on captions. Plenty of people watch with the sound off, and most apps will generate captions for you.
Fifteen minutes of shooting and ten minutes of trimming in the app gets you a post. That’s the whole workflow.

Save professional production for the pieces that have to carry weight for years: the homepage video, the customer story you’ll run as an ad, the walkthrough of your signature service. That’s where professional videography earns its cost. For the weekly stuff, your phone is fine, and nobody will think less of you for it.

Film once, post in four places

One vertical clip can go to Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok with almost no extra work. Upload the original file to each app. A Reel with another app’s watermark stamped on it looks recycled.

Put the good ones on your Google Business Profile too. It accepts video, and a clip of real work sitting next to your reviews gives people one more reason to call you instead of the next listing.

Then watch for a couple of months. Whichever platform actually brings calls or messages gets your best effort. The rest get the same clip and nothing more.

A posting schedule you can keep

One video a week, same day every week, beats a burst of ten followed by two months of silence. Tonight, write down ten ideas specific to your business. Most owners get there in about five minutes once they start listing the questions customers ask. That’s ten weeks of posts.

Our one-hour-a-week social media system shows how video fits in next to everything else you post, and our social media management team can plan and post it if you’d rather not. If a week slips, post the next week. Nobody is keeping score but you.
May 12, 2026
Google Business Profile Optimization in 2026: What Changed
Google Business Profile optimization used to be a one-afternoon job. Fill in the fields, upload a logo, move on. The profile does more work in 2026, and Google reads it differently. The old Q&A section is gone, and Google has started answering questions about businesses with AI that draws on your profile and your reviews. A thin profile gets you thin answers.

For a business in Sherman, Denison or anywhere else in Texoma, the profile is often the first thing a customer sees, before they ever reach your website. Here’s what to get right this year.

Fill in everything, then check it every quarter

Most owners stop at name, address and phone. Finish the rest:
- Your real business name, exactly as it’s on your truck and your sign. Stuffing it with “Best Plumber Sherman TX” breaks Google’s guidelines and can get the profile suspended.
- Service areas by city. List the towns you actually drive to, not “North Texas.” Showing up in a second town takes more than a checkbox, though, which is why you might rank in Sherman but not Denison.
- Hours, plus special hours for holidays and weather closures.
- A phone number a person answers, matching the one on your website.
- A website link to the right page. If you have a page for each service or city, use it.
- The description. You get 750 characters. Say what you do, where and for whom, in plain words.
- Services and attributes. Add each service with a short description, and check every attribute that’s true.
Then put a reminder on your calendar to look at it every three months. Hours drift. Numbers change. The public can suggest edits to your listing, and now and then a wrong one sticks.

Choose categories like a customer would

Your primary category matters more than anything else you pick. Use the plainest term Google offers for what you are: “Plumber,” “Roofing contractor,” “Hair salon.” Picking something broad to seem bigger usually backfires.

Secondary categories are for your other real lines of work. A lawn care company that also does landscaping and irrigation should add both. If you’d turn the job down, leave the category off.

One quick check: search your main service in Google Maps and open the top three results. The primary category shows under each business name, and you might spot a better fit than the one you chose.

Photos and video on a schedule

Photos are some of the most-viewed parts of a profile, and a stale set makes people wonder if you’re still open. Upload real work every week or two. The job, the crew, the truck, and the building from the street so people recognize it when they pull in.

Short video works here too. A 20-second clip of a finished job next to your reviews says more than a logo. Phone footage is fine. Blurry isn’t, so shoot three and keep the best one.

Reviews carry more weight every year

BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses and 74% look for reviews from the last three months. Recency counts. Fifty reviews from 2021 don’t tell anyone how you’re doing now.

Ask every happy customer, in person or by text, using the direct review link from your profile. Don’t pay for reviews or trade discounts for them. Google’s policies prohibit it, and the reviews can be removed.

Then answer every one. The same survey found 89% of consumers expect owners to respond, and half said they’re unlikely to use a business that replies with generic templates. Use the customer’s name and mention the job. For a bad review, stay calm, keep it short and offer to talk by phone.

It adds up faster than owners expect. Cole’s Pest Control in Bossier City, a client of ours, went from 32 to 45 Google reviews between late May and July 2026, every one of them five stars. We wrote more about building that habit in why online reviews are the new word of mouth.

Google Business Profile optimization for AI answers

This is the part that changed. Google began phasing out the public Q&A section on Business Profiles in 2025 and is moving toward AI answers inside Maps, built from your profile details, posts, photos and what reviewers wrote.

So the questions you used to answer in Q&A need a new home. Put them in your service descriptions, your business description, your posts and an FAQ page on your website. If someone asks Maps whether you work Saturdays or come out to Whitesboro, the answer has to exist somewhere Google can read it.

Reviews feed this too. “They fixed our tankless water heater in Denison the same afternoon” tells the AI, and the next customer, what you did, where and how fast. You can’t write reviews for people. You can ask them to mention what the job was.

The same groundwork helps ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews describe you correctly: the same name, address and phone everywhere, a clear list of services and towns, and a website that says the same thing your profile does. Our AI search optimization work starts there.

Posts are useful, not magic

Don’t expect profile posts to move your rankings much by themselves. They do give people something current to look at, and they give Google more words about what you do. A seasonal offer, a new service, a photo of a job finished this week. Once a week is plenty. Once a month beats nothing.

Read your performance numbers monthly

The Performance section in your profile dashboard shows calls, website clicks, direction requests and the searches people used to find you. Look at it once a month, like a diagnosis.

Lots of views and few calls usually means your photos, rating or reviews aren’t convincing people. Lots of website clicks and few calls points at the website. And if nearly every search term is your business name, you’re only being found by people who already know you.

That last one is common, and fixable. Our Google Business Profile management covers the weekly work: photos, posts, review replies and the monthly numbers.
May 5, 2026