How to create a marketing strategy for a small business

Search for “how to create a marketing strategy” and page one is government business-advice pages, a university blog, software companies and a Reddit thread. They agree on the headings and disagree on almost everything else, and nearly all of them describe a plan for a company with a marketing department.

A small business has a different constraint. The strategy has to be something one or two people can actually carry out next to the real work. So the useful question is not “what should a complete strategy contain” but “what is the smallest plan that will move the numbers, and how will you know?”

What is a marketing strategy?

A marketing strategy is a set of choices: who you are trying to reach, what you want them to believe about you, which channels you will use to reach them, and how you will tell whether it worked. A plan is the schedule that carries the strategy out. The strategy comes first, because a calendar full of activity without those choices is just busyness.

What are the steps of a marketing strategy?

1. Start from where the business really is. Not the strategy someone tried last year, the actual current picture: where enquiries come from today, which of them turn into customers, and what the website and accounts already do. Most strategies skip this and pay for it later.
2. Decide who you are for, and what sets you apart. One audience and one difference worth saying beats a message that tries to suit everyone.
3. Choose the channels. This is where small businesses lose most of their budget, and it gets its own section below.
4. Size it to what you can execute. A roadmap the business cannot keep up is worse than a smaller one it can. Be honest about hours as well as money.
5. Decide what “working” means before you begin. Pick the few numbers that will tell you, such as enquiries, bookings or the cost of each, and agree what a good month looks like.
6. Review and adjust. Read the results on a schedule and change the plan when the evidence says to, rather than defending it. Often the cheapest improvement is not more traffic but getting more of the visitors you already have to act, which is what conversion optimisation is for.

How do you choose which channels to use?

Do not use every channel by default. Match the channel to where your buyers actually look when they are ready to buy, and to what you can sustain.

Search, whether organic or paid, reaches people who are already looking, so it suits businesses where customers search before they buy. Social media reaches people before they are looking, so it suits businesses where visibility and trust build over time. Email works on the list you already own. Each takes ongoing effort, and a profile that goes quiet costs more credibility than no profile at all.

For many small businesses the honest answer is one or two channels done properly, not five done thinly. Leaving a channel out is a strategic decision, not a gap.

Sometimes the evidence changes which format of a channel is right. The Google Ads search campaigns for Koolcube, an online store, were performing badly, so the budget moved to Shopping ads, which show the product with its photo and price to people already searching to buy. Sales went up while spend came down. As a test, the budget was cut by 50%, and it stayed there: the cost per sale stayed low, and spending more was not bringing in more sales, because the campaign was already reaching most of the people looking for those products. The decision was to follow what the numbers said about that product, not to defend the format the plan started with.

Do you need a plan as well as a strategy?

Yes, but a short one. Once the choices above are made, the plan is just what happens when: what is published, which campaigns run, when the numbers are reviewed. It should fit on a page and be updated more often than it is rewritten.

Why measurement belongs at the start

A strategy you cannot measure is an opinion, and the way it usually fails is quiet: everyone is busy, nobody can say whether it is working. That is also where a banner-gated analytics tool misleads, because decisions get made on the visitors who accepted cookies rather than your whole audience.

A Bordeaux tanning studio had pageviews and follower counts but little sense of who its content was actually reaching. Once cookieless analytics showed which pages and posts were earning attention, what the studio published and promoted followed from that, instead of from a guess. The strategy did not get bigger. It got better aimed.

Where to start

Write down, in a few lines, where your enquiries come from today and how you know. If you cannot answer that, you have found step one. Then choose the single channel you could run well for the next three months and the one number that will tell you whether it worked.

If you would rather work it out with someone alongside you until you no longer need them, that is what marketing strategy at Doppio is. And since the plan stands or falls on being able to read the results, the analytics usually comes first, with the content following from what it shows.