Marketing for a business that has nobody doing marketing

Ask any owner why the shop has not posted in three weeks and the answer is almost never that they forgot. It is that posting means opening a blank app, deciding what to say, finding a picture, laying out the text, and then doing it again tomorrow. Each step is small. Together they are an evening.

So it gets skipped, and the page goes quiet, and the quiet is what customers read as a business that is not doing much.

The fix is not a better design tool. It is not having to start from nothing.

A poster for this week. The offer, the festival, the new arrival, the timings change. Static, quick, and the one thing most businesses post most often.

A short video that explains what you do, for people who found you and are deciding. This is the one that answers the question your customers keep asking on the phone.

An ad for a specific product or service, built around a photo you already have on your phone.

Vertical cuts for status and stories, because a large part of your customers will see you there before they ever see a website.

Plenty of your customers do not read the language on your signage first. In the US that is most often Spanish; on a British high street it can be half a dozen languages. Most tools quietly assume one.

Videos here are written and narrated in 13 languages, with captions in the right script rather than a transliteration. An existing video can be dubbed into 27.

That matters more for a local business than for almost anyone else, because your audience is a neighbourhood rather than an algorithm.

Almost every business can post once. The difference between a page that works and a page that does not is whether anything goes out in week six.

That is a scheduling problem rather than a creative one, and it is the part software should carry.

Set the days you want to publish and the topics queue themselves, with each one waiting for your yes before it goes anywhere.