The taverna owner who out-marketed every agency in Crete

Hello from beautiful Rethymno old city on the island of Crete!!!!

We’re a few days into our family holiday here after Athens, and last night we ended up at a little taverna tucked into one of the old town’s back streets, the kind of place with six tables, a dog asleep by the door, and no menu you can find online.

Within about two minutes, the woman who owns it came out from the kitchen herself.

“Kalispera!” she said, arms out, like we were old friends she’d been expecting all day.

Not to hand us menus.

To introduce herself.

She told us the recipes were her mother’s. That her son was the one cooking that night. That the wine was made by her brother-in-law up the road.

By the time our food arrived, we weren’t customers anymore.

We were guests.

And here’s the thing, nobody at that taverna has a content calendar. Nobody’s worrying about the algorithm.

But they are doing, instinctively, exactly what I’ve been teaching in Session 4 of our Marketing Masterclass this week.

We spent this session on the six types of content that are actually getting attention right now. And two of them kept replaying in my mind at that table.

The first is showing the humans behind the business.

Most spas and salons keep the curtain firmly closed. Nobody sees who’s actually doing the treatments. Nobody sees the qualifications behind the therapist’s hands. Nobody sees the behind-the-scenes of how a room gets ready, or who’s actually running the front desk.

And then we wonder why people don’t trust us the way they trust the taverna up the road.

People don’t build trust with a logo. They build it with a face.

Show your people. Show their training. Show the real, unpolished behind-the-scenes. That’s not “unprofessional” content right now, it’s some of the most powerful content you have.

The second is creating conversation, not just posting content.

That taverna doesn’t have big follower counts either. But every table in that room was talking, to the owner, to each other, to us. That’s community. And it didn’t happen by accident. She invited it.

Most of our industry’s social media gets quiet, polite engagement - a few likes, maybe - because we’re broadcasting at people instead of inviting them in. We post the after photo. We post the offer. We rarely ask a real question and wait for the answer.

Content that starts a conversation will always outperform content that simply announces something.

So here’s what I’d ask you this week:

If someone scrolled through your last ten posts, would they know who you are, or just what you sell?

And when did you last ask your audience a question and actually wait to hear what they said back?

Small shifts. Big difference in trust.

If you want the other four content types we covered this week - and the templates that make this easy to actually implement instead of just knowing about - that’s exactly the kind of thing that lives inside the Club portal for our members.

Have a wonderful week, wherever you’re reading this from.

Me agapi, Marisa

P.S. One more session of the Masterclass to go. If Session 4 taught me anything sitting in that taverna, it’s that the businesses people fall in love with are rarely the flashiest ones, they’re the ones that feel like people, not brands.