Two hours for one Reel and 140 views: what local businesses get wrong

Three years in, the food is good, and you're stuck at the same sixty or seventy regulars. Everyone from your nephew to the bloke who sold you the POS system has told you that you need to be on Instagram.

So you tried. Two hours on one Reel, a hundred and forty views. Eight posts across six weeks and then it stopped, and the page has been sitting there dead ever since, quietly making you feel like you failed at something.

You didn't. You were told to do a thing and never told what the thing was.

The pattern is the same everywhere

I see this in hospitality, in supplements, in trades. Anywhere the social account gets handed to whoever on the team is youngest.

They're nineteen, they're on Instagram constantly, and they build the page they'd want to follow. So you end up with an entertainment account attached to a business that needs customers. And when the same style of content gets pushed out across every industry regardless of what the business actually does, it dilutes the whole point of the business.

They're trying to be funny. They're not trying to be a business. Those are different jobs and only one of them pays your rent.

The sandwich

I worked with a cafe that had a pulled pork slaw sandwich. Genuinely excellent, the kind of thing people came back for, and they were sold out of it by lunchtime most days. It was the thing they were known for.

They had never posted it. Not once. What was on the page instead was staff doing short trend videos.

People come to you for your food. Not to watch someone dance.

So the fix started there. What are you actually good at, and what's the one item people already come in for. Then talk about that constantly. Then talk about where you are, and how to find you, over and over, because a person two streets away doesn't know you exist and the algorithm can't tell them if you never say it.

Then calls to action, which sounds obvious and almost nobody does. Tell people to come in. Tell them what to order.

We built out the keyword work and the location tagging, and honestly a lot of it was just cleaning up and getting the staff thinking like a business rather than like the internet.

The franchise guy who isn't allowed a website

Here's an extreme version. I work with an operator whose franchise contract forbids him from having his own website.

Think about what that removes. No SEO, no GEO, no AEO, nothing. There is no surface he owns to optimise. He is entirely at the mercy of a platform he doesn't control, which is a position nobody should be in voluntarily.

And when I looked at what he had, it was seventy-four videos over a full year. Out of those seventy-four, not one had a location tag on it. Not one had a call to action.

A local business, on the one channel available to it, posting for a year without ever telling anyone where it was or what to do next.

That's not a content problem in the way people mean it. Everything he needed was already there.

Own the suburb before you chase the country

Everyone wants to jump straight to viral. It's the wrong ambition at this stage and it costs people years.

The goal is not the customer five suburbs away. The goal is the suburb you're in. Once the place becomes a bit of a hotspot locally, then people start travelling to try the thing, and that's when the wider reach shows up on its own.

Build first, think local, act global. In that order.

What education content did to a dying store

I bought a failing supplement store in Randwick off a brand that had given up on it. Terrible revenue, around fifteen thousand a month, poor reputation, the lot.

The basics came first: open seven days, nine till six thirty, actually be there. That alone moved it.

But what took it to eighty-five thousand a month was content, and specifically education content made by the managers. Breaking down ingredients. Talking about new studies and what they actually meant for someone training. Talking about what people were saying and what the reviews said.

It took two years. About a year to get out of the woods and another year before we saw the Vegas lights, and we did it through COVID.

Here's what it produced, and it's the bit worth stealing. People walked in already sold. Our brand wasn't the sign above the door, it was *these guys know their stuff*. So the hesitation about being upsold was gone before they crossed the threshold. They'd ask what they should be taking and buy the stack, because trust had been built weeks earlier, on the phone in their hand.

We were redlining around ninety a month and the only ceiling was stock.

Where to start

If your page has gone quiet and you can't work out why, the fastest useful thing is someone reading it the way a local customer does. Three hundred dollars, your site and socials scored and prioritised, credited to your first month if you continue.

And if you're wondering why you stopped posting in the first place, that's a different problem and it's not your discipline.