Guide
A small business marketing strategy you'll actually use.
Most small businesses don't need more marketing. They need the marketing they're already doing to point the same way. This is the order I work in, written out so you can do it yourself if you'd rather.
Here's the pattern I see, over and over. A business owner is good at the thing they do. Genuinely good. Then the website gets built by a cousin, the logo comes from whoever was cheapest that month, someone says "you should be on TikTok," and three years later there are six versions of the business online and none of them agree.
Nothing there was a mistake exactly. It just happened in the wrong order. A strategy isn't a fancier version of that work, it's the thing that decides which work is worth doing at all.
Five steps
The order that actually works.
- 01
Be honest about where you are
Not the version you'd put on a grant application. What's working, what's quietly not, what you've been avoiding since spring. A SWOT sounds like business-school homework, but written honestly it's the fastest hour you'll spend. Most owners already know the answers. They've just never written them down in one place.
- 02
Go and look at your competitors
Properly. Open five of them, book their intro call, read their pricing page, sign up for their newsletter. You'll find two things: something they do better than you, and a gap none of them have covered. The gap is your positioning. It's usually sitting there in plain sight because everyone copied each other instead of looking.
- 03
Pick who you're for, and say it out loud
"Anyone who needs my service" is not an audience, it's a hope. When you name the person, everything downstream gets easier: what your homepage says first, which photos you use, what you post, which enquiries you turn down without feeling bad about it.
- 04
Write the sentence
One sentence that says what you do, who it's for, and why you and not the other five. If you can't say it without a run-up, your website can't either. This is the piece most small businesses skip, and it's the piece that makes every other decision take ten minutes instead of three weeks.
- 05
Put it in order, ninety days at a time
A strategy that lists nineteen things is a to-do list wearing a suit. Pick what happens in the next ninety days, in order, with a name against each one. Everything else goes on a later list where it can't guilt you. Then do the first thing.
What to skip, at least for now
Being on every platform. A rebrand, if your current one is only tired rather than wrong. Paid ads before your website can hold the traffic. A newsletter you'll write twice. None of these are bad ideas. They're just expensive ways to find out you hadn't decided anything yet.
How to tell it's working
You'll notice it in small ways first. Writing a post takes ten minutes instead of an afternoon. You turn down an enquiry that isn't right and don't lie awake about it. Someone describes your business back to you using your own words. That's the point where it stops being a document and starts being how the business runs.
If you'd rather not do this yourself
Fair enough. That's what the Blueprint is: the SWOT, the competitor matrix, the positioning and a ninety-day roadmap, done properly and handed over as one plan you can act on. Build it with me afterwards or take it elsewhere. It's yours either way.
Questions I get asked
The short answers.
How long should a marketing strategy be?
Short enough that you'll actually read it again. Mine run about ten to fifteen pages, and most of that is the research behind the decisions. If it needs a table of contents, it's a document nobody will use.
Do I need a strategy before a new website?
Yes, and I'll say that even when it costs me the faster sale. A website is a set of decisions made visible. Without the decisions, you're paying someone to guess, and you'll be paying again in eighteen months.
How much should a small business spend on marketing?
Less than you think, if you spend it in the right order. Most of the waste I see isn't overspending, it's spending on the fifth thing before the first thing works.
How often should I redo it?
Revisit the roadmap every quarter. Redo the whole thing when the business genuinely changes: new service, new audience, new competitor who's actually good.
Next step
Want the thinking done for you?
Tell me what needs sorting and I'll tell you straight whether the Blueprint is the right place to start.