A small business guide to creating your marketing strategy

Marketing strategy doesn’t need to be complicated. For us a marketing strategy needs to answer three key questions: what is your current situation; what are you trying to achieve and how are you going to do this? For us the most important part of any marketing strategy is that everyone understands it, can recall it and it guides their actions.

We say this because we often speak to small businesses and marketing teams who are feeling overwhelmed by the lack of a clear plan or priorities. A wise person once said to us: “a strategy tells us just as much what we won’t do, as what we will do.” It makes it easier to identify what is going to help you meet your business goals and what is just noise that will distract you.

Define your business and goals

This is about understanding the what and why? Sometimes Mission and Visions can become a bit wordy or hard to conceptualise and bring to live. But what is your business elevator pitch if you had 60 seconds to explain what you did to a stranger in a lift, how would you describe your business. This is a good opportunity to reflect on whether this has changed over the last couple of years.

Defining your business goals: What are three things that you want your business to achieve in the next 2-3 years? We like focusing on three things, because it helps make it easy to remember and articulate. This could be areas of focus like: we want to grow our customer base, improve customer retention or develop a new service or product.

You can then turn these into SMART goals that you can use to guide your marketing activity, A SMART goal is something that is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. For example, it could be:

• We will grow our customer base by 20% in 2026.

• We will increase our customer retention rate from 5% to 10% in 2026.

• We will scope, develop and launch a new service in 2026.

We often see people put their marketing strategy objective as we will increase website traffic by x%. But this is more of a key performance indicator that can help you to understand whether you are on track to reach your wider business goals. By focusing on the result it can also help marketers to explain the contribution of their team to the wider organisation.

Understanding your target audience and competitors

Customer personas are a great way to bring your audience alive and help you focus your activity. A persona is a semi-fictional character you develop that describes the demographics, behaviours, interests and pain points of your key customer groups. You can also include information about where they spend time online or shops they are likely to visit.

Alongside this spend some time snooping on your competitors. Undertake a competitor analysis to understand who your competitors are, what they do well and where you can differentiate your business and stand out from the crowd.

Choose your marketing channels and tactics

This is about defining the how? There is a temptation with marketing to try and do everything, but the reality is that small businesses don’t have the resources or capacity to be everywhere! Therefore, we would recommend that you start with a few channels and do them well before expanding into other channels. We truly believe it is better to do one channel well, then four channels mediocre.

When choosing the main channels to be on consider where your target audience spends their time and how they behave on each. This will inform your selection and approach to each channel. We would recommend that you add a few bullet points against each channel to define how you intend to use that channel and why.

Create a content plan and calendar

Once you’ve selected your channels, we would recommend developing a content plan. Start with the role of each channel. For example, social media might work well for awareness, blogs on your website could be good for consideration and email marketing for decision making. Thinking through the role of each channel in the customer journey can help you to really think through your messaging and the response you want to create.

We would also recommend creating 3-5 content pillars. These are broad categories that can provide your content some focus. For example, at Marketing Moments we have three pillars small business marketing support, strategic marketing and understanding the impact of digital innovation on marketing. We then make sure anything we post on our channels aligns with these categories. It helps us to create a consistent narrative.

Consistency is key to executing a content plan, so we would recommend keeping a content calendar and on a monthly basis sitting down and thinking about what you are going to post, where and when. To save yourself time use scheduling tools.

Measure, analyse and adapt

We like to think of a strategy as a living breathing document that can be adapted or change with you. This is why measuring impact is so important. It will enable you to have controls in place that tell you when and what to do if things are not going to plan. We would recommend setting KPIs that sit underneath the SMART Objectives you set in stage 1 of this blog.

For example, if we stick with the objective: We will grow our customer base by 20% in 2026. Then some KPIs could be:

• Say this 20% increase was 100 people over the year, we could then break this into a quarterly KPI where we say we need to grow by 25 people a quarter.

• We could also work back from a conversion rate so if you have a 5% conversion rate then you need 500 additional website visitors a quarter

• And you can also do similar by looking at reach needed on your channels to drive that increase.

We would recommend setting a time to regularly review this data and see what is working and what isn’t. If you’re getting more success on a particular channel for example you might want to dial this up and reduce the effort into channels that aren’t working as hard for you.

We hope that you’ve found this blog useful and full of tips and tricks to help you define your small business marketing strategy. Get in touch if you would like to find out how we could help your small business.