After more than a decade of building websites for small businesses both in the Perth Hills and around Australia, I’ve noticed something that doesn’t get talked about much.
Hills businesses are built on relationships
Hills businesses are different. Not just in the obvious ways, the distances, the slower pace, the fact that everyone seems to know everyone, but in the way they build their customer relationships. A Hills business owner sponsors the local footy club, chats to the same faces at the news agent or stockfeed week after week. That trust accumulates over years, and it’s genuinely valuable. It’s not something you can replicate with a clever ad campaign.
Which makes it all the more frustrating when the marketing doesn’t match.
A post that sounds like it was written by a committee in a city office, someone on a different continent, or worse, generated by an algorithm doesn’t build on those relationships. It ignores them. Marketing a Hills business to a Hills community needs to sound like a real person — because the community already knows the real person behind the business.
The Hills also has no shortage of capable people looking for flexible work
Parents whose kids are now at school. People who’ve left corporate careers and aren’t quite sure what comes next. People who are brilliant communicators, organised, good with technology, and would be absolutely excellent at helping a local business with their social media and email marketing, if only someone would show them how.
For most of them, the idea of working for themselves feels like a step into the unknown. Not because they can’t do it, but because nobody ever showed them the practical side of it. What do you charge? How do you find clients? What does a typical week actually look like?
Those questions are enough to stop a lot of capable people before they’ve properly begun.
Two groups sitting right next to each other — and not finding each other
The business that needs a local voice for their marketing, and the local person who could provide it perfectly, and who could even pop in, grab a few photos of the week’s specials, and have a quick chat about what’s coming up next month. Which, let’s be honest, is a much more Hills way of doing things than emailing a brief to someone you’ve never met.
What I’ve tried to do about it
That’s what I’ve built with Uncomplicated Marketing Training. Not just a marketing course, but a practical path for people who want to work for themselves and aren’t sure where to start, and a way to connect them with the local businesses that need exactly what they offer. Businesses like many of my own clients, who would almost certainly benefit from the availability of enthusiastic, organised virtual assistants.
Marketing is where I’ve started, because it’s what I know. But the thinking behind it is bigger than that.
Uncomplicated Marketing Training offers practical, self-paced courses for freelance marketing VAs and small business owners. Courses start at $49.