Mac&Ernie Marketing Strategy & Training

Mac&Ernie Marketing Strategy & Training I am practical, kind and passionate about sharing knowledge that is relevant and more 'you'. Please reach out to connect.
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I help Australian regional, suburban and small-town businesses build trust, loyalty and referrals through clearer communication, more sustainable marketing and better customer experience. I’m a marketing and customer experience strategist, focused helping you to build strategies that take into account the people in your world and the place you are. With 30 years’ experience across marketing, adver

tising, employer branding and customer experience strategy, I help organisations close the gap between how they want to show up and how they’re actually experienced - by customers, communities and the public. I believe clear thinking creates better experiences, and better experiences create trust and we know the impact trust has on the success of any business. I support:

👉 Small businesses and community organisations to simplify their marketing, strengthen customer experience, and build brands people return to.

👉 Leaders, boards, academics and public figures to communicate with clarity, build influence responsibly, and show up publicly without compromising integrity.

👉 Councils, chambers of commerce and member organisations with training, strategy and practical frameworks that improve visibility, trust and engagement at scale. Ways to work with me include strategy sessions, custom workshops & masterclasses, coaching, advisory projects, training, and the development of practical social media policies and playbooks for organisations and councils. If you value marketing that is structured, realistic and grounded in community - you’ll feel at home here. I work locally throughout Gippsland and across Australia.

11/06/2026

Too busy to follow a plan or make content or implement your marketing strategy? I call BS on that. We make time for so many things but the problem is we smush all the marketing stuff together and then get overwhelmed and put it in the too hard basket.

What if you try a different approach. Make time! But separate it into ideation, research and creation. Not all at the same time.

You have great ideas, ones that come from your knowledge and experience but you’re researching what other people are doing and it’s stalling you and making you second guess yourself. Or maybe you’re using AI but you never create and implement the ideas it gives you because in your head and heart you know it’s beige.

Try separating these three activities. Block out time and resist the urge to jump straight into Canva or Edits when you have a good idea. Sit with it and when the time comes to turn that idea into content, it will feel more authentic and more natural.

💛 Erika

Of all the things to hit my brain this week, it was robots that made me really stop and think. Specifically the rise of ...
05/06/2026

Of all the things to hit my brain this week, it was robots that made me really stop and think. Specifically the rise of robot baristas and automated coffee machines (I know…random). Of course I feel sad about the loss of jobs, but when I picked at it, I realised I was feeling sad about so much more.

The loss of experience.

If a robot pulls the perfect shot, froths your milk to the perfect temperature and serves it to you cheaper than a human there are so many plusses…you would think. But if the coffee is flawless every single time, what have you actually got left? You've got coffee. That's it. What you've lost is the person behind the counter who knows your order before you've said it. The bit of chat while you wait. The small gamble of a new place where you've got no idea if it'll be any good. Too hot, too cold, surprisingly lovely, quietly disappointing. All of it is a tiny human experience - something to feel something about and move through in your day.

Take enough of those little frictions away and a day gets very smooth and very flat. Take away the accidental burnt tongue and you have nothing to complain about and no discomforts to overcome.

We keep saying robots will take on the dull work so we can get on with the meaningful stuff. But a fair bit of what makes a day feel like a day is exactly what we're trying to automate out. The wait. The small talk. The not knowing. The minor letdowns we've recovered from by lunchtime.

I'm not anti-progress. I just think we're a bit quick to file friction under "problem to be solved."

Coffee is a tiny thing. A blip. But what about the people I work with every day who are using AI to replace all the functions that used to annoy them or that felt hard - a problem to overcome. I’m noticing something really important about the way people are talking about themselves and comparing themselves to their robot helpers. They think that what AI produces must be correct so if it doesn’t work the only person they have to blame is themselves. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong” “I’m no good at this” “I don’t understand why it’s not working”.

No one likes to be uncomfortable, but learning from it, working through it and finding solutions so it doesn’t happen again is how we innovate and how we empathise.

Where's the line for you? What's the thing a machine could technically do better, faster and more reliably, that you'd still rather have a person do, imperfectly, with a bit of chat thrown in?

04/06/2026

How to stop those annoying Meta Business Partner request emails from clogging your inbox and what to do if you think you may have accepted one.

I get this question daily and finally got around to explaining how I got rid of them (and I was getting 10-20 a day 😮‍💨).

