Marketing strategy
Marketing strategy for owner-operated businesses
Help deciding where to put your marketing time and money, for owner-operated businesses.
What this is
Most small businesses do not have a marketing problem so much as an allocation problem. There is some money, a limited amount of the owner's time, and a dozen things that could be done with them.
This is the conversation about which ones, and in what order.
What you get
What gets worked through
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01
Where your work actually comes from now
Referrals, repeat customers, search, a van with a phone number on it. Owners are often wrong about this, and getting it right changes the whole conversation.
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02
What you are already paying for
Directory subscriptions, lead-generation services, an agency retainer, print. There is usually something being paid for out of habit that stopped producing a while ago.
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03
What the work is worth
A rough sense of what a customer is worth to you over time. Without it there is no way to judge whether a cost is sensible, and most decisions become guesses.
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04
Where the gaps are
The obvious things not being done. Frequently unglamorous: no reviews being asked for, a profile half filled in, a phone number nobody answers on a Friday.
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05
An order to do things in
What to do first, what to stop, and what to leave alone this year. A plan that fits the time you actually have rather than the time a marketing plan assumes.
This page is allowed to tell you not to buy anything
That matters, because everything else on this site is something I sell. If the honest answer for your business is that your website is fine, your profile is fine, and your problem is that you are not asking for reviews, then that is the advice and it costs you nothing to act on.
I would rather be the person who told you that than the one who sold you a package. The value of strategy advice from someone who also does the work depends entirely on their willingness to say the work is not needed.
What it costs
Quoted after a free consult, because what it takes depends entirely on what you already have. Book a call, I will tell you what is involved, and you get a number before anything starts. Website plan details are on the pricing page.
Starts with a free consult. Whether it goes further depends on how much work an honest answer needs, and you will know the cost before anything begins.
How this differs
This is channel-agnostic and sits above the rest. SEO consulting goes deep on one channel and assumes it is the right one.
A website strategy session is narrower still: planning the pages and structure of a specific site before it gets built.
Questions
What people ask
Will you tell me to spend money with you?
Only where I genuinely think it is the right call, and the conversation is worth having precisely because that is not always the answer. If your money is better spent elsewhere, that is what you will hear.
Can you advise on things you do not sell?
On where they fit and whether they are worth your attention, yes. On running a channel I do not work in, I will tell you that you need someone else rather than improvising.
I have almost no budget. Is this worth it?
Then the conversation is mostly about your time rather than your money, and it is arguably more useful. The highest-return things available to most small businesses cost nothing but attention.
How is this different from a sales call?
A sales call ends with a proposal. This ends with a plan, and the plan is allowed to say that nothing should be bought.
Work out where the money should go
Tell me what is going on and I will tell you whether this is what you actually need. No pitch deck and no pressure.
Book a free consult