By cdelprincipe@hubspot.com (Curt del Principe)

In addition to running a marketing agency with customers around the globe and a seven-figure local business, today’s master is also a kickboxing champion and MMA fighter — making Jennifer Waters easily the marketer I’d least like to fight.

Though Flo from Progressive seems like she’d be a scrapper, right? It’s not just me?

But rather than spend our time arguing about which mascot would win in the octagon, today she’s here to teach you how to kill it… in small and local business marketing that is. But don’t worry; you SMB and enterprise marketers will get your kicks in, too.

Meet the Master

Jennifer Waters
Co-founder, 7 Figure Dojo; Executive sensei, Seigler’s Karate Center

• Claim to fame: Grew her small business to seven figures (Thus the name of her agency!)
• Fun fact: She’s a sixth-degree Kempo karate black belt and purple belt in Tetsu Shin Ryu Jiu-Jitsu

Lesson 1: Forget omnichannel. Think omnipresence.

“To survive as a local business, you need to think and market like a Fortune 500 company,” Waters says.

If that reflexively made your wallet pucker, you can relax. She means that you need to think bigger than just a few scattered Facebook ads.

“You need to do what I call omnipresence marketing. Digital marketing is just one arm of it,” Waters explains.

So while omnichannel refers to coordinating your marketing across all of your digital channels, omnipresence means you include the real world. In fact, Waters says the foundation of small-business marketing is live events.

“This is where you’re out shakin’ hands and kissin’ babies,” she smiles.

For a karate school, this might be hosting a monthly parents’ night out. For a florist, it could be weekly wine-and-design classes. (As a real-life example, the kung fu school I go to hosts a monthly classic kung fu movie night.) The exact details will differ, but the goals are the same: generating leads and building visibility.

“We want to be physically present in the community. We want to have internal events to bring people to us, to generate publicity. And because your name is constantly out there you become category king or category queen with your local business.”

Meanwhile, as your digital marketing promotes these live events, your live events provide fodder for your digital marketing. And when you coordinate them both? Voilà! Omnipresence.

Lesson 2: Relationships are everything.

Because I’m a massive dork, I can’t resist asking the cheese question: What do martial arts masters know that marketers need to learn?

Waters’ answer is anything but cheese.

“Relationships are everything,” she says. “Your relationship to the individual customer, or in this case to your martial arts student, is what is going to keep them coming back. Or feeling comfortable referring other people to you.”

Every touchpoint you have with your audience — at live events, on social media, on your website, on the phone …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron