Talks that give a room straight answers.

[On screen: How to Market Your Business, The Whole Picture. Collinsville Chamber Coffee Talk. Mark Heinz, Verona Coffee Co, September 29, 2026.]

Opening 0:14

Good morning. The chamber invited me to talk about how to market your business, and I’m glad to. When most of us hear the word marketing, two things come to mind: the Facebook page and the logo. Both of those matter, but they’re a small part of a much bigger picture, and most of the rest of it costs you time, but not money. I’m Mark Heinz, from right here in Collinsville.

[On screen: Mark Heinz. Brand, websites, and video. Rendered, Collinsville, Illinois.]

I ran my own production company for thirteen years, with more than eighty clients, so I know what it’s like to keep the work coming in. After that, I spent more than seven years running the marketing for a company with three divisions in three states: the brand, a dozen websites, and more than sixty videos. When competitors went quiet during COVID, we went the other way. I brought all three divisions together under one brand, launched two video series to back it up, and we came out stronger than we went in.

These days, I’m the marketing department for businesses that don’t have one. Here’s the one idea I’d like you to leave with. Your brand is what a customer expects from you before they’ve paid you a dollar. And marketing is everything you do that builds that expectation or spends it. The logo is the signature at the bottom of the letter, but it isn’t the letter. I’m going to come at this idea three ways this morning: where your customer meets you, who they meet, and what they hear about you.

That last one is where AI comes in. It’s all on the page in front of you, so there’s no need to take notes.

Part one: Where they meet you 1:39

Before they’ve paid you a dollar, your customer has already met you somewhere, and these days it’s usually on a phone. Picture someone who’s never heard of you. They find your Google listing and read your reviews. They tap through to your website or your Facebook page, and when they call and hear whoever answers your phone. After that, they meet your sign, your truck, or your front door, and they get your estimate, your invoice, or your receipt.

They hear from you after the job or the sale, or they don’t. And when they leave a review, how you answer it matters to them, and to the next customer who reads it. Every one of these places is on the page in front of you. Your customers go looking for all of them, whether you’ve set them up or not, and finding nothing tells them something too. For most of your customers, the listing comes first now.

So if the hours on it are still last winter’s hours, that’s the very first thing you’ve ever said to them. A national survey this February found that 97% of people read reviews for local businesses, and nearly three out of four look for reviews written in the last three months. So your listing isn’t a sign you hang once and forget, it’s a conversation, and it goes stale if you let it.

Your customer isn’t comparing you to the shop down the street, they’re comparing you to the last thing they tapped on their phone this morning. They’re not expecting you to be slick, they’re expecting you to be current, clear, and easy to reach, because that’s what everything else on that phone has taught them. Your website comes next, and the look of it gets judged faster than you think. Researchers in Ottawa found that people decide whether they like the look of a webpage in about a twentieth of a second.

Give them half a second, ten times as long, and they come to almost the same verdict. That first look is a promise about your work, so it should match your work, no better and no worse. If it’s better, you’re writing a check your shop can’t cash, and if it’s worse, you’re losing customers you never get to meet. And on that same screen, your competitors are one scroll away, so it pays to know the one sentence only your shop can say.

If it could hang on your competitor’s wall just as easily as yours, it isn’t yours yet. It took me more than one try with my own business. Where I landed is that at Rendered, the brand, the marketing, the website, and the tools behind it are all made by the same hands. Yours probably won’t sound anything like mine, and that’s the point. Every place they meet you should agree with the same name, the same hours, the same number, and that same sentence, because consistency is what trust looks like from the outside.

So here’s the first thing, and I’d do it this week. Pull up your own Google listing on your phone the way a stranger would, and fix anything on it that isn’t true today. And if you search and can’t find yourself at all, claiming your listing is free, and that becomes the first thing.

Part two: Who they meet 4:48

So before they’ve paid you a dollar, your customer has also met somebody. In a 2019 study across eight countries, 81% of people said that whether they can trust a brand to do what’s right is a deal breaker or a deciding factor when they buy. So where does that trust actually land? Pull up the reviews of any local business you like, yours or anybody’s, and read a few.

I bet they name a person, and I bet not one of them mentions the logo. Nobody trusts a logo. They trust the person standing next to it. And that person is the one thing your competitor can’t copy. I learned that behind the camera. Of all those videos, the ones that worked were never the polished product shots. They were people talking plainly about what they do. For a lot of your customers, the first person they meet is a voice on the phone.

