Bruno Auger Marketing

Bruno Auger Marketing I specialize in working with local businesses,helping them grow & scale using my connections with the media.

08/23/2026

A prospect finally calls you back, and they already know everything about your business.

They read your reviews. They looked at your site. They compared you to two other companies and talked it over with a partner. By the time you pick up the phone, half the decision is already made.

That is not bad luck. That is how buying works now.

New research from Sopro surveyed 442 sales and marketing decision makers, and the picture is pretty clear.

61% say buyers trust cold outreach less than they used to.

31% say buyers are further along in their research before they ever talk to a salesperson.

34% say deals now involve more decision makers, and two thirds say it is usually more than three people.

44% say decisions take longer than they used to.

So what does that mean if you sell to other businesses in town?

Your marketing has to do the work before the call. Your reviews, your site, your Google profile. If those do not hold up, you never get the phone call to begin with.

You need something your contact can forward. The person you talk to is usually not the only one deciding. Give them a one page summary or a short case study they can send to their boss without having to explain you from scratch.

And you need patience. Pushing harder on a longer timeline just makes people go quiet. Staying useful keeps you in the room.

The old approach was get in front of the right person and close. The new one is build trust before the conversation, then help your champion sell you internally.

If your sales approach still assumes one person and a quick yes, it is worth a look. Send me a message and we can talk it through.

08/22/2026

Everybody bought the AI tools. Fewer and fewer people can prove they made any money.

Here is the number that stopped me. The share of marketers who say they can prove AI actually paid off dropped from 49% to 41% in a single year. In retail it fell harder, from 54% to 38%. And that is while adoption kept climbing.

Read that again. More people using AI. Fewer people able to show it worked.

That is not because the tools got worse. The bar moved.

The early wins were about speed. Faster posts, faster emails, faster first drafts. Those were real, but they were shallow. Now people want to know whether it brought in customers, and most of them never set up a way to measure that.

Here is the part that matters for a small business.

AI scales whatever you already have. If your follow-up process is a sticky note on your monitor and a spreadsheet only you understand, AI does not fix that. It just makes the mess run faster.

Gartner expects more than 40% of these AI projects to be canceled by the end of 2027. Not because the technology failed a demo. Because the costs added up and nobody could ever point to the money.

So before you sign up for another subscription, pick the one part of your business that runs on workarounds. The quote you rebuild from scratch every time. The follow-up you keep forgetting. The report you assemble by hand every month.

Fix that one thing first. Then bring AI to it and see what happens.

You will get more out of the tools you already pay for than the ones you have not bought yet.

What is the one workaround in your business you would fix first? Tell me in the comments.

08/21/2026

Look under your star rating on Google. See those little clickable buttons?

Those are called Place Topics. Google builds them automatically from the words people use most in your reviews. Most owners have never even noticed them, and they are sitting right there under your rating where every customer sees them.

Here is why they matter.

If enough people write "cold food," that becomes a button. If enough people write "fast service" or "showed up on time," that becomes a button too. Google is handing new customers a summary of your reviews before they read a single one.

You cannot edit those buttons. But you can influence them, and it comes down to how you ask for reviews.

Most owners send something like "please leave us a review." You get back "great service, thanks." Nice, but it says nothing.

Try asking a specific question instead. "How is the new furnace working out?" or "How did the crew do on your driveway?" People answer the question you ask, and those words end up in your review.

A few more things that help:

Give customers a short list of prompts. What did we do for you? How did we do? Was there anyone you want to mention? People freeze when they open a blank review box.

Ask for a photo. Reviews with photos stay near the top of your review list much longer than plain text ones. You can even take the photo yourself during the job and send it along with your request.

Keep asking. Google looks at your rating, your review count, how recent your reviews are, and whether they keep coming in steadily. Four of the top 20 local ranking factors involve reviews.

And follow the rules. No discounts or gifts for reviews. No screening customers first and only sending the happy ones to Google. Both are against Google's guidelines. You can reward your own staff for asking, though.

Pull up your profile today and look at your Place Topics. If you see something you do not like, that is your review request talking.

Want my review request template? Comment TEMPLATE below and I will send it over.

08/20/2026

74% of small business owners expect to spend more time on marketing this year.

Not more money. More time. That number comes from a survey of 1,500 owners across Canada, the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Here's what nobody puts on the budget line. Those hours come from somewhere. Usually from you. From the evening you were going to take off. From the part of the business only you can run.

And in the same survey, inflation and rising costs came back as the number one worry for 2026. So owners are trying to protect their money by spending the one thing they can't buy more of.

I'm not saying do less marketing. I'm saying more hours in a scattered plan is just a slower way to burn out.

The owners who win this year won't be the ones doing the most. They'll be the ones who picked two or three things and stuck with them long enough for those things to work.

Two more numbers worth knowing:

68% expect their marketing budget to go up.
54% say they're already using AI tools for marketing.

That second one surprised a lot of people. If you're not using AI in your marketing yet, you're now in the minority. And you don't need to become an expert. Start with one small thing, like drafting your email subject lines or getting unstuck on post ideas.

So before you add anything else to your plate this month, ask yourself a simpler question. Where are my marketing hours actually going right now, and which of them made the phone ring?

If you're not sure, message me. Sometimes it just takes an outside look to see which two hours were worth it and which six weren't.

08/19/2026

94% of buyers now use AI before they ever land on your website.

That number is from 6sense, and it includes a lot of people who don't think they're using AI at all. They just googled something and read the summary at the top. That still counts.

Here's what it means. Your customer is moving through most of their decision inside a chat window. They're asking questions, comparing you to two competitors, and reading your reviews. All before you know they exist.

So how do you show up in there? Four things, and you can start this week.

1. Fix your home page first.
AI pulls most of what it knows about you from your home page. Not your services page. Not your about page. Your home page. Put your FAQs right on it.

2. Stop just linking to testimonials.
Take the strongest number or sentence from your best review and put it in plain text on the page. Then link to the full thing.

3. Describe your logos and awards.
AI cannot read a picture. If your credibility badges are just images, they're invisible. Write out what they mean in text underneath.

4. Get more reviews, and better ones.
AI pulls trust signals from Google and directory sites, not just your website. And the details matter. The reviews that say "they cleaned up the job site" or "they didn't let our dog out" are doing more work than the ones that say "great service."

One more thing. Polished is out. The overly perfect photos and the AI-narrated videos all look the same now. A slightly rough video of you actually explaining something builds more trust than a professional one.

Here's a 10 minute test you can run today.

Open ChatGPT. Type what you think your customer would actually search. Not "plumber near me" but the real version, like "plumber in [your town] who works on older homes and can come this week."

Are you in the answer? Then keep going. Ask it "how can I trust this company?" and watch what it pulls in.

Whatever comes back is what your future customers are seeing.

If you want a second set of eyes on what AI says about your business, send me a message and I'll take a look.

08/18/2026

You know that feeling when you read a post and you just know a robot wrote it? Too polished, too generic, too... nothing.

LinkedIn is finally doing something about it.

They're testing a button that lets people flag posts as "AI slop." They're also killing their "enhance your post" tool, the one that rewrote your thoughts into corporate speak. It's being replaced with a proofreader that fixes your grammar but leaves your voice alone.

Here's the part that should get your attention. If your post gets flagged, its reach gets cut. It only shows to people who already follow you. So you're still posting. Nobody new is seeing it.

And this isn't just LinkedIn. Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Reddit and X are all doing versions of the same thing.

So what's the lesson for us as business owners?

It is not "stop using AI." I use it every day.

It is stop sounding like everyone else. The platforms are now rewarding content that sounds like a real person with a real opinion. AI is fine for a rough draft or a proofread. It is not fine as your whole voice.

The fastest way to get flagged is to publish something that could have been written about any business in any town. Lines like "we're committed to excellence" or "your satisfaction is our priority" are dead on arrival.

So put real things in your posts. Name the actual job you did last Tuesday. Use a real number from your business. Mention the street. Mention the employee who stayed late.

That's what makes you human. That's what makes you local. And that's the one thing nobody can fake.

Try this before you hit post: read it out loud. If it could be from any business in any town, add one specific detail only you would know.

What's one detail about your business that nobody else could claim? Tell me in the comments.

08/16/2026

Somebody moved onto your street last month and picked about a dozen new businesses in six weeks. You were probably not one of them.

That is not because they did not like you. It is because nobody unpacks a kitchen and thinks about the plumber they might need in March. They think about the one they need Saturday, and they pick from whoever they can find that afternoon.

This is the easiest customer in your town to win, and almost nobody has a plan for them. Here it is in four parts.

PART ONE. HOW BIG THIS ACTUALLY IS

Statistics Canada looked at the two years leading up to 2021. In that stretch, 2.1 million Canadian households moved. That is 13.8 percent of every household in the country.

Renters moved more than owners, 1.2 million against 870,000. So if there are apartments in your trade area, the turnover is higher than you picture.

The reasons matter more than the number, because the reasons are shopping lists.

Twenty eight percent moved for bigger or better housing. Almost seventeen percent moved for a nicer neighbourhood. Millennials mostly moved for space, and 46 percent of the millennial owners who moved were becoming homeowners for the first time. People 56 and older most often moved to cut their housing costs, to be closer to family, or for their health.

Now read those back as customers. A first time homeowner needs everything and knows nobody. A couple downsizing needs help getting rid of things. Somebody who moved for a nicer neighbourhood is not hunting for the cheapest option in town.

One more from that data. Six percent did not choose to move at all. They were forced out. Go easy with the congratulations.

PART TWO. WHAT MOVERS DO, AND WHO IS TELLING ME

Let me be upfront about my source here, because it is not a great one.

The best recent numbers on mover behaviour come from a report a company called Speedeon released in May. It surveyed 150 American adults who had moved recently. Small sample, not Canadian, and Speedeon sells new mover data for a living, so they have every reason to make movers look like gold.

Direction, not proof. With that said, the direction matches what I see in local businesses.

Eighty two percent said that if they were moving tomorrow, they would want companies to send them relevant offers. Two percent said definitely not. This might be the only group of people on earth who are actually asking to be marketed to.

Eighty five percent said moving makes them rethink the brands in their life. Nearly eight in ten said they go with one of the first companies they come across. More than three quarters said they felt fully settled with all their essential services inside one to two months.

There is your window. About six weeks, and first place usually wins.

They also spend. Six in ten went at least a thousand dollars over their normal budget around the move. Nearly one in five spent between three and seven thousand in the thirty days around moving day. The biggest surprise category was household stuff. Curtains, rugs, organizers. Almost half also spent more on food and eating out while they got settled, because nobody cooks the first week.

And here is the one that should sting a little. Four in ten cancelled a service during their move, not because they found something better, but because nobody at their old provider ever tried to keep them.

One last piece of that survey, and it is the one I would pay attention to. More than half of movers used an AI tool like ChatGPT or Gemini to research their new area, compare providers or find services. Two thirds used social media. If you are not findable and not reviewed, you are not on the list they are handed.

PART THREE. WHAT YOU CAN DO THIS WEEK FOR NOTHING

You do not need a mover list to start. You need to stop ignoring the movers already in front of you.

1. Notice them. A sold sign. A moving truck. A new name on an account. A customer who mentions they just moved in. That is a list, and it is free. Most owners see all of it and file none of it.

2. Make one offer that fits a move, not a coupon. Movers are buying setup, not treats. Ten percent off means nothing to somebody standing in a kitchen full of boxes. A first visit that includes the thing every new house needs means something. Fit the offer to the week they are having.

3. Be easy to find in the first fourteen days. Your hours right. Your phone answered. Your reviews recent. That is the whole competition, and most of it costs nothing but attention.

4. Do the retention half nobody does. When your own customer moves, reach out. Not a form email. A short note that says we noticed you moved, here is how this works at the new place. Four in ten cancellations during a move happened only because nobody asked them to stay. That is the cheapest save in marketing.

5. Ask one question. How long have you been in the area? Ask every new customer, write down the answer, and in a month you will know exactly what share of your new business is movers. Almost no owner has ever measured that, including the ones who guess.

