Small business marketing: how to know what’s worth your time and money
Key takeaways
Start with who you're trying to reach and what you actually need your marketing to achieve.
Get the foundations right before adding more. Your website, Google Business Profile and relevant social channels don't need to be perfect, but they need to give people somewhere to learn more about your business.
You don't need to be everywhere. Focus your time and money on the places your customers actually spend their time.
Judge each part of your marketing against the job it's there to do. Not every channel needs to generate an immediate sale to be valuable.
Keep experimenting. Your business, customers and marketing will change, and very few marketing decisions are permanent.
No one expects marketing a small business to be easy. It takes time, money and thought to keep it moving, all while there’s still a business to run. In a small business, marketing is often managed by one or two people who are responsible for plenty of other parts of the business too. The person planning a campaign or making a marketing decision might also be the person a customer is waiting to hear back from that afternoon, or the person needed to keep a project moving.
Then there are the decisions about where to focus, what’s worth investing in and what actually makes sense for your business. There’s rarely one clear answer, and what works well for one business might not work for another. But making those decisions becomes a lot easier when you know what you actually need your marketing to do.
Start with what you need your marketing to do
Before deciding whether you should be posting more on social media, investing in Google Ads, sending emails or trying something completely different, start with a few basic questions. Who are you trying to reach? What do you want your marketing to achieve? And what are you already doing? The answers give you something to assess your marketing against.
If you want more enquiries from homeowners in a particular area, your approach will look different from a business trying to build relationships with commercial builders across Melbourne. A business trying to generate leads now might need something different again from one using marketing to stay in front of existing customers over a longer sales cycle. Without that clarity, it's easy to end up investing in individual marketing activities without really knowing why they're there.
Get the foundations in place before adding more
There's no shortage of things you can spend your marketing budget on, but doing more isn't necessarily the place to start. Before adding another campaign or channel, make sure the foundations are there to support it.
For most small businesses, that means having a website that clearly explains who you are and what you do, an up-to-date Google Business Profile and a presence on the social platforms that are relevant to your customers. None of those things need to be enormous or perfect. They just need to give someone enough information to take the next step.
This becomes particularly important when you're paying to put the business in front of more people. If someone discovers you through an Instagram or Facebook ad, for example, they might want to look at your social media before making an inquiry. Someone else might Google the business, read your reviews and visit your website. If those foundations aren't there, you're potentially paying to generate interest without giving people enough to work out whether your business is right for them. Get the basics in place first, then you have something to build on.
Meet your customers where they already are
There will always be another platform someone says your business should be using, but that doesn't mean you need to be there. A local trade business looking for homeowner enquiries doesn't need the same marketing presence as an online retailer selling across Australia. A business trying to reach other businesses might find its customers are far more active on LinkedIn than Instagram.
The question isn't whether a platform works. It's whether it makes sense for the people you're trying to reach. Once you know who your ideal customer is, look at how they find businesses like yours, where they spend their time and what information they're likely to want before making a decision. Then focus your time and budget there. There will always be more you could be doing, but doing enough doesn't have to mean doing everything.
Look at whether each part of your marketing is doing its job
One of the difficult things about marketing is that not everything has the same job. Some activity is designed to generate an enquiry relatively quickly, while other marketing is there to build awareness, stay in front of potential customers or nurture people who aren't ready to buy yet. That means asking whether your marketing is "working" can sometimes be too broad a question. Instead, look at each part of it and ask what it's there to do.
If you're running a lead generation campaign, how many enquiries is it generating and are they the right enquiries? If you're sending regular emails to nurture potential customers, are people opening them, clicking through and staying subscribed? If you're creating social media content to build familiarity with your business, are the right people seeing it, engaging with it and learning more about what you do?
You don't need complicated reporting to start getting a better picture. Even consistently asking new customers how they found you and tracking whether an enquiry turned into a customer can tell you a lot over time. Once you know what something is contributing, it becomes much easier to decide whether to keep doing it, change it or put that time and money somewhere else.
Don't only show the finished product
For businesses that build, make and create, one of the easiest places to find marketing opportunities is in the work you're already doing. It's easy to wait until a project is finished, everything has been cleaned up and you have something polished to photograph, but there's plenty worth showing before you get to that point.
Take people through the process. Show the work happening on site, the decisions being made, the problems being solved and the people behind the business. The finished result shows what you can deliver, while the process helps people understand how you work and gives them a reason to follow along before there's a finished result to share.
It doesn't all need to look perfect. Sometimes the parts of the business that feel too ordinary to you are exactly the parts a potential customer hasn't seen before.
Make sure your marketing keeps up with the business
A marketing approach can work well for years and still eventually need to change because the business around it changes. Your services might evolve, your team might grow, the type or size of projects you want might change, and your processes improve. Your work gets better and what separates you from your competitors can become clearer.
Even if you're still providing broadly the same service to the same type of customer, the business you're marketing today probably isn't exactly the business you were marketing a few years ago. Your marketing needs to keep up with that.
It's also why being busy isn't necessarily a reason to stop marketing. When the work is coming in, marketing can quickly move down the priority list, but being busy today doesn't tell you what your pipeline will look like in three, six or twelve months. Marketing often takes time to influence an inquiry or sale, so maintaining it when things are busy can help you stay visible and continue building demand rather than waiting until work slows down to start marketing again.
Treat marketing as an experiment
There isn't one marketing mix that every small business should follow, and you don't need to know with absolute certainty that something will work before you try it. Treat marketing as an experiment. Have a reason for trying something, give it enough time to learn from it, look at what happened and decide what comes next.
If it's working, keep going. If it's showing promise, tweak it. If it's clearly not reaching the right people or doing what you introduced it to do, put that time and money somewhere else. Very few marketing decisions are permanent, and as your customers, business and goals change, your marketing can change with them.
So, what’s actually going on?
Small business marketing can feel difficult because there are always more things you could be doing and rarely enough time or budget to do all of them. The answer isn't necessarily more marketing.
Start with the people you're trying to reach and what you need your marketing to achieve. Make sure the foundations are there, focus on the channels that make sense for your customers, understand what each part of your marketing is contributing and be willing to change things as you learn.
Your marketing doesn't need to be bigger or more complicated to get better. It needs to make sense for the business you're actually running. If you're looking at your own marketing and wondering how to turn that into a longer-term approach, we've explored the next step in more detail in our blog: How to build a marketing plan that actually lasts.
