Is Trojan a Black owned agency?
Yes. Judge the work on whether the pages rank, the inquiries arrive and the reporting tells you the truth. Everything else on this page carries a source you can open and check for yourself.
Marketing for Black Owned Businesses
Marketing for Black owned businesses, built on what the numbers actually show. Discovery, proof and the arithmetic behind a first hire.
Most Black owned businesses in Marion County run without a single employee, which means the owner sells, delivers and follows up alone. So the marketing has to carry weight on its own: getting found when someone searches, collecting proof that survives scrutiny, and knowing the demand you need before a hire pays for itself. Every figure here comes from a source you can open and check.
Census and Federal Reserve figures with the arithmetic shown
Current on Indiana's July 2026 certification suspension
Google Business Profile, reviews and service pages before anything else
Claims kept to what the sources support
The structural factAbout 95 percent of Black owned firms in Marion County have no employees, so the marketing has to work without a sales team
What moved the needle in researchAdding a Black owned attribute raised website clicks and calls sharply in Yelp data, though the baselines were small and the rating effect is contested
What changed in 2026Indiana suspended state MBE and WBE certification in July 2026, including active certificates. Veteran owned certification survived
Where the work startsBusiness Profile accuracy, review volume and one service page that answers the question a buyer actually typed
What does the Census actually say about Black owned businesses in Indianapolis?
In 2023 Marion County had about 25,241 Black owned firms, roughly a quarter of all firms in the county. Around 24,000 of those had no employees. Those firms took in about 1.9 billion dollars of the county's roughly 201.6 billion dollars in total business receipts.
- Source: US Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics, table AB00MYNESD01C, reference year 2023
- Employer firm counts come from a sample survey and carry a published margin, so treat them as approximate
- Nonemployer counts are rounded by the Census, which is why they end in three zeros
Did Indiana really suspend MBE certification?
Executive Order 26-17, signed July 14 2026, suspended the MBE and WBE components of Indiana's Diversity Business Enterprises Program, including certifications that were already active. Veteran owned certification and preferences stayed in place, and existing state contracts with MBE and WBE commitments remain in force. The order applies to state agencies and doesn't automatically bind a city or county.
Does adding a Black owned label to your listings help?
Research says it raises traffic and contacts, and honest reporting means giving the size. In Yelp data covering 27,834 restaurants, adding the label roughly doubled weekly website clicks and phone calls, but the starting points were 2.28 clicks and 0.80 calls a week, so doubling 0.80 calls gets you to 1.6. Separate peer reviewed work found average star ratings slipped slightly after ownership became visible.
Where the market actually stands
What the data says about Black owned businesses in Marion County
Is the problem demand, or is it scale?
It's scale. Black owned firms make up about a quarter of all businesses in Marion County and take in under one percent of total receipts, and the gap runs almost entirely through employment. Roughly 95 percent of those firms have no employees at all, against about 83 percent of firms countywide. A business with no employees has a hard ceiling on how much work it can accept, no matter how good the marketing is. So the useful question is what demand you'd need before a first hire pays for itself, and that's arithmetic you can run today.
- Black owned firms, Marion County, 2023
- About 25,241
- Of those, firms with no employees
- About 24,000
- Share of all Marion County firms
- Roughly 25 percent
- Share of total county business receipts
- Under 1 percent
- Indianapolis metro openings, 2023 vs 2022
- Up 59 percent on Yelp data, third among US metros
First moves
The three things worth doing before anything else
When an owner runs the business alone, marketing has to produce qualified inquiries without a follow up team behind it. That narrows the useful work considerably, and the order matters more than the volume.
Start with the Google Business Profile, because for a local service business it's usually the first thing a buyer sees and the cheapest thing to get right. Categories, service areas, hours, and a phone number that matches the one on your site. A number that differs between your footer and your profile is a small error that quietly costs calls, and it shows up constantly in site scans.
Then reviews, which do two jobs at once. They're the proof a buyer reads before calling, and review volume is one of the few signals a solo operator can build steadily without a budget. Ask at the moment the work is finished and the customer is still standing there happy. An email a week later gets ignored.
Then one service page that answers the question somebody actually typed, written for the service you most want more of. One page that genuinely answers a question will outperform eight thin pages that each mention a city name. That's the same finding that shows up in search results across every market we work in.
One page that answers a real question beats eight that mention a city name.
Evidence, including the parts that cut against the story
What the published research actually found
Method · Every figure above comes from a published study or a federal survey you can open and read. Where studies disagree, both results appear. Percentages are shown with the baseline they were calculated from, because a percentage without a baseline can make a change of less than one phone call a week sound like a change that reshaped the business.