PART FOUR. THE PAID ROUTE, AND WHETHER IT IS WORTH IT

Canada Post runs a program called smartmoves, built on their Change of Address data. It reaches more than a million Canadian households on the move. There is a magazine that lands at the new address two to three weeks after the move, and a direct mail piece you can target down to the postal code and the type of dwelling, for up to eighteen months after somebody moves.

Now the honest part, because I looked at the actual rate card.

The web and print bundles start around seventy thousand dollars a year. That is not local business money. That is national brand money.

The direct mail piece is the one within reach. Their page says it can start at under a dollar a piece, and that includes the envelope, the letter, inserting your material, and the postage. There is no self serve version. You have to call a sales rep for a quote.

And one more thing I noticed. The two big claims on that page, that movers spend over eleven billion dollars in a year and that the program reaches seventy percent of moving households, are both footnoted to studies from 2006 and 2007. Those numbers are about twenty years old. The program may still work fine. The proof they are showing you is older than the iPhone.

So my honest read. If you sell something a new household needs once and buys big, a mail piece to movers can pay for itself. For most local businesses, the free version in part three will do more this year than a rate card will.

Being honest with you, none of this is clever. Movers are just the one group in town who have not decided yet. Everybody else already has a guy. That is the whole advantage, and it expires in about six weeks.

Message me the word MOVED and I will send you the simple one page checklist my clients use to catch the people who just moved into their area.

08/15/2026

A client forwarded me an email last week saying her ads were suspended and her page would be removed in 24 hours. She had already clicked the link.

That is the whole game now. Nobody broke into anything. They just made her panic for ninety seconds.

Here are the numbers, because the size of this surprised me too.

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre recorded a record 704 million dollars in reported fraud losses in 2025. And they say only 5 to 10 percent of victims ever report it, so the real national number is somewhere between 3.5 and 7 billion.

The one aimed straight at businesses is called payment redirection. Canadians reported more than 68 million dollars lost to it in 2025. In the first three months of 2026 alone they reported almost 31 million more. That is not a slow climb.

South of the border, the FBI's 2025 report puts business email compromise at just over 3 billion dollars from 24,768 complaints. Do that math. About 123,000 dollars per business, per incident.

Most of those were not big companies.

In May the Anti-Fraud Centre put out a release about a Quebec business that lost about 3.5 million dollars this way. Criminals had been sitting inside the email chain, impersonating a real contact, and sent new payment instructions. Two wire transfers went out. The money came back only because the business reported it fast.

The Centre named the industries getting hit most often. Construction and contracting. Real estate. Ordinary local operators, not banks.

THE THREE THAT ACTUALLY LAND ON LOCAL BUSINESSES

1. THE BANKING CHANGE EMAIL

A supplier or contractor emails to say their bank details changed, please send the next payment to this account. The address is off by one letter and you never notice. It also shows up as a past due notice for an invoice you already paid.

2. THE FAKE SUSPENSION EMAIL

Security researchers at Cofense pulled one of these apart. The email says your ads are temporarily suspended for violating advertising policy. The landing page looks right. There is even a live chat support agent who asks for screenshots and walks you through a system check.

That system check quietly registers the attacker's own authenticator app on your business account. Then the page asks for your password.

The tell in that campaign was the from address. It was [email protected], not Instagram or Meta. The web address was businesshelp-manager.com, which is not a Meta domain at all.

3. THE FAKE GOOGLE LISTING CALL

A recorded voice says your Google listing is suspended or unverified and will disappear from search unless you press zero right now. Google does not cold call small businesses about this. If there is a real problem with your profile, it is sitting there when you log in.

WHAT ACTUALLY STOPS IT

The Anti-Fraud Centre's own list is short. Verify payment instructions independently. Confirm any banking change using contact info you already had, not the info in the email. Turn on multi-factor authentication for business email. Train whoever pays the bills, because it is usually not the owner sending the wire. Report it fast if it happens.

Three more from me.

Write one rule down and stick it on the wall. No bank detail change goes through without a phone call to a number already in your file. No exceptions for urgency, because urgency is the attack.

Never fix an account problem from a link. Type facebook.com or google.com yourself and go look. A real restriction will be right there in your account.

