Marketing strategy for a small and medium-sized company: where to start

A marketing strategy for a small business starts with three things: identifying who your customer is, what sets you apart, and how to know that the efforts are resulting in inquiries. Only then do you choose the channels. With a limited budget, the order of priority is more important than the number of actions.

Reading time: 10 min · Strategy · Commplace® since 1996

Marketing strategy for a small business: where to start

A small company has different problems than a corporation. It doesn’t have a marketing department, and often there isn’t a person who works full-time on it; you have to spend the budget so that it brings in inquiries in months, not years. Therefore, the marketing strategy for a small company must be simple, narrow, and based on what already works.

We’ll start with three questions. Who buys from you and why? Where do your customers come from today? What makes them choose you over someone else? The answers take an hour, and if you have few customers, one afternoon is enough. Write them down in a simple table: client, source, service, value, reason for choosing. After ten rows, you’ll see patterns you haven’t seen before. The answers take an hour, and they allow you to rule out most activities that usually drain the budget without producing any results.

Next, we show five steps, a priority list, an example of calculation, and situations where it is better not to hire an agency.

Marketing for a small business: five steps to get started

The following sequence works in service and manufacturing companies where sales are based on talking to the customer. It does not require specialized knowledge; it just requires discipline.

1. List your last ten customers: who they are, where they came from, what they bought and why they chose you.
2. Formulate one sentence that answers the question „why you?”. Test it with three clients.
3. Organize your website so that it clearly states what you offer, for whom, and how to contact you.
4. Choose one or two channels that, according to your data, bring in inquiries, and only then act on them.
5. Set a simple measurement: how many inquiries per month, from where, and how many of them end in a contract.

Why do we start with customers, not with channels?

Many companies start by asking „should I create a profile on a social media platform?”. That is the wrong question in the first place. A channel is a tool, not a goal. If you don’t know who is buying from you, you don’t know where to look for them. Talking to five customers gives more than a week of watching other people’s campaigns.

Limited marketing budget: what to do first

With a limited marketing budget, every penny must be justified. Instead of spreading funds out over everything, organize your efforts according to two questions: how closely they relate to the query and how quickly it can be verified. The following table helps you set the order.

Pay attention to the role of opinions and references. In a small company, trust is of particular importance because customers buy from people they can verify. A simple system: after completing each order, ask the client for a short opinion and their consent to use it. After a year, you have several dozen reliable testimonials that appear on the website and in the company's brochure.

The priorities in the table are suggestions for adjustment. Your industry and your customers may require a different order. What matters is the thinking itself: first the foundation, then acceleration.

First marketing activities: an example of calculation

The following calculation is an illustrative example with assumptions. It does not describe any specific company, and you can replace the numbers with your own.

Let’s say a small service company has 3,000 PLN per month for marketing. Today it has about 8 inquiries per month, of which 5 are from referrals and 3 are from the website. On average, one in four inquiries ends in a contract, and the average value of an order is 6,000 PLN net.

Note that the account does not involve miracles. With such assumptions, the return from the first quarter is modest, and the real profit appears later, when the content and opinions start to work without additional costs. Therefore, in small companies it is worth measuring not only the revenue from the month, but also the durability of the effect.

The company decides to allocate the first three months to organizing: PLN 1,000 per month for improving the website and business card, PLN 1,000 for three articles answering customer questions, and PLN 1,000 for collecting reviews and references. Suppose that after three months of inquiries from the website, there are 3 to 5 per month. That’s two additional inquiries, one of which ends in a contract, or about half a contract per month, for a revenue of about PLN 3,000. It’s not much, but each additional article and each review continues to work without additional costs.

How to check that this is the result of actions? The company records the status before the change and compares it with the period after the change, and at the same time records events that could have changed the outcome, for example a season or one large order. Only repeated growth over several months justifies increasing the budget.

Marketing strategy for SMEs: how to choose channels

Remember that in a small business, time resources are just as limited as money. One well-managed channel provides more than three poorly managed ones. Write down how many hours per week you can devote to marketing and choose channels based on that number.

The marketing strategy for SMEs, or small and medium-sized enterprises, chooses channels based on where your customers are looking for information, not on fashion trends. A few questions help narrow down the choice.

• Where does the customer look for a supplier: in a search engine, from friends, at industry events, in industry media?
• How much time do you have to dedicate to regular operations: a channel that requires daily presence does not fit a company without someone dedicated to it.
• What is the value of a single agreement: with a high value, it pays to invest in content and relationships; with a low value, in quick, simple channels.
• What already works: develop it, instead of starting from scratch.

Channels that are worth considering first

For many service companies, this will include a website with a clear offer, a business card in the search engine with reviews, content that answers customers' questions, and relationships with local and industry media. A broader discussion of content can be found in the article about content marketing strategy for B2B companies, and about the presence on LinkedIn in the text about social media strategies for B2B companies.

The most common mistakes made by small businesses in their first actions

From experience working with companies of various sizes, several recurring mistakes emerge. These are general patterns, not descriptions of specific companies.

The first mistake is dispersion: a profile on several portals, a blog, a newsletter, and advertising at the same time, and none of the channels gets enough attention to work. The second is lack of measurement: the company knows that „something is happening,” but it doesn’t know what brought the customer. The third is buying tools before determining the goal, because the automation program won’t help if it’s not clear to whom and for what the writing is being done.

• Starting with advertising when the site doesn’t clearly say what you’re offering.
• Copying the actions of a competitor that has a different budget and different customers.
• Lack of a responsible person: „side-by-side” marketing doesn’t work.
• Expecting the result after a month: content and opinions build the effect over months.
• Increasing the budget too early, before you see that the first actions are working.

How Commplace works with small and medium-sized companies

Commplace has been operating since 1996, that is, for 30 years. We work like a doctor: diagnosis, tests, plan, implementation, and control. For a smaller company, this means a shorter diagnosis, a narrower plan, and focusing on a few actions that deliver the best results quickly. We do not sell a „one-size-fits-all” package.

We describe the activities on the internet on the website. online marketing. If you want to know how much it costs just to develop a strategy, read on. How much does a marketing strategy cost?. Pricing after a brief conversation and an initial diagnosis, as the scope depends on your situation.

We do not impose tools that the company does not need. If a sheet and a well-set page are enough, we stay with the sheet and page. We return after a few months for a review and show what has changed compared to the starting point.

What do you get? A diagnosis with recommendations, a plan of several actions with deadlines and metrics, support in implementation, and control of results. The decisions about the direction are yours.

When a small company can manage without an agency

Many small businesses don’t need an agency at the beginning. If you sell mainly on referrals, you have time to manage the website and talk to customers, and your problem is more likely a lack of time than a lack of knowledge. A good first step would be to self-organize these five steps. You’ll only pay for what you can’t do yourself.

The agency makes sense when there is a lack of questions despite the efforts, when you don’t know what is the cause, or when you are planning development and want to avoid costly attempts. Then a short diagnosis will save the budget on activities that have no chance of working. It will also be helpful to have a text about marketing plan for the year.

Source: preparation by the Commplace® editorial team. The numerical examples are illustrative and based on explicit assumptions; they do not constitute legal advice or guarantees of results.