The Marketing Questions Every Business Owner Asks Me, Answered.

I am Preston. I run PELORA Marketing out of Newport Beach, and before this I was the operator, not the vendor. I grew up on job sites. My dad ran a concrete company in the Coachella Valley and I was working in the trade by 14. Later I co-founded and ran behavioral health companies, including a detox and a mental health program we built and sold. In between I remodeled my own homes and helped a lot of contractors grow. I have hired agencies, gotten burned by agencies, and built in-house teams. Today I help clinics, treatment centers, wellness brands, and remodeling and construction companies grow.

What follows are the questions I get asked the most. The answers are the same across every one of those industries, because good marketing is not industry magic. It is the same handful of principles applied with a little judgment.

Question 1How much should I spend on marketing?

Anchor your budget to the value of a customer and your growth goal, not a flat number you read somewhere. A working rule of thumb is 7 to 10 percent of revenue to hold steady, and 15 to 20 percent if you are trying to grow fast. But the percentage is the small lever. The big lever is what a customer is actually worth to you.

A med spa selling a 300 dollar facial, a contractor selling a 40,000 dollar kitchen, and a treatment center with a high-value admission cannot run the same budget. The higher the value of a customer, the more you can afford to pay to get one, and the more it costs to underspend. That is the trap I see most: an owner puts a tiny budget behind a high-value service, the ad platform never gathers enough data to learn, the results look bad, and they conclude that ads do not work. The ads were never the problem. The math was. I built a free ad-spend calculator so you can model your own numbers in about a minute before you spend a dollar.

Question 2Should I hire a marketing agency or do it myself?

Here is the honest version, by revenue:

• Under about 250,000 dollars a year: do most of it yourself with AI tools. Your job right now is to prove the offer, not to pay someone else to market something that is still being figured out.
• Between 250,000 and 1,000,000: go hybrid. Pay a consultant to map the strategy, then execute with one capable hire plus AI tools. This is where most owners either waste money on the wrong agency or stay stuck doing everything alone.
• Past 1,000,000 with real growth ambition: a good agency or an in-house team pays for itself, because your time is now worth more than the work.

The expensive mistake is hiring an agency too early, before your offer and your numbers are proven. I will tell a business owner that on a call, even when it means we do not work together yet. I would rather keep the relationship than take a retainer on a plan that cannot work. If you want the full breakdown, I wrote a whole piece on agency vs doing it yourself, and our pricing is public so you can see exactly what each tier includes.

Question 3How do I actually get more customers?

Three things, in this order: be findable, be trustworthy, and respond fast. Most owners pour all their money and energy into being findable, running ads and chasing rankings, and almost completely ignore the other two. That is backwards.

The fastest win for most businesses is not more ad spend. It is following up in minutes instead of hours. A lead that comes in at 7pm and gets a reply at 9am the next morning has usually already booked with whoever answered first. We wire up automatic text and email follow-up with an instant booking link so nobody slips through, day or night. It is the cheapest growth most owners are leaving on the table.

Question 4Is video marketing really worth it?

Yes, more than almost anything else you can do. Here is why: almost every local business is a trust purchase. Nobody hands a stranger their face, their recovery, or the keys to tear apart their kitchen based on a logo and a stock photo. They buy when they can see the owner, see the work, and hear from real people who got a real result.

Video delivers all of that in seconds. We shoot the owner, the team, the job site or the treatment space, and real before-and-after stories, then run that same footage across ads, social, your website, and your Google profile. One day of shooting becomes months of content. A static photo is easy to scroll past and easy to fake. A real transformation on video earns trust the moment it plays.

Question 5How do I get more Google reviews, and do they matter?

They matter enormously. Around 75 percent of consumers regularly read online reviews for local businesses, and most read them on Google, before they ever call. Reviews are often the single biggest factor in who gets picked, and they are nearly free.

The way to get them is simple and most owners just do not do it consistently: ask every happy customer, at the right moment, automatically. We set up a system that requests a review right after a great experience, so your count climbs every month without anyone remembering to do it by hand. One rule: never buy fake reviews. People can smell them, and platforms punish them.

Question 6Why aren't my ads working?

It is almost never the platform. After running a lot of accounts, it is usually one of four things:

• The budget is too small for your customer value, so the algorithm never gathers enough conversions to finish learning.
• The offer is weak or unclear, so even good traffic does not convert.
• The follow-up is too slow, so the leads the ads produce go cold before anyone calls them.
• The creative has no proof in it, no real faces, no real results, so it never earns trust.

Fix those four and most "broken" ad accounts come back to life on the same budget. Switching platforms rarely fixes a problem that was never about the platform.

Question 7How long until marketing actually works?

Honest timeline: about 90 days to a real signal, and six months to compounding. Months one and two are the learning phase for the ad platforms plus content production and getting your follow-up and review systems in place. Month three is usually when cost per lead drops and things click. Months four through six are when it compounds, with the ads dialed in, reviews flowing, and follow-up closing business that used to slip away.

If someone promises you a flood of customers in week two, they are selling you a story. Real marketing is a system that gets stronger over time, not a slot machine.

Question 8Do I need to show up in ChatGPT and AI search now?

Yes, and it is already happening whether you are ready or not. People now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews things like "best med spa near me" or "good remodeler in my city," and the AI answers with a short list of names. Getting your business to be one of those names is called AEO and GEO, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization.

The good news is that the same things that earn trust with humans, clear and structured content, strong reviews, and being the most obviously correct answer to a question, are what get you cited by the AI. We build this into every page now. If you want the deeper version, here is how we think about AI search optimization and a piece on SEO, AEO, and GEO for local businesses.

Question 9Should I run Google Ads or Facebook and Meta ads?

They do two different jobs. Google captures people who are already searching for what you sell, which is high intent and ready to act. Meta creates demand by putting your video and your story in front of the right local audience before they were even looking.

Most businesses need both eventually. If you have to start with one, start with whichever matches how your customer actually decides. Emergency or urgent services lean Google. Visual, considered, trust-driven purchases like aesthetics, weight loss, and remodels do beautifully on Meta with real video. I broke this down in detail in Google Ads vs Meta Ads.

Question 10How do I get found on Google in my city?

Local visibility is its own game, and it is very winnable. The core moves: claim and fully optimize your Google Business Profile, collect reviews steadily, build simple location and service pages, and publish helpful local content. Maps and near-me searches drive most local calls, so showing up strong in your city usually beats chasing national rankings you do not need.

This is also where being specific wins. A page about your exact service in your exact city will almost always outrank a generic national page for the people who can actually become your customers.

Last updated June 24, 2026. By Preston Durnford. Newport Beach, California.