Pick a code word with your family and your staff. Voice cloning is cheap now, and a clip of you talking is probably sitting on your own page. If a voice on the phone is rushed and needs money moved, ask for the word.

Being honest with you, none of this grows your revenue. It is not exciting and nobody will compliment you for it. It just keeps you from losing a quarter of your profit on a Tuesday afternoon because somebody was in a hurry.

Ninety seconds of doubt is the entire defence.

Message me the word SAFE and I will send you the simple one page checklist my clients keep beside the phone.

08/14/2026

The customer with the most money in your town is the one your marketing keeps skipping past.

People over 50 make about half of all consumer spending. The marketing industry points about ten percent of its dollars at them.

Read that again. Half the money. A tenth of the attention.

That gap comes from AARP, and I will be straight with you, AARP sells advertising to this exact audience, so they have a reason to make the case. But it lines up with what I see in local businesses every week. Owners chase the twenty five year old on TikTok while the sixty two year old with a paid off house walks in, pays full price, and never gets marketed to again.

In Canada this is bigger than most people think. Canadians fifty five and up are now roughly a third of the population.

And they are spending. A HomeEquity Bank survey this year found ninety percent of Canadians fifty five plus plan to keep or increase what they spend on health and wellness, and three quarters said they would cut somewhere else before they touched that budget. Eighty one percent expect to keep or increase spending on hobbies and recreation. Forty seven percent plan to travel more inside Canada this year.

Now the three excuses I hear.

EXCUSE ONE. THEY ARE NOT ONLINE.

Statistics Canada has it around seven in ten Canadians aged fifty to sixty four using social media regularly, and about five in ten of those sixty five and up.

They are on Facebook. Right here. Probably reading this.

That same HomeEquity survey found eighty one percent are comfortable doing transactions online, including shopping and booking travel. Four in ten said they are interested in trying AI features in apps they already use. That is a higher number than a lot of forty year old business owners I talk to.

EXCUSE TWO. THEY ALREADY HAVE SOMEBODY. I CANNOT WIN THEM.

This is the one that costs the most.

AARP's own research director put it plainly. Loyalty is tied to the category, not the age. Most fifty plus customers are open to a new relationship with a business.

Think about your own life. Somebody moves. A favourite place closes. A service gets sloppy. A kid recommends someone new. That door opens all the time. Most businesses just are not standing there when it does.

EXCUSE THREE. I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO TALK TO THEM.

Short version. Talk to them like adults.

The research on this is blunt about the words. Around fifty five percent of this group dislike being called older, senior, mature or silver in advertising. So stop using those words. Nobody wakes up and thinks of themselves that way.

Then check your photos. An AARP survey found sixty two percent of people over fifty wish ads showed realistic images of people their age, and nearly half said the ads they see reinforce outdated stereotypes. The most common one, by a wide margin, is the idea that they cannot work a phone.

If your website shows a grey haired customer squinting at a laptop while a young staff member rescues them, you are telling half the money in town that you think they are helpless.

FOUR THINGS TO DO THIS WEEK

1. Look at the last ten photos you posted. How many show a customer over fifty who looks capable and happy, not confused or frail? If the answer is zero, that is a free fix.

2. Cut the age words out of your copy and sell the outcome instead. Not senior discount. Tuesday special. Not designed for older adults. Designed for people who want it done right the first time.

3. Make one thing easier. Bigger type on the website. A phone number somebody can actually find and tap. A real person answering. This group rewards convenience and respect more than any other, and they tell their friends.

4. Count. Go through your last twenty customers and count how many were over fifty. Most owners guess low. The real number usually surprises them.

Being honest with you, most of those spending stats are American and do not translate perfectly to a Canadian street, and some of the survey work on stereotypes is a few years old now. But the direction has not changed in a decade, and nobody has moved in to fill the gap.

That is the whole opportunity. Your competitor is busy chasing people who do not have the money yet.

Message me the word FIFTY and I will send you the simple one page checklist my clients use to stop leaving the biggest spender in town out of their marketing.

08/13/2026

If you fired your marketing company tomorrow, could you still get into your own website?

