Avoid these 6 Mistakes in Supporting Local - Episode 13

If you’re a Chamber, Main Street, tourism organization, municipality, or another organization supporting local businesses, you’re more than a promoter. You’re a community anchor.

That means when a business asks you to share an event, flyer, or promotion, the goal shouldn’t be to simply check the box. If you’re going to do the work anyway, make sure the business, your organization, and the entire community get as much value from that effort as possible.

1. Treating Promotion Like a One-Off Favor

A local business sends you a flyer and asks, “Can you share this?”

Of course you can. But if all you do is reshare it on Facebook or drop the flyer into your next email newsletter, the value is pretty limited.

• Look beyond the immediate request
• Turn one promotion into multiple distribution opportunities
• Help the business build something that continues working after the initial share

You’re already putting time into helping. Get more mileage out of the effort.

2. Confusing Promotion With Distribution

Posting something does not necessarily mean people will see it.

Distribution means getting information in front of more people, in more places, and giving them multiple ways to discover it.

That can include:

• Publish it on your website
• Share it to social media
• Include it in your email newsletter
• Cross-promote it through community partners
• Make it discoverable through Google and AI

Sometimes there’s a little setup required.

For example, a business using Locable can connect its Google Business Profile and Facebook account and add Locable tools to its website. That might take 10 or 15 minutes one time, but now future content can go much further without creating more work every time.

3. Ignoring SEO and AI Discovery

If the information never makes it onto a website, you’re missing an important part of the opportunity.

A social post can help today. Website content can continue creating value later.

When events, business information, and other useful content live on the public internet, they can contribute to:

• Google visibility
• Search engine optimization
• AI discovery
• Long-term website value
• Greater community awareness

If you’re already creating or managing the information, make sure it has an opportunity to keep working for you.

4. Recreating the Wheel

Businesses should not have to manage the same information in five different places.

Neither should you.

You want a single source of truth.

If a business changes its hours, updates an event, or reschedules something because of weather, that change should flow wherever possible.

Otherwise, you end up with one version on the business website, another on Facebook, another on your community calendar, and an old version sitting in an email or social post.

• Connect information instead of recreating it
• Reduce unnecessary copying and pasting
• Keep updates tied to the original source
• Avoid distributing outdated information

The more disconnected copies you create, the more opportunities there are for something to become wrong.

5. Failing to Model Good Marketing

Community anchors have another role that isn’t always obvious.

You need to model the behavior you want businesses in your community to adopt.

It’s hard to tell a local business, “You need to market yourself better,” while demonstrating marketing practices you wouldn’t recommend they use themselves.

Instead:

• Show businesses what good distribution looks like
• Demonstrate how one piece of content can work across multiple channels
• Use the same best practices you encourage businesses to adopt
• Make effective marketing feel achievable

When businesses see you doing it correctly, they can see what’s possible.

You’re not just telling them what they should do. You’re showing them.

6. Saying “No Problem”

This one might seem small, but words matter.

When a business asks you to do something for them, it takes time. It requires attention. It interrupts something else you could be doing.

You may be genuinely happy to help, but that doesn’t mean there was no value in the help you provided.

So retire “no problem.”

• Say “You’re welcome”
• Say “My pleasure”
• Explain how you can help
• Be clear about what you need from them
• Establish reasonable boundaries around the support you provide

When you constantly tell people their requests are “no problem,” you can unintentionally communicate that your time and effort have no value.

Be helpful, but make the value of that help visible.

Turn One Request Into More Value

The next time a business asks you to promote something, don’t just think about the flyer they sent you.

Think about the system.

Can the event live on their website? Can it appear on your calendar? Can it connect to their directory listing? Can it reach Google or Facebook? Can you include it in email? Can community partners help distribute it?

The business asked you to do one thing. That doesn’t mean the impact needs to stop there.

Pro tip

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