Main Street, year round
Hastings has a downtown most towns would envy and a customer base split between the people who live there and the people who drive down from the metro. Those are two different marketing jobs. We do both.
Five blocks of East Second Street are a nationally registered historic district, with thirty-five commercial buildings put up in the last quarter of the 1800s. That is not set dressing. It is the reason people make the drive.
Which creates a specific problem. The buildings do a lot of the selling, so plenty of Hastings businesses have never had to be good at marketing — foot traffic covered it. Then something shifts. A new shop opens two doors down, or a quiet winter runs longer than usual, and suddenly the storefront is not enough on its own.
There is no single industry driving the town, either. Hastings is mostly small, locally owned businesses, which means there is no template to copy from the company down the street. What works for a boutique does not work for a service business, and what works for either does not work for a restaurant. The plan has to actually fit you.
The Local Reality
Hastings sits about thirty minutes from the southeast metro, which means a real share of your customers are not locals. They are people who decided on Saturday morning to go somewhere with a main street, and chose yours.
That visitor is deciding between you and a dozen other river towns before they ever leave the house. They are searching, scrolling and looking at photos. If your last post is from August and your hours are wrong on Google, you lose them before they have put shoes on.
Your neighbors are a completely different audience. They already know you exist. They do not need convincing that Hastings is worth visiting — they need a reason to come in this week, which means new arrivals, events, restocks and the occasional reminder that you are still there.
Most of the accounts we take over are speaking to one of those groups and accidentally ignoring the other. Usually it is the locals who get forgotten, because visitor content is more fun to make.
Where We Start
Step one
Before anything gets posted. Hours, categories, photos, products, the question-and-answer section, and the review flow. For a downtown storefront this is usually the fastest return available, because it catches people who are already looking for what you sell and are already nearby.
Step two
We shoot and write a month ahead so you are never posting from the floor between customers. Content pillars, captions, a posting schedule built around when your actual audience is awake, and Canva templates so anything urgent still looks like you.
Step three
Social platforms rent you an audience. Email is the one you keep. We set up the capture, write the first sequence and build a newsletter rhythm you can actually sustain — usually monthly, because a monthly email that goes out beats a weekly one that does not.
How It Runs
The honest answer most agencies avoid: no marketing arrangement takes zero time from the owner. What it should do is take the right kind of time. You should be spending it on decisions and raw material, not on sitting down at nine at night trying to think of a caption.
Your time, month one: about two hours. One kickoff conversation about the business, one short content day, and a round of feedback on the first calendar.
Your time, every month after: roughly one hour. A monthly strategy call, plus whatever photos or news you send through as they happen. Everything else — writing, scheduling, publishing, replying, reporting — sits with us.
For a Hastings business that is often the deciding factor. The constraint is almost never ideas, because owners here know their customers extremely well. The constraint is that the person who knows the business best is also the person running the register, and marketing is what gets dropped when the day gets long.
Working Together
One-time · $675
A full read of where you actually stand: platforms, profile, search visibility, email and the gaps between them, with a prioritized list of what to fix first. Most people start here. If you continue, the cost is credited toward your first month.
$950 per month
Thirty days of concepts and captions, content pillars, hashtag and keyword direction, branded Canva templates and a monthly strategy call. You publish. We handle the thinking and the writing.
From $1,650 per month
Strategy, content production, scheduling, publishing, community management, email newsletters and monthly reporting. See what Full Management covers.
Questions
Yes. Social Honey is based in Red Wing, about forty minutes down Highway 61, and Hastings is one of the river towns we serve regularly. Most of the work happens remotely, and we come to you for content days, planning sessions and events.
Usually yes. A customer driving down from the metro is making a day-trip decision, and a neighbor two streets over is making a Tuesday decision. Those are different messages. We normally run one core content stream with a visitor-facing layer on top rather than trying to speak to both at once.
The Audit is a one-time $675. The Content Plan is $950 per month. Full Management starts at $1,650 per month. Where you land depends on how many platforms you need and how much original content we produce.
For a downtown storefront, it is often the single highest-return thing we fix first. Someone searching for what you sell while they are standing three blocks away is the easiest customer you will ever get, and most profiles we open are half finished.
Ready when you are
A free discovery call, no pitch deck. Tell us where you are and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.
