A marketing strategy for a small business is six decisions. Who you want more of. What you say to them. How you capture them when they show up. Where you spend. How much. What you measure.

Make those six on purpose and you've got a strategy. Skip them and you've got activity.

I've built this plan for companies at $3M and run it inside companies at $50M. The decisions don't change with size. Only the budget does.

What a marketing strategy for a small business is, and isn't

A strategy is the set of choices about where to compete and how. A plan is the calendar that comes after. A tactic is one thing on the calendar.

Most small businesses have tactics, no plan, and a strategy living in the owner's head. Which is why it changes every time a vendor calls.

It's not a document you write once. It's not a list of channels. And it's not the agency's job. The agency executes. The strategy is yours until you hire somebody senior enough to own it, which I'll get to at the end. Want the longer history of how I've thought about this? The marketing basics post from 2019 still holds up. This is the current version.

Decision 1: Who you want more of

Not who buys from you. Who you want more of.

Every business has a customer who pays on time, refers others, and doesn't call at nine at night. Describe that customer in a paragraph. What they run, what they're trying to fix, what they searched for, what almost stopped them from calling.

Then say who you don't want. Owners skip this step because it feels like turning away money. It's the opposite. A message aimed at everybody lands on nobody, and the wrong customers are the ones eating your margin.

Decision 2: What you say

One sentence. What you do, for whom, and why you instead of the other three bids. If it could be any competitor's tagline, it fails. "Quality work at a fair price" is what everybody says. "Kitchen remodels for Chandler homeowners, finished on the date we promised" is a choice.

The headline is the most important element on any page you'll ever publish, and it should be this sentence or a close cousin. I wrote a whole piece on how a home page should be built around it.

Decision 3: Fix capture before you buy traffic

Cheapest lead you'll ever get, and almost nobody does it first. Every call, every form, every walk-in goes into one place, and somebody follows up the same day. That's the entire rule.

Most small businesses lose a third of their inquiries right here. The voicemail nobody returns, the contact form that emails an inbox nobody checks, the estimate that goes out four days late. Fix it and you'll find leads you were already paying for. A simple CRM and a rule about response time is all it takes. Don't spend a dollar on ads until this is done.

Decision 4: Two channels, not eight

Pick the two channels where the customer from Decision 1 actually looks. Not the two you like. Not the two your agency sells.

For most local service businesses that's Google search plus reputation, meaning a Google Business Profile with real, recent reviews. For a business selling to other businesses it's usually referral systems plus one outbound channel.

Run two well for six months before adding a third. Eight channels run badly is the most common setup I walk into, and the fix is always subtraction. When HiLine Homes went from 12 to 20 leads a week per office to 150 to 200, it was a handful of channels run hard, not a dozen run lightly.

Decision 5: A budget, worked backward

Forget percentage of revenue. It tells you nothing about your business.

Work backward instead. How many customers do you need next year? At your close rate, how many qualified leads is that? What does a qualified lead cost in your market and channel? Multiply. That's the budget, and it's tied to work you can actually deliver.

The number is almost always less than owners fear and more than they're currently spending on things producing nothing. It also gives you something a percentage never will: a reason to stop spending on a channel when its cost per lead runs past the math.

Decision 6: Two numbers

Cost per qualified lead. Cost per new customer. That's the whole dashboard.

Impressions, followers, and engagement are what an agency reports when the two real numbers look bad.

Review monthly. When a channel's cost per customer runs past what that customer is worth, cut it. When one's under, feed it. That's the strategy doing its job.

Turning the strategy into a marketing plan for a small business

The plan is the calendar. Take the six decisions and put dates on them. Which month the CRM goes in and who owns follow-up. Which week the Google profile gets rebuilt and the review request enters the closing process. When the two channels launch, what they cost, and the date you look at the two numbers.

It fits on one page. If your marketing plan runs longer than that, it's either padding or a list of tactics with no decisions behind it. The startup guide I wrote years ago has a longer checklist of tactics if you want one. Use it after the six decisions, not instead of them.

The mistakes I see most

Buying traffic before capture is fixed. The ads work and the leads die in a voicemail box.

Changing the strategy every quarter. Six months is the minimum before you can judge a channel. Most owners bail at eight weeks.

Letting the agency set the strategy. They'll set the one that sells the most of what they do. That's not malice, that's their business model.

Confusing a new website with a strategy. A website is a tactic. A good one executes the six decisions. A bad one is a brochure with a logo and a phone number.

Who owns it

Every one of these decisions is simple. None of them happen without one person accountable every week. In most small businesses that person is the owner, doing it at night, between everything else. That's the real reason the strategy drifts.

The fix is a person, not a document. For some companies that's a marketing director instead of a manager. For most businesses in the $5M to $50M range it's a senior person on part-time hours: a fractional marketing director when the work is running the plan, or a fractional CMO when it's setting it. If you searched for a marketing consultant for small business, that's the same seat with a plainer name.

Start with Decision 3 this week. Costs nothing, and it's the one that pays first.

  • A marketing strategy for a small business is six decisions: who you want more of, what you say, how you capture them, where you spend, how much, and what you measure.
  • Fix capture before you buy traffic. Most small businesses lose a third of their inquiries to slow or missing follow-up.
  • Two channels run well for six months beat eight run badly. Budget by working backward from customers needed, not a percentage of revenue.
  • The dashboard is two numbers: cost per qualified lead and cost per new customer. The plan is the one-page calendar that puts dates on the six decisions.
  • Strategy drifts when nobody owns it. The fix is a person, full-time or fractional, not a longer document.