Over 100 percent
Rise in weekly website clicks and phone calls after adding a Black owned attribute
The baselines were 2.28 clicks and 0.80 calls per week, so the absolute change is under one additional call a week. Weekly platform revenue rose about 52 percent on a 37 dollar base. Review ratings showed no significant change in this study.
Source: Aneja, Luca and Reshef, NBER Working Paper 30932, 2023
3.03 vs 3.78 stars
Average rating from reviewers aware of Black ownership versus those unaware
Drawn from over 250,000 Detroit and Los Angeles reviews around the 2020 tag launch. A separate study in Production and Operations Management found review volume rose while average rating fell slightly. Both findings cut against the first one, and a page that reported only the upside would be selling.
Source: Bui and Moy, CHI 2025, and Son, Wowak and Angst, POM 2024
About 2x
Review counts in neighborhoods with few Black residents compared with majority Black neighborhoods
Across 86 metros, a high rating in a non Black neighborhood came with 8.5 to 9 percent growth against 5 to 7.5 percent for a low rating. In Black majority neighborhoods both groups grew at about 7 percent, so the rating carried no growth advantage. This is a structural pattern one business can't close alone.
Source: Perry, Rothwell and Harshbarger, Brookings Institution, 2020
27 vs 52 percent
Share of applicants fully approved for a loan, line of credit or cash advance
Black owned firms applied at a higher rate than white owned firms, 42 percent against 33 percent, and were fully approved at about half the rate. Among firms that skipped applying, 40 percent of Black owned firms said they expected to be turned down, against 8 percent. This is 2021 survey data and the newer report doesn't break results out by owner race.
Source: Federal Reserve Banks, Small Business Credit Survey, 2022 report on firms owned by people of color
What changed in July 2026
Certification after Executive Order 26-17
This changed recently and a lot of published advice is now out of date. Here's what we can state from the record, and what we can't.
What exactly was suspended?
The MBE and WBE components of Indiana's Diversity Business Enterprises Program under Ind. Code ch. 4-13-16.5. The state can't issue new certifications or recertifications, and certifications that were already active are suspended too.
What survived?
Veteran owned certification and the preferences attached to it. Existing state contracts that carry MBE or WBE commitments also stay in force, and agencies still have to administer and enforce them.
Does this end city certification too?
The order applies to state agencies and doesn't automatically bind a municipality. We can't tell you the current status of the City of Indianapolis XBE program, because no public source we could reach confirms it after July 2026. Call the Office of Minority and Women Business Development at (317) 327-5262 and ask directly. A wrong answer here costs somebody a bid deadline, so we'd rather send you to the source than guess.
Should I pursue state MBE certification now?
There's nothing to apply for at the state level while the suspension stands. If certification matters to your pipeline, the city program and private sector supplier programs are the paths worth asking about.
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Work out your own figures before you spend anything
Every number on this page describes a population. Yours will differ. These run your actual arithmetic.
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FAQ
Questions we hear before kickoff. Direct answers, no guarantees.
That's your call and the research cuts both ways. Yelp data showed clear gains in clicks, calls and revenue after businesses added the attribute, while two later peer reviewed studies found average star ratings slipped slightly once ownership was visible. The gains were measured on small weekly baselines, so read the absolute numbers before you decide.
Google launched the attribute on July 30 2020 for verified US merchants, and it appears on Search and Maps. You add it through your Google Business Profile once the profile is verified. Google has published no figures on how many businesses use it, so anyone quoting an adoption rate is guessing.
It depends entirely on whether public contracts are a realistic part of your pipeline. City contract goals under Chapter 202 cover a meaningful share of spend, but the application asks for three years of business tax returns and an on site review, which is real work. Call the office at (317) 327-5262 and ask what the program looks like right now before you start.
Work backwards from a single job. Take your average job value, your gross margin, and your close rate on inquiries, and you get the most you can pay for one inquiry before the work stops being worth doing. The lead cost calculator runs it in about a minute, and that ceiling is a firmer guide than any industry benchmark.
Because a lot of writing on this topic recycles figures nobody can trace. Every number here names the survey or study it came from and the year it covers, so you can check it or hand it to someone who will. Where two credible studies disagree, both are on the page.
Talk it through
Start with the problem you actually have
Tell us what work you want more of and what's happening now when someone searches for it. If the answer is a free tool and a Business Profile fix, we'll say that.
- We'll tell you plainly if the work you need doesn't require an agency
- We promise the work, and we leave rankings, lead volume and timelines to whatever Google itself will state
- Reporting shows the inquiries and where they came from, including the ones that went nowhere