This is a very common situation in small business marketing. And it’s probably not due to a lack of effort or a small budget. It is caused by the absence of a strategic base on which tactics can be built.
What are the founders of strategy mistakes
Most founders who struggle with strategy think they have a strategy. They probably never did.
What they do have is a list of tricks they do, opinions about each one, and a history of what did and didn’t work. That is not a strategy. Strategy is a coherent answer to three questions:
Who are we really? What are we doing that other ways can’t do? What is one sentence that combines those two things together?
Without those answers, the underlying strategies cannot be integrated. They just took turns and failed.
Strategy One: three pieces
The strategic foundation has three parts. All three must be present. Any one of them alone is not enough.
The ideal client
A persona is not an ideal client. The demographic is not the ideal client. “Small business owners between 35 and 55 who value quality” is a description, not a strategy.
The ideal client is a specific type of client, in a specific situation, whose problem you are uniquely positioned to solve better than any real alternative they consider.
Here’s what the specification looks like in practice: a home services company whose ideal client is “homeowners 20 years and older in zip codes where homes sell for more than $800,000, who have lived there for more than 3 years and are thinking about aging in place.” That’s the plan. All the decisions downstream, where they advertise, what their images show, what they cost, what they stop offering, can be tailored to that particular person.
Wealth is in places. That was true when I wrote the first Duct Tape Marketing. It’s so true now. In a market where AI makes it easy to generate generic content for a general audience, the only marketing that comes in is marketing that is clearly tailored to a specific person.
The difference
Two errors occur frequently. Looking for real differentiation (quality, service, experience: every business wants this). And explaining the difference against the wrong opponent.
Your customer rarely has to choose between you and a direct competitor. They choose between you and doing nothing, a different class of solution, or doing it themselves. Your classification should be consistent with that actual set of alternatives.
Separation is also a commitment. If you’re a firm that does very deep strategic work before any action, you also can’t take an emergency project on Monday and deliver on Friday. A claim requires you to refuse a particular job. That’s the real test: does your separation require you to say no to something?
The core message
One sentence. In the customer’s language. It explains who they are and why they are in the right place.
It must pass 3 tests. It is clear (an intelligent 12 year old should understand who he is serving and what he is doing). Unique (can’t be lifted and pasted on a competitor’s site without anyone noticing). It is reliable (the customer trusts you).
Clever is the tag line. The core message is clear. They can be the same thing. Usually they are not.
The Marketing Hourglass
Strategy First also provides you with a diagnostic lens to use for everything that follows: the Marketing Hourglass.
Most people have been taught to think of the customer journey as a funnel. Leads up, customers out at the bottom. It’s useful for a small piece of work and dangerously imperfect for the whole picture.
Real growth for small businesses happens within the hourglass, because the most important customer service happens after the sale. 7 categories: Know, Love, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, Refer. The hourglass opens again after the purchase. That’s the part most small businesses ignore, and that’s where the highest value growth resides.
Diagnosing is easy: find the platform where things are leaking and fix it before you build anything new on top.
One thing you can do this week
Write your core message. One sentence. The customer’s language. Do it in 3 tests: clear, distinct, reliable.
If it can’t get past all three, that’s a strategic exercise. Everything else is waiting to happen.
This is the second step of a seven-step system that I have been refining for over 20 years. The complete outline is in my new ebook, “7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success.” Find it at dtm.world/7steps.