Answer these five questions before you spend anything. Get them right and even mediocre tactics start working.
CTFM Team
Most marketing advice starts in the middle. Post daily, run ads, build a funnel. None of it helps if you have not answered five questions first, and those five questions take an afternoon.
Get them wrong and every tactic underneath them wastes money. Get them right and mediocre tactics still work.
"Small businesses" is not an answer. "Small businesses" includes a solo tattoo artist and a 40-person accounting firm, and nothing you say will land for both.
The test is whether you can picture one person. What their week looks like, what annoys them on a Tuesday afternoon, what they have already tried and given up on.
Here is a rewrite to show the difference.
Vague
Specific
Small business owners
Solo bookkeepers with 10 to 30 clients doing their own invoicing
Marketers
One-person marketing teams at companies under 50 staff
Fitness enthusiasts
People restarting the gym after a long break, embarrassed to ask questions
The specific version is harder to write and much easier to sell to. You know where those people gather and you know what they are worried about.
The fear that stops people doing this
Narrowing feels like turning away business. It is not. Nobody is stopped from buying because your message spoke clearly to someone else. Vague messages do not reach more people, they just reach everyone weakly.
People do not buy features. They buy a change in their situation.
The bookkeeper does not want invoicing software. They want to stop chasing late payers on a Sunday evening. Same product, completely different sentence, and only one of them makes someone stop scrolling.
The exercise takes five minutes. Write your feature, then ask "so what" until you reach something a human would actually complain about out loud.
Automated invoice reminders. So what? The system chases people for you. So what? You stop having awkward money conversations with clients you like.
That last line is the marketing. The first line is the spec sheet.
Almost everybody gets this wrong by assuming the alternative is a competitor. Usually it is not.
The real alternatives are doing nothing, doing it manually, or asking a colleague. Most purchases are lost to inertia, not to a rival.
This matters because it changes the argument. If you think you are fighting a competitor, you list features. If you know you are fighting inertia, you address the actual objection, which is "this is probably not worth the hassle of changing".
Positioning is a whole discipline
The structured version of this question is called positioning, and April Dunford's book Obviously Awesome lays out a proper method for it: list the competitive alternatives, find the attributes only you have, work out the value those create, and identify who cares most about that value.
You do not need to build an audience from nothing. That is the most expensive possible route.
Your buyers already gather somewhere. A subreddit, a trade association, a WhatsApp group, a particular newsletter, a conference, a supplier's customer list, a specific search query they type when they are stuck.
The job is to find three of those places and show up usefully. Not to pick a platform because it is popular.
Ask five existing customers where they look
Not a survey. Five messages asking where they went when they had this problem. The answers are usually surprising and often not a platform at all.
Search for your problem the way they would
Type the complaint, not the product name. See which forums, videos and articles come up. Those are the rooms.
Pick one, not five
One channel done properly beats five done badly, and it is the only way to tell whether the channel or your message was the problem.
You will meet the 4 Ps early: product, price, place, promotion. The framework comes from E. Jerome McCarthy, who set it out in his 1960 textbook Basic Marketing.
It is a useful checklist. It is not a strategy. It reminds you that pricing and distribution are marketing decisions too, which people forget, but it will not tell you what to do about any of them.
Treat it the way you treat a packing list. Good for making sure you did not forget something. No help at all in deciding where to go.
A made-up business, so you can see the five answers together. The numbers here are invented purely to show the shape of the thing.
We make project management software for small businesses. Our platform is intuitive and powerful, with best-in-class collaboration features. We are targeting SMBs across all industries.
Nobody knows what to do with this. It could describe forty products.
Notice that the second version tells you what to build, where to post, and what to write. The first tells you nothing.
