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There are maybe eight thousand people who could ever realistically walk into your shop. Give or take. Everyone within a sensible drive, on a day they feel like spending money. That’s your whole market. Not the internet. Eight thousand people, and a good few already know your name.

Now here’s the advice you’ll get anyway. Grow your audience. Post more. Get your reach up. More followers, more eyeballs. It’s the one thing every marketing article agrees on, and nobody ever tells a small business to aim for fewer.

It’s winter, the shop’s quiet, and a slow-growing follower count feels like proof you’re failing. So the advice bites hardest right now. For most of us on this coast, it’s also the wrong game.

Followers in Joburg don’t buy your coffee

Reach is a big-city number. It’s built for businesses that can sell to anyone, anywhere, and post it off. An online store wants ten thousand strangers, because a slice of ten thousand strangers turns into orders.

You’re not that. Run a coffee spot in Sedgefield or fix fridges in Mossel Bay and a follower in Joburg is worth almost nothing to you. Nice that they liked your photo. They’re never making the drive for a flat white.

So you chase a number that was never really yours, feel behind when it crawls, and the whole time half of your actual market, those eight thousand people down the road, still don’t know you exist.

Lula, the SME lender, put it plainly in a June guide to marketing in South Africa: for a local business, relevance beats broad visibility, and the likes and follower counts we fret over are mostly vanity metrics that never become a paid invoice.

Be the name the butcher gives out

The opposite of reach is depth, and depth is what a small town actually rewards.

You don’t need three thousand followers. You need two hundred people who’d recommend you without being asked. The plumber the whole street phones. The café the guesthouse owner sends every guest to. That doesn’t come from posting more. It comes from being genuinely, almost boringly known by the few hundred people who live and spend within twenty minutes of you.

A few ways that looks down here:

• One solid relationship with a complementary shop that sends you customers. Beats a month of posting into the void.
• Your regulars kept warm, the way we’ve gone on about before. They’re your marketing department, and they work for free.
• Being the answer on the local WhatsApp groups where someone asks “who does X in town?” That question gets typed every single day. Your name should be sitting under it.

None of this shows up as a satisfying number on a screen. That’s exactly why it works. It’s also why hardly anyone bothers.

So this week, ignore your follower count completely. Write down the ten people or businesses in town whose word actually sends you work. Then go do one real thing for one of them. A coffee, a favour, a thank-you they weren’t expecting. That’s your reach. It lives right here.

Reply and tell me where most of your work actually comes from. Word of mouth, walk-ins, a referral, the internet? I’ll pull the answers together, no names, so we can all see how this town really finds the businesses in it.