Most owners say yes. Then they go looking, and the domain is registered in somebody else's name, the Google profile is owned by a Gmail address nobody recognizes, and the page lives inside a business account they have never once logged into.

I am on the agency side of this, so let me say the quiet part out loud. Most of the time nobody set out to trap anybody. On day one it is just faster to build everything inside our own accounts. Five minutes instead of an hour of back and forth.

But the result is the same either way. The business does not hold the keys to the thing that brings it customers.

Here is the rule. Your marketing partner should have ACCESS. Never OWNERSHIP.

Five things to check.

1. YOUR DOMAIN NAME

This is the big one. Your website, your business email and every link in every ad you have ever run all run through it.

If the registrar account lists your agency or your old web guy as the owner, you cannot move that domain without their cooperation. Not quickly, and not on your own.

Log into your registrar this week. Is the registrant your business? Is the account email one you actually check? Is the renewal on your card?

One heads up. Changing the registrant details can put the domain under a 60 day transfer lock at a lot of registrars. So do this while things are friendly, not in the middle of a breakup.

2. YOUR GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE

There are two roles. Owner and Manager. One owner is the primary owner.

A Manager can do almost everything day to day. Edits, photos, posts, replying to reviews. What a Manager cannot do is add or remove people, or remove the profile.

Which means your agency only needs Manager. Google itself treats a marketing company as an authorized representative and says they have to transfer ownership back to you when you ask.

Never let an outside company be your only owner. Keep two trusted owners, and one of them is you.

If somebody else is holding it right now, do two things at once. Ask them in writing, and start Google's ownership request at business.google.com/add. The current owner gets three days to respond. If they ignore it, Google may then offer you a claim or verify path, but Google is clear that option is not always there. So it is not a guaranteed back door. Ask nicely first.

One more thing. When you are newly added as an owner, Google holds you to a seven day wait before you can remove anyone else or take primary ownership. Do handoffs before the last day, not on it.

Your reviews stay with the profile through all of this.

3. YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE

Whoever creates a page inside their own Meta business account owns that page. If your agency built yours, it is probably sitting in their portfolio, not yours.

The fix is not to start a new page. You set up your own Meta business portfolio, then the agency uses Assign Partners to give your business ID admin access to the page. Meta has its own seven day wait for new admins too.

4. YOUR AD ACCOUNTS

Some good news here. If the ad account itself is yours and the agency just manages it through their manager account, cutting their access does not wipe your campaign history or your conversion data. It stays with you.

The trouble is when the ads were run inside an account the agency created and owns. Then the years of history and learning leave with them.

One thing worth asking about. If conversion tracking was set up at the agency's manager level, your own account cannot use its own conversion actions while that is switched on. Nothing is lost and your own tracking works again once it is turned off. You just have to know to ask.

5. YOUR WEBSITE AND YOUR LIST

Ask one question. What is my site actually built on?

If the answer is WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or Squarespace, you can take it with you.

If the answer is a custom system only that company can host, you usually cannot. Leaving means building it again from nothing. Warning signs are monthly fees just to change a paragraph of text, no admin login of your own, and no access to the files.

And export your customer and email list. Today, then every three months. That list is the one marketing asset nobody can switch off on you.

THE TWENTY MINUTE VERSION

Registrar: is the registrant you.
Google Business Profile settings, People and access: are you the primary owner, and is there a second one.
Meta business settings: is the page in your portfolio with the agency as a partner, or the other way around.
Ad accounts: whose name is on the account, not just who logs in.
Website: ask in writing what it is built on and whether you can have full admin and the files.
Customer list: export it.

And before you hire anybody next time, put four lines in the agreement. Accounts get created in the business name. The provider gets access, not ownership. Everything made for the business belongs to the business. Admin and files come back within a set number of days when the work ends, for any reason.

Being honest with you, this costs an agency nothing to do properly. A good one hands it over without blinking, because a good one keeps clients on results instead of on hostages.

If someone gets defensive when you ask who owns the accounts, you already have your answer.

Message me the word KEYS and I will send you the simple one page checklist my clients use to make sure their business owns its own accounts.

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