About Mac&Ernie
Mac&Ernie is here for regional businesses, leaders and community organisations who are tired of marketing activities that don’t fit their purpose or the people they serve.
Small Business Owners
You're doing everything you can to be visible. Customers are still slipping through the cracks and you can't quite see where.
Councils, Boards & Business Groups
You need policies, training or strategy that holds up across teams without sounding corporate or city-centric.
Place-Based Community Organisations
You want marketing that reflects the region you serve, not metro playbooks that don't translate.
Why people come to Mac&Ernie for marketing advice
People usually come to me when something feels out of step.
Their marketing keeps them busy but it is not especially effective. Their messaging sounds fine on paper but does not quite reflect who they are. Their customer experience feels inconsistent. Their team is doing a lot, but without enough structure or confidence behind the work.
My role is to help make sense of that. I identify what matters, reduce unnecessary friction and help my clients focus on the decisions that improve communication, strengthen experience and support long-term growth.
About Erika McInerney - Marketing and customer experience strategist
How did I get here?
I came up in agency marketing in Melbourne in the mid-1990s and spent almost two decades working across advertising, employer branding, marketing strategy and customer experience.
Big rooms, big budgets, brands you've heard of. Some of that time was in London, most of it in Melbourne.
Then I moved home to Gippsland, started a family and a farmers’ market and started taking on small projects for local businesses on the side, and within a few months realised this was the work I was meant to do.
Strategic marketing for the kind of business owners who know their customers' names, who can see the difference small changes make within the week, and who have no patience for jargon. Workshops that teach important skills and build much needed confidence. That's who I'm for and why I’m here.
Mac&Ernie launched in 2016. Ten years in and still loving it.
What I do
Most consultants stop at marketing or social media. I work across both marketing strategy and customer experience, because for small business they're really one job, not two.
The marketing side is the work you'd expect - messaging, positioning, content, audience. The customer experience side is everything that happens during and after that - the booking form, the welcome email, the speed of a reply, what it feels like to work with/buy from you.
The two halves are usually pulled apart, even though they shouldn't be. Your marketing creates an expectation. Your customer experience either keeps that promise or doesn't. Most of the business owners and service-led organisations I work with are losing more connections and sales to the gap between the two than to anything else.
What us working together looks like depends on what you need. Sometimes it's a strategy from scratch. Sometimes it's untangling a specific bottleneck - a website that isn't converting, a team that needs a content plan, a council writing its first social media policy. Whatever the brief, the lens stays the same.
Do less. Connect More.
It started as advice in workshops for business owners burning out trying to be everywhere at once. It soon became my approach to the whole job.
The dominant message in marketing right now is more. More channels, more posts, more visibility, more output. For most of the regional and small-business owners I work with, that advice has cost them more than it's earned them. The businesses that grow steadily over time aren't shouting. They've worked out what to say, where to say it, and who they're saying it to, and they've stopped trying to be everything to everyone.
Doing less means doing fewer things - but doing them properly and with purpose. Connecting more means being useful to specific people, in specific places. That sits behind everything I do, including the EASE Framework I use with clients.
Why I work with regional and place-based businesses
Regional, suburban and small-town businesses work under different conditions to metro brands.Relationships matter more, word of mouth carries further, and growth is shaped as much by trust and consistency as it is by visibility.
That's why I don't default to generic advice. What works for a café in Collingwood doesn't necessarily work for one in Warragul, Horsham or Mudgee. The strategy has to fit the place, the resources and the rhythm of the town.
I'm based in Gippsland and work with clients across regional Australia, in person and online. The place I work from helps to inform the work I do.
From The Weekly Times: Pictured winners of the Shine Awards
Credentials and community
I'm a Certified Practising Marketer with the Australian Marketing Institute, hold a Master of Marketing, Bachelor of Arts in Media & Comms and bring formal training in Customer Experience. Alongside the marketing work. I'm a member of a number of professional communities, provide mentoring for organisations such as Inspiring Rare Birds, Small Business Victoria, Ken Hore Tourism and more and am not only a graduate of the Gippsland Community Leadership Program, I was program manager for two years.
I co-founded the Warragul Farmers' Market and Binary Shift Conference and have won a number of awards including Roar and Shine (Weekly Times) both for my contributions to regional communities and I’ve also been a finalist in many other awards programs - local and national.
The Small Town Business podcast started as a side project and consistently topped the charts in the Australian marketing and small business space.
Things people ask me
Why "Mac&Ernie"? McInerney is a bit of a mouthful so the name of my business is simply a fun hint as to how to pronounce my name.
Why regional, why not stay in agency work? Two things. I knew Gippsland already, having grown up around here. And I work better when I can see who I'm working for. The kind of relationships you can have with clients you might run into at the bakery is the kind I wanted to build.
Do you work with city businesses? Yes, when there's a good fit. My experience translates anywhere. But most of my clients are regional or place-based, and that's where my unique approach works best.
What's it like to work with you? Calm and practical. We talk things through properly, make decisions, then move. Clients tell me they feel clearer after a session, not more overwhelmed.
Small Town Business Podcast
