How to
How to Write a Small Business Marketing Plan (Without an MBA)
Most small business marketing is not bad, it is random. A burst of posting in January, an ad campaign when things go quiet, a website refresh when a competitor gets one. Each activity is defensible. Together they add up to noise.
A marketing plan fixes the randomness, and it does not need to be a 40 page document. The plans we build for clients across the UK fit on a couple of pages, because a plan you can hold in your head is a plan that actually gets followed. Here is the whole process, step by step.
Step 1: pick one number to move
Not five. One. "Twenty qualified enquiries a month by December" or "grow repeat orders by 25 percent". The single number forces every later decision: a plan chasing enquiries looks different from a plan chasing repeat business.
Make it a number that ends in money. Followers, likes and traffic are means, not ends, and plans built on them drift.
Step 2: describe your best customer, specifically
Not "homeowners aged 30 to 60". Think of the last five customers you were glad to have. What did they have in common? What were they trying to sort out? What nearly stopped them buying? Where did they first hear of you?
Write one honest paragraph. Every piece of marketing you produce afterwards is aimed at that paragraph, which is what makes it land. Marketing aimed at everyone reads like it.
Step 3: write your one-liner
One sentence: who you help, what changes for them, and why you over the next option. "We give ambitious UK businesses a full marketing department without the payroll" is ours. It is on everything we produce, which is rather the point.
The test of a good one-liner is that a stranger could repeat it after hearing it once. If yours needs a breath in the middle, keep cutting.
Step 4: choose three channels, and only three
The most expensive mistake in small business marketing is being everywhere thinly. Our default trio, which works for most UK service businesses:
- One channel to be found: search. Your Google Business Profile and website answering the searches your buyers make. This captures people already looking.
- One channel to be remembered: email. A monthly send to customers and prospects, because attention you own beats attention you rent.
- One channel to be discovered: the social platform your customers genuinely use, or paid ads if you need volume quickly.
Which three depends on your market, and it is fine to be wrong at first. It is not fine to run seven channels so thinly that none of them can work.
Step 5: set a budget you will actually sustain
The UK benchmark is 5 to 10 percent of turnover. The more useful exercise: work out what a customer is worth to you over a few years, then decide what you would happily pay to win one. That number tells you whether a £600 a month plan or a £2,500 a month plan is rational, and it turns marketing from a cost into an equation.
Whatever the number, commit to it for six months. Marketing spend that switches off every quiet month never compounds. If you are weighing up doing this in-house versus outsourcing it, our piece on the £55,000 question runs the numbers on both.
Step 6: turn it into a 90 day calendar
Annual plans are fiction. Plan hard for 90 days: what goes out each week, on which channel, who does it, aimed at which part of the goal. Then review, keep what worked, kill what did not, and plan the next 90.
The whole plan on one page: one number to move, one paragraph on the customer, one sentence of positioning, three channels, a budget you can sustain, a 90 day calendar and a monthly half-hour with the numbers. That is genuinely it. The value is not in the document, it is in the discipline.
Step 7: measure like an owner, not a marketer
Once a month, thirty minutes, three questions. How many enquiries or sales came in, and from where? What did we spend? What is that per customer won? Google Analytics and a phone log cover most of it. The trend matters more than any single month.
If you would rather have all of this built and run for you, that is what our retainers are: the plan, the channels and the reporting, from £1,500 a month on our pricing page. And if you want to sharpen one channel first, our free guides cover local SEO, social ads and content planning step by step.