🎙️We are so excited to have Jared Williams, founder of Get The Coast on the podcast this week! 

👨‍💻Jared is blazing a new trail in news media and digital marketing. Get The Coast has more than 19,000 followers on Facebook alone and has broken most of the big stories in #Okaloosa County in the last couple of years, from the '♻️recycling incident♻️,' where commissioners voted to suspend traditional recycling because of cost - and then changed their decision after his story went viral to the 🏫half-cent sales tax for school initiative. 

🌊Get the Coast is a passion project for Jared - he started the business three years ago with the goal to revolutionize the news industry in our area. 

🗣️He was tired of the mug shots and the health code violation machines running the news media in the area and decided that the people of the emerald coast deserved something more. 

His goal was to promote pride in the community by highlighting the good in the community - not just the bad stuff that happens… like health code violations and mugshots. 

No one can get local news out faster to people in Fort Walton Beach, #Destin and #Niceville faster than Get the Coast can. This is because of their streamlined creation-to-consumer process. Because of their less cumbersome process, they can quickly get news out onto the 💻website, into their 🗞️newsletters and onto #️⃣social media - and almost always beat traditional news sources to the punch. 

•Probably the biggest frustration you will experience as a small business owner will center around your marketing success - or failure (or the perception that it hasn’t succeeded). 

A lot of that has to do with the #magicmystery of marketing. How do you know it’s even working? Can you even trace the sale of one of your products to a certain advertisement or marketing strategy?

The short answer is, no (unless you have a couple of hundred thousand dollars to spend on a marketing analytics team, big focus groups, and other tools that can put a small business in the red.)

But we know marketing is still important, and that if no one knows about your business, they can’t or won’t buy from you. 

So, how do you split the difference? How do you make marketing work for you as a small business owner, without breaking the bank?

By marketing continually - after all, you don’t know where the customer is in the buying process and a consistent message - from newsletters, to social media, to display ads keep you top of mind, so that when the customer is ready to buy, they will buy from you! 

•How should a small business owner look at a marketing budget? Well, it depends! 

Some hard and fast rules, though:

1. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Don’t put everything into the digital media basket, the postcard basket, the radio ads basket. A couple (though not too many) baskets is usually the right move for your business. 
2. Make sure that whatever choices you make, they align with reaching your key demographic. Start with the people who will be your most loyal followers and get them on board first. 

•Our customers may be at work, not working, when they see our next piece of marketing content. That means they may not be able to listen to the video you just produced! Does a photo or graphic work better then? 

Not necessarily! 

That’s when the data comes in. 

Learn what works for your target demographic.