Marketing for small businesses - without it draining the life out of you
There’s a version of marketing that assumes you have a team, a budget, a content strategy and at least a full day a week to dedicate to it. It’s the version most of the advice is written for but if you’re running everything yourself, it’s also completely useless to you.
Your values are the strategy. Marketing is the work.
Most marketing advice is designed for volume. Loud, frequent, built for scale. For most small service businesses, that model feels completely wrong, and that discomfort is useful information. It’s pointing you toward better marketing, not away from it.
Marketing that works for a trust-based business is honest, specific and genuinely useful. It lets potential clients see themselves in what you do, the outcome they’re working toward, the thing they want to change, the person they want to feel like on the other side of working with you. It also shows them that you know what you’re talking about. Expertise matters, and marketing is part of how you demonstrate it. Good marketing doesn’t push. It helps people recognise that you understand their situation, that you can help, and that you’re the right person to do it.
When your values are clear, the marketing follows. You don’t have to perform. You just have to show up honestly, and do it consistently.
Social media: start here, but don’t stop here
It’s free, accessible and a reasonable place to begin. But for most local service businesses, it’s one tool, not the whole strategy.
A few things that help early on:
Ask friends, family and former colleagues to like, share and comment. It extends your reach to people who don’t know you yet. Most people are happy to help if you ask.
Research where your audience actually spends time before spreading yourself across every platform. One platform done well beats five done adequately.
The same content can work across platforms with small adjustments. LinkedIn rewards longer and more considered, Instagram is visual, Facebook communities respond to conversational.
Keep your visual branding consistent across everything, the same colours, fonts and style of imagery. It makes your content instantly recognisable and gives your presence a coherence that builds familiarity over time. (I had a client once who became completely obsessed with how her posts looked on the Instagram grid and the order of colours - possibly a tad too far!)
In Facebook groups, including local community groups, don’t sell. Be genuinely useful. Answer questions. Be yourself. When people want to find out more about you, make sure your business name and website are in your profile ‘About’ so they can (you can also add a link to your website here).
Start with nine posts and don’t think about who’s reading.
The goal is to build something that exists, so when someone finds you, there’s something to find. And if you’re further along and have already put out a hundred posts, it’s never too late to go back to basics. These nine work at any stage.
I worked with a new franchise business (Physiotherapist) on exactly this when they were just getting started. Their first nine posts on Instagram are a good example of what I’m talking about: https://www.instagram.com/home.links.physio.croydon/
Introduce yourself, the real reason you do this work, not the CV version
Describe your business and who it’s for
Explain one specific service (include the outcome)
Talk about outcomes, not what you do, but what changes for someone because of it
Share your experience or a relevant qualification, with a photo if you have one
Post a testimonial (with permission). One genuine sentence from a real person is worth more than any amount of self-promotion
Share a picture from your working day
Record a short video, sixty seconds of you talking about something you know
Share something useful from someone else, with a genuine note about why
Two frameworks for when you feel lost about what to post
Jab, jab, jab, right hook (Gary Vaynerchuk): the jabs are the giving: useful posts, honest answers, content that offers something without asking for anything back. The right hook is the ask: book a call, get in touch, come to the event. Most new businesses skip straight to the hook. Trust has to come first.
Educate, experience, enrol: educate through useful content, let people experience what it’s like to work with you through a free call or workshop, and enrol them when they’re ready. Building trust takes time and that’s exactly what we’re aiming for, to be genuinely trusted in your area and your field. Just remember that you do have to make the ask eventually.
Local presence matters as much as online
For most local service businesses, showing up in person is at least as valuable as showing up online.
Attend local networking events
Offer a free taster session, short workshop or talk
Create a lead magnet, a useful guide, checklist or resource that gives people a reason to stay in touch and starts building your email list, which you own regardless of what any algorithm does
People who've met you, heard you speak, or attended something you've run already know you're worth listening to. They're partway to becoming clients before you've even had a conversation.
Build something you own: your email list
Social media accounts can change their algorithm, restrict your reach or disappear entirely. Everything you build there is borrowed.
Your email list is yours. It’s a direct line to people who have actively chosen to hear from you, a warm audience that no platform can take away. Every piece of content you put out, every event you attend, every free resource you offer is an opportunity to grow it.
It doesn’t need to be big to be valuable. A small list of the right people, people who know who you are and have chosen to stay in touch, is worth considerably more than a large following of people who half-remember your name.
There’s a lot more to say about how to build and use it well, and I’ll cover that in a future article.
Do this in a way that keeps you well
A realistic week might be one piece of content, a handful of genuine comments on other people’s posts, and one real conversation with someone in a relevant field. That’s enough. It’s also something you can actually sustain.
Some people thrive with a content calendar. Others find the guilt of not sticking to one does more damage than the inconsistency it was meant to fix. Only you know which one you are.
There are no guarantees. Some things will land, some won’t, and it’s rarely the ones you expect. You’re testing what works, and that takes time. (A picture of my dogs consistently outperforms posts I’ve spent considerably longer on. A post I shared about a job vacancy, nothing to do with my business, just trying to help someone out, got more views and responses than anything else I’ve put out. You never know who is connected to who, and helping people where I can is genuinely one of my values. It tends to come back around.)
Your values are already doing marketing work you’re probably not giving yourself credit for. Every time you refer someone on because it’s outside your scope. Every time you’re honest about what you can and can’t do. Every time you explain something clearly even when you’re busy. That is marketing. And it’s the kind that builds something worth having.
Don’t exhaust yourself trying to do everything. Pick the things that feel sustainable. Do them consistently. Let the rest wait.
About me
Whilst I’m not a marketing expert - I work with small businesses every day on systems, design, websites and marketing. Over the years I’ve built up a clear picture of what tends to work, what tends to exhaust people, and where most new business owners get stuck. This article is based on that experience, my own time running a small service-based business, and the conversations I have with small business owners regularly.