Please ask anything in the comments if it’s not clear or reach out- my DMs are always open 💛 Erika

04/06/2026

Meta just made three moves. Only one should change what you do.

If you run a Real Estate Agency in Warragul or a trade business out of Traralgon, the past fortnight of Meta news probably read like a reason to feel behind before you'd finished your morning coffee.

1. New paid subscriptions.
2. AI plans.
3. A brand new app to get across.

Take a breath...Most of it is not built for a regional owner-operator, and the part that is matters far less than the headlines suggest.

Here's what was announced so far and there's a couple of things I'd like to draw your attention to.

The subscriptions announcement you can mostly ignore. Meta has started selling paid "Plus" tiers across its main apps. Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus cost about $3.99 USD a month, and WhatsApp Plus about $2.99, in exchange for extras like profile customisation, super reactions and story insights. On Instagram that means things like seeing who rewatched your Story, extending a Story past 24 hours, and watching someone else's Story without showing up as a viewer.

Looking at the list of features, it's clearly is built for heavy personal or influencer users who want more control and a few vanity features, not for a small business. None of it will bring new business through your door and all of it will probably distract you even more.

There's also a bigger umbrella now called Meta One, which is where the company will park its AI subscriptions. Two AI tiers are being tested - Meta One Plus at $7.99 USD and Meta One Premium at $19.99 - mostly differing in how much heavy lifting the AI will do for you on things like deeper reasoning and image and video generation.

Those AI tiers are being tested first in markets like Singapore, Guatemala and Bolivia, so they're not something you can act on from Australia yet anyway.

👉 The business plans worth watching, not buying (yet)

This is the part that's genuinely relevant, so it's worth understanding even though you can't get it here yet. Meta is preparing separate plans for creators and businesses that bundle things like enhanced profile visibility, audience insights, collaboration tools, and clickable links in Instagram posts and Reels.

Clickable links in posts is the one a lot of people have wanted for years, and "elevated search positioning" sounds tempting when you're competing for local attention.

But two things: 1. these are launching in selected test markets first, which means Australia is almost certainly not at the front of the queue and 2. paid discoverability is not the same as being worth discovering. If your profile doesn't clearly say who you are, where you are and what you fix, no amount of paid placement will save it. Get that right first, for free, and you'll be ready if and when the business plans reach us.

👉 Now for the bit that really matters

Meta has released a new app called Forum that pulls Facebook Groups into their own space. It's listed as "a dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and communities you care about," which is Meta's polite way of saying it wants to be Reddit.

It includes an AI feature called "Ask" that gathers answers from across your groups so you don't have to dig through each community on your own.

For now it's a US iPhone app and still in testing, so you can't rush off and use it today.

So why does it matter? Because it's the same move I've been talking about with Google. AI is becoming the layer that decides which real answers, from real people, get surfaced.

Forum is Meta building that layer on top of the community conversations already happening in Facebook Groups.

The "Local Buy Swap Sell" and "Gippsland Mama" type groups your customers are already in are becoming a place that AI reads to answer questions like "who's a good photographer in Traralgon" or "best spot for coffee in Inverloch."

So what do you actually do?

Everything you already know how to do. Be a real, useful presence in the groups your customers are actually in. Answer the question someone asks about your biz or industry without pitching. Recommend the other good local when it isn't your job.

Post the thing you know that nobody else in town is saying.

That's not a growth hack, it's just being a decent operator who turns up - and it happens to be exactly what these AI answer tools are now built to reward.

Do less. Connect more. Still valid. The platforms keep changing the furniture, but the room you want to be standing in is still the one full of your neighbours, having a real conversation.

💛 Erika

02/06/2026

Most business owners don’t need another workshop explaining what social media is.

They don’t need the slide with the statistics about how many people use Facebook, or Instagram, or LinkedIn. They already know social media exists. They’ve been on it for years.

What they actually need answered is harder. Is this even the right channel for my business? Does my audience genuinely spend time here, or am I shouting into a room they’ve already left? Do I have the hours and the headspace to do it properly? And if I do show up, how does it bring me customers, referrals and stronger relationships, rather than just filling a content calendar?

A lot of social media training never gets near those questions. It stays safe in facts, figures and theory that look impressive on a slide and change nothing on a Monday morning.

But the conversation has moved on. Social media is more intuitive than it was. AI is reshaping how we create content. Customer experience and marketing are no longer separate departments, they’re the same conversation. Visibility isn’t about posting more. It’s about being known and trusted in the places that matter to your customers.

