Almost everything written about marketing is written for someone whose job is marketing. That is not you.
You are probably doing delivery, sales and accounts as well, and fitting marketing into time that does not exist. The problem is that advice written for a full-time marketer fails when it is applied in two hours a week, and you conclude that marketing does not work. Marketing works. The advice was written for someone else.
This is written for the owner who is going to do it themselves this quarter.
First: marketing is not advertising
This confusion costs more money than any other mistake, because it makes the first question "how much do I spend on ads", and that is not the first question.
The American Marketing Association defines marketing as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large". The definition is published on the AMA's own site.
Look at the four verbs: creating, communicating, delivering, exchanging. Advertising is part of one of them. So if the offer itself is unclear, or the price is not understandable, or you take two days to answer a message, then advertising is paying to bring more people to something that is not ready.
This is the real reason people say they tried ads and nothing happened. Usually the ads worked and everything after them did not. I went into that distinction in the difference between marketing and advertising.
The order that works in two hours a week
This is not a task list, it is an order. Each item makes the ones below it cheaper, and doing them out of order wastes money.
- Who exactly the customer is. Not "anyone who needs this". A description specific enough that you can tell whether someone qualifies in three questions.
- An offer that is written down. What you provide, what it costs, what the next step is. Somewhere people can see it.
- One channel, done properly. One. Not four done halfway.
- Answering quickly. The cheapest improvement on this list and the most neglected.
- One number you watch. Serious enquiries per month, for instance.
Skip the first two and advertising becomes needlessly expensive, because you are paying to reach people who will not understand the offer. The audience step is what I wrote about in knowing your customers instead of trying to please everyone, and the written offer gets much easier once that is settled.
One channel, and the reason is not just time
Every owner has been told they need to be on every platform. That is wrong, and the reason is not that there is not enough time. It is that a weak presence on four platforms does more damage than an absence.
Someone looks you up, finds a page whose last post is five months old, and concludes the business has closed. That dead page works against you actively. A page that does not exist at all is neutral.
So pick one: the one your existing customers actually use, not the one you are comfortable with. If you do not know, ask five customers how they found you. That answer is more reliable than any analysis you could run.
The only number to watch at the start
Analytics dashboards are full of numbers, and almost none of them will change a decision you make this month.
Start with one: serious enquiries per month. Serious means somebody asked about price, availability or specifics. Not somebody who liked a post.
That number connects the work to money directly, and tells you whether this month beat last month. Once it has been stable for three months, add a second. I set out that sequence in how to measure marketing results with four numbers.
When to start spending on ads
Not the first step, and also not the last. There are conditions that come before it.
You need a clear offer, a way to respond quickly, and some idea of what a customer is worth so you know what you can afford to spend. Without those three, advertising measures something that is not ready, and you draw the wrong conclusion about the market.
I wrote those conditions out in when to start spending on ads. And if it is still too early, there are channels that cost nothing, the most reliable being a referral from a satisfied customer and answering enquiries quickly.
Teach yourself, or pay someone to teach you
A common question, and the honest answer is that free training is more than enough at this stage.
Google's Digital Marketing and E-commerce Certificate, for example, is described officially as a "7 course series" taking "6 months, 10 hours a week", with "no experience required", available through Coursera and Google Career Skills on the programme page.
But notice what that is: 240 hours. You do not need 240 hours to market your business. You need roughly twenty, spent on the five things above. That programme is designed for someone who wants a job in the field, not for an owner who wants to sell their product.
And if you do decide to pay for a course, what you should be looking for differs from what a student looks for. The team at UCourses wrote a practical comparison in how to pick a marketing course as a business owner, and the distinction is worth reading before you pay.
The limits, said plainly
Three things I cannot tell you otherwise.
This takes time. The first three months will probably not produce a result you can measure, and that is not evidence of failure, it is the normal shape of the curve. Anyone promising a result in two weeks is selling you something else.
There is a point where paying someone is correct. If this work takes more from you than it brings in, or you are postponing revenue-generating work to write a post, the arithmetic has flipped. You do not have to wait until you are large to hand the file over, and I wrote about having that conversation with yourself in making the case for investing in marketing.
And last: marketing does not fix a product that is not good or a price that makes no sense. If people arrive and leave, reach is not the problem. The best campaign in the world will only help people discover faster that the offer does not suit them. That is not pessimism, it saves you money you were about to spend on the wrong problem.