You've got $200. Maybe $2,000. You want more people to know your business exists. What do you do with it?
Most people go straight to Google Ads or Facebook Ads. It feels like the obvious move. Set a budget, target your area, watch the clicks roll in. Except here's what actually happens for most local businesses: you pay somewhere between $2 and $15 per click, depending on your industry. A plumber in the Hunter might pay $8 a click. A psychologist, $12. Most of those clicks don't convert. Someone lands on your site, looks around for four seconds, and leaves. Your $200 lasts a week, maybe two, and then it's gone. Nobody remembers your ad. Just a line item on your credit card and a vague sense that "digital marketing" didn't work.
I'm not saying Google Ads never work. For some businesses, in some contexts, with a proper strategy and someone managing the campaign well, they can. But for most small, local, community-based businesses? The return is brutal. You're competing with national chains, franchise groups, and businesses with marketing teams and monthly ad budgets bigger than your annual revenue. The algorithm doesn't care that you're the best plumber in Cessnock. It cares who's willing to pay the most per click.
So here's what I tell my clients. That $200, that $2,000, whatever you were going to hand to Google? Invest it in your community instead.
What I mean by community investment
It's strategy. It can overlap with charity, sure, but the core of it is practical. You're buying something Google Ads can never sell you: trust, recognition, and word-of-mouth from people who actually live in your area and actually need what you do.
When you sponsor the local under-12s soccer team, every parent on that sideline sees your name every Saturday for an entire season. They know you. When their toilet breaks at 9pm on a Tuesday, they don't Google "plumber near me." They text the group chat and someone says "use the one on the kids' jerseys, they're good."
That is advertising. It just happens in a group chat instead of a Facebook pixel.
One thing I should say up front: this is about redirecting your advertising budget, not giving your work away for free. If you were already planning to spend $500 on Google Ads this quarter, I'm asking you to consider what that same $500 could do in your community instead. And if you don't have money to spend but you do have some time, that works too. One hour at a school talk or a Saturday morning at parkrun is a deliberate investment, the same way a paid ad is. You choose when, how often, and what you offer.
If you don't have money or time to spare right now, that's okay too. I'm writing this for people who are already thinking about investing in getting their name out there, and want to do it in a way that actually builds something.
So where does the money (or time) actually go?
The best version of this depends on your business, your community, and what you can genuinely offer. Here are real examples.
Sponsor a team. Put your name on the jerseys, the banner at the ground, the end-of-season trophy night. A full junior season sponsorship often costs between $300 and $1,500, and your logo is in front of families every single week for months.
Be the expert in the room. If you're a psychologist who works with young people, offer a free parent information session at your local school. Talk about neurodivergent diagnosis pathways, or how to support anxious kids, or what to expect from the NDIS process. One hour of your time, some printed handouts, a plate of biscuits. Do it every six months with a different topic. You become the person those parents think of first.
A speech pathologist could do the same thing at playgroup. An accountant at the library. A financial planner at the neighbourhood centre. A physio offering free 15-minute assessments at parkrun on a Saturday morning. The common thread is being useful in public.
Put your product where it matters. A café providing the coffee for the volunteer crew setting up the community market. A bakery putting bread in the community fridge with a small card. A butcher sponsoring the meat tray raffle at the local club (this one has been working in regional Australia for about forty years and shows no signs of stopping).
Discount your rates for community orgs. Offering reduced rates to not-for-profits, charities, and community organisations is community investment too, and it works differently from the other examples here. This one builds an ongoing working relationship where they trust you, refer you, and talk about you to their networks. I do this with DotJess. Some of my favourite long-term clients came through a community org I gave a good rate to years ago. The referral chain from a single NFP relationship can run for years.
Open your doors. A bookshop hosting free storytime and letting local authors do readings. A restaurant running a locals night with a percentage going to a community cause. A photographer offering a free headshot station at a market day. An art supply shop sponsoring school holiday workshops. Every one of these is an invitation. People remember who opened the door.
The humble newsletter sponsorship. Sponsor the local community newsletter, the school bulletin, the sports club program. Unglamorous, and wildly effective. Your name, in print, in the hands of people who live within 15 minutes of your business, every week or month, for a fraction of what a Google campaign costs.
You still need a good website
I build websites for a living, so I'll say this plainly: community investment replaces paying for traffic. It does not replace having a solid online presence.
Your website still needs to be well-built. Accurate SEO. Proper page titles, meta descriptions, and keywords set up for each page. Google indexing configured correctly. Your Google Business Profile filled out, verified, and kept up to date. Fast loading. Mobile-friendly. Accessible.
All of this is organic work. It means that when someone hears your name at the soccer, or picks up your card at the school talk, or sees your logo on the community newsletter, and then searches for you online, they find a website that confirms what they already suspected: this person is legitimate, professional, and good at what they do.
The long game
Here's the thing about Google Ads: the moment you stop paying, you disappear. The whole thing evaporates. You were renting attention, and the lease just expired.
Community investment compounds. The soccer parents remember you next season even if you don't re-sponsor. The school invites you back to talk again. The NFP you gave a good rate to three years ago sends you their board member's sister who needs a plumber. The café owner whose market coffee you supplied mentions you to every stallholder looking for an accountant.
This doesn't scale the way a Google campaign scales. You can't A/B test it or track it with a pixel. But it builds something underneath your business that paid advertising never will: a reputation that exists in rooms you're not even in.
Take the $200. Show up. An investment in your community is an investment in your future.