That’s the work I care about, and it’s what I bring to every room I’m in.

What that means for you is simple. When I’m in the room with you, we don’t do generic. We work on what’s relevant to your business, what’s achievable in the time you actually have, where your effort will return the most, and how your marketing can add to your bottom line, not just your to-do list.

Has the training caught up with the way businesses actually market themselves now? In my experience and from what I hear - not often enough. That’s exactly the gap I’m here to close.

Want something more from your training service provider? Ask for me 😄

A quiet morning is worth more to your winter marketing than another launch.Most of us audit our marketing by asking what...
01/06/2026

A quiet morning is worth more to your winter marketing than another launch.

Most of us audit our marketing by asking what's missing. The better winter question is what's already working that you've stopped noticing. The client who keeps referring you. The post that quietly books people in. Name three things that work, and protect them before you add a single new thing.

Then look at who you already have. It's easy to spend winter chasing new customers while the loyal ones go quietly cold. Pull up your last twenty enquiries or sales and count how many came from people who already knew you. That number usually tells you where next month is best spent.

Now dig a little deeper. What are you doing because you think you should? The platform you dread, the weekly post that lands flat, the tactic you borrowed from a business nothing like yours. Winter is your permission to stop doing at least one of them.

And check what season your business is actually in. An accountant in June is not a retailer in June. If you're heading into your busiest stretch, the job is to hold steady and look after the people you have, not launch. If you're quiet, this is thinking and building time. Match the work to the season you're really in, not the one the apps assume.

Last, look past the business. A marketing rhythm that costs you every weekend isn't a strategy, it's a slow leak. What would a plan look like if it left room for the netball sideline, the unrushed dinner, the community you actually live in? Build that in first and let the rest fit around it.

That quiet morning is the most useful thing you'll do for your marketing this winter. The questions are the easy part. Knowing what to do with the answers is the work, and that's the bit I love doing with people. If you'd rather not take the long hard look on your own, we can do it together, through Do Less. Connect More. or a one-off strategy session.

Send a message or pop a comment below and I'll send you think link to book a free chat with me.

Google just announced the biggest change to search in 25 years, and the headlines are doing their usual job of making sm...
29/05/2026

Google just announced the biggest change to search in 25 years, and the headlines are doing their usual job of making small business owners feel behind.

So here’s the plain-English version, and why I think it’s quietly good news if you’re a real, local, useful business.

The summary is that search is becoming less of a list you scroll and more of an answer people get handed. Which means the goal is no longer “be the top link” it’s to “be the business the answer recommends.”

That comes down to trust, specificity and actually being helpful. The stuff you can’t fake, and the stuff AI can’t invent.

You don’t need to become an SEO expert (I’m not one either). You need to be findable, credible, and clearly the kind of business a real person would happily point a friend to.

I’ve written a more detailed blog on this topic that explains (with no jargon) how this new search works, what ‘agents’ are and I give some practical advice on what you can do to help yourself become the ‘go-to’. Link in comments.

*edit I should add that this is general and not going to be true for all businesses and in many cases it will set them back. My point is that there is work to be done to move with this, but it’s not necessarily complex or scary.

I hope this took the panic down a notch, please share with your small biz friends.

And tell me - what’s the one question your customers always ask you? That’s your next piece of content right there👇It’s all connected

💛 Erika

PlantUp is live 🎉I’ve spent the last few months working with the team as they build this exciting new venture. Brand dev...
22/05/2026

PlantUp is live 🎉
I’ve spent the last few months working with the team as they build this exciting new venture.

Brand development, messaging, marketing and content strategy…and what a lovely bunch to work with. The kind of clients who turn up to every meeting genuinely excited about what they’re building. That changes the whole shape of a job.

Look at this stunning visual identity by Design With Zach who I always love collaborating with. He has a way of taking an idea and bringing it back in full colour - nailing it every time.

PlantUp is delivering across Greater Melbourne, Geelong and the Mornington Peninsula for now. Once people work out how easy it is to get great quality plants and pots delivered to their door, I suspect that map won’t stay small for long. So go have a look and, if you’re on the delivery zone you can enter to win $250 plants plus $250 to share with a friend.

—
I’ve got space this winter for one new brand development project. If you’re ready to hit go on something new, or your current brand needs a freshen up - reach out.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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