September 12, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 4 min read · Business & Marketing
A meaningful amount of standard marketing advice circulating online is written with a large, anonymous, scalable audience in mind, and applies awkwardly, or sometimes not at all, to a small business operating in a town the size of Young. Here's what I deliberately ignore, and the actual reasoning behind ignoring each piece specifically.
"Niche Down to a Specific, Narrow Audience"
Standard advice for scalable, online-first businesses, where a smaller, sharply defined niche audience is genuinely easier and more profitable to serve well at scale. In a small town, narrowing too aggressively can shrink an already genuinely limited local customer pool below what's actually sustainable for a small, local operation to survive on alone. I stay deliberately broader than this advice would generally suggest, because the actual local market size simply doesn't support extreme specialisation the way a global online audience comfortably can.
"Post on Social Media Constantly, Every Single Day"
Genuinely good advice for building an audience from literal zero, with no existing local presence or reputation to draw on. Less relevant once you're already a known, established local entity with real existing community presence built up over years — at that point, constant posting risks looking more desperate or noisy than it does genuinely helpful or informative to the actual people already following along.
"Always Be Testing and Optimising Everything"
Makes complete sense at genuine scale, where meaningfully large traffic numbers let you actually, statistically distinguish a real, significant effect from simple random noise in the data. At a small, local-business scale, a lot of "testing" is really just reacting to statistically meaningless noise dressed up convincingly as a real, actionable insight. I test the bigger, more consequential things occasionally. I don't obsess over genuinely small, granular details that small-scale data realistically can't support drawing any confident conclusion from anyway.
"Your Brand Needs a Consistent, Polished Aesthetic Everywhere"
Important for businesses competing primarily on visual differentiation in a genuinely crowded, anonymous online marketplace. Less critical when most of my actual reputation comes from direct personal interaction and genuine word of mouth rather than from a scrolling Instagram feed someone's casually browsing. I keep things reasonably professional and consistent. I don't lose meaningful sleep over perfecting visual brand consistency the way that advice generally assumes I should.
"Always Be Building an Email List"
Genuinely valuable for businesses without any other reliable, direct way to reach their existing audience repeatedly. I've already got radio, the shop counter, and a genuinely small, well-connected community where word travels fast through completely different, non-digital channels. An email list isn't actively harmful by any means — it's just lower priority for me than the standard advice would generally suggest, given the other channels I already have working well.
Why I'm Comfortable Deliberately Ignoring Parts of "Best Practice"
Marketing advice, almost all of it, was written with assumptions about scale, market size, and existing reputation baked in, usually invisibly, often without the advice explicitly stating those underlying assumptions out loud. When those specific assumptions don't actually match my real situation, following the advice anyway just wastes time and effort on a tactic optimised for a genuinely different kind of business than mine.
What I'd Tell Another Small-Town Business Owner
Read marketing advice with a healthy, genuine question running constantly in the back of your mind: what assumptions about scale and audience is this advice quietly baking in, and do those assumptions actually match my real, specific situation? A lot of genuinely good advice, for a genuinely different kind of business than yours, is simply the wrong specific advice for you, no matter how confidently and universally it's presented online.