The first ten words that voice says are part of your brand. So decide what they are and make sure whoever answers knows them. So here’s the second thing, and October’s a good month for it. Take one real photo of the person who answers your phone, stands behind your counter, or knocks on your customer’s door, and put it on your website and your listing with their name. If that’s your spouse or your office manager, then it’s their face and their name.

Because to your customer, the brand is whoever they actually meet.

Part three: What they hear 6:15

And before they’ve paid you a dollar, your customer has already heard something about you. The only question is whose voice it was. Some of it should be yours, and the place it counts most is how you answer a review. That reply is for the person who left it, and for the customer who reads it after them. The same national survey from this February found that 42% of people are unlikely to use a business that never replies to its reviews, and nearly one in five expect a reply the same day.

And every reply you sign puts fresh words on your listing, which is the first place the next customer meets you. So keep the reviews coming. Ask for one the moment a customer thanks you, by text, by email, or at the counter. All of that lives on your Google listing, which is really Google’s building, furnished with your words. This is big. Your Facebook page is rented land. The landlord decides who sees your posts, and the rent tends to go up.

The ground you actually own is your website, your phone number, and the list of customers who’ve said yes to hearing from you, like your email list. Stand on the rented land as much as you like, but build on the land you own. I ran into this myself. I wanted an email list for my business, and the industry’s answer was another monthly subscription. So I built my own in a weekend, right on my own website, with no tracking, and just one click to leave it, to unsubscribe, and I call it the mailbox.

You don’t have to build one, but your customers’ names belong somewhere no landlord can take them. Attention is rented, but trust is owned. And this year there’s a new voice in Google’s building, because Google is already using AI on business listings like yours. It reads your listings, your reviews, and your website, and it answers people’s questions about your business in its own words. So if your listing still has last winter’s hours, that’s what it tells people, in a confident voice with your name on it.

Your website feeds it too, so the old search-engine basics matter more now, not less. Say plainly what you do, where you do it, and when you’re open, in real words on the page, not buried in a picture, and have whoever runs your site add the behind-the-scenes labels that tell Google exactly who you are. Which means you can’t sit AI out, but that’s not the same as buying it.

Has anybody here been pitched anything with AI in it in the last year? I build my own AI tools and I run my business on them, so I’m no skeptic, but my straight answer on about half of what’s being pitched to this room is, just don’t bother. What gets sold is a magic employee who never sleeps. What actually shows up is a brilliant intern who knows nothing about your business except what you hand it, and who has no shame about guessing.

The intern is genuinely useful for drafts, sorting, summaries, and the follow-up nobody was getting to, but it shouldn’t be your voice. If a competitor is flooding Facebook with posts that a machine wrote, you don’t have to keep up, because more words isn’t a strategy, it’s a landfill. And when everybody’s words come out of the same machine, sounding like yourself becomes the rare thing. And here’s the third thing, which brings us back to that reply.

Starting with the next review that comes in, answer every one within a day and sign it with a real name. Let the intern write the first draft, if that helps, then make it sound like you, and send it yourself. It drafts, and you sign. That’s the whole picture. Before they’ve paid you a dollar, your customer has met you somewhere, met somebody, and heard something about you. So fix your listing this week, put a real face with a real name on it in October, and answer every review within a day, signed.

And keep your customers’ names on ground you own.

A question: Do I have to put my face on it? 10:17

One question I would be thinking about is, do I really have to put my face on it, like on the website, on the profile? You don’t have to like it, and you don’t have to be good at it, but a real photo with your name or 40 seconds of a phone video of you saying something true about your business beats three polished paragraphs about “our team.” And if it truly can’t be you, it can be the person your customers already love talking to, with their name on it.

The point is a human, not a performance. Like I mentioned earlier, the mailbox that I built, if you’d like to see the mailbox, it’s at the end of every note I write at my personal site, markheinz.com. And that’s all I had to say to you all. I appreciate your time.

[On screen: Rendered. Notes, by email. MarkHeinz.com. Collinsville, Illinois.]

Sources for the figures in the talk

• 97%, nearly three out of four, 42%, and nearly one in five: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 1,002 U.S. adults, published February 11, 2026.
• 81%: Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report, “In Brands We Trust?”, 2019, eight countries, 16,000 respondents.
• A twentieth of a second: Lindgaard, Fernandes, Dudek, and Brown, “Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!”, Behaviour & Information Technology 25(2), 2006.