You’ve put some money aside to “do some marketing”. Maybe it’s a few hundred a month. Maybe it’s more. And the obvious next move is to spend it: run some ads, refresh the logo, post more on Facebook, hire someone to “do SEO”.
That’s where most of the money goes wrong. Not because ads or logos or posts are bad, but because they’re the last step, and most businesses start there.
Proper marketing has an order to it. You find out before you decide. You choose who you’re for. You decide what you want to be known for. You decide how you’ll measure it. And only then do you spend. Each step makes the next one cheaper and easier, and skipping one quietly undoes the rest.
This article walks through those five steps, in order. For each one, there’s something concrete you can do on your website, often this week, often for nothing.
To keep it real, we’ll follow one business the whole way. Dana runs Ridgeway Tax & Books, a family bookkeeping and tax firm in Jeffersonville. She’s made up, but you’ll probably recognize her. She’s good at the work, her clients stay for years, and she has just decided it’s time to “get the name out there”.
You already know your business inside out
That’s your biggest strength. It’s also the thing that gets in the way.
You know every service you offer, every corner you refuse to cut, and every reason you’re better than the firm down the road. The trouble is that your customers don’t see your business the way you do. They see it from the outside, for a few minutes, while they’re busy with something else.
Dana is sure people choose her because she’s cheaper than the bigger firms in Louisville. So her plan is a set of ads that lead with price. It feels obvious to her. It’s also a guess.
This is the hardest part of marketing to accept: you are not your customer. What matters to you about your business is often not what matters to them. That’s not a failing. It’s just what happens when you’ve been close to something for years.
The fix isn’t to think harder. It’s to go and find out.
So start by finding out, not deciding
Before you decide anything, talk to real customers and look at real numbers. It sounds slow. It’s the fastest step there is, because it stops you spending on the wrong thing.
Dana picks five clients who signed up in the last year and calls them. She asks one question: “Why did you choose us, rather than someone else?” Then she stops talking and writes down exactly what they say.
Not one of them mentions price.
Two say she answers the phone. One says she explained a tax letter without making him feel stupid. One was recommended by her brother-in-law. One found Dana on Google, read her reviews, and liked that people kept saying “patient”.
That’s ten minutes of phone calls, and her whole ad plan has just changed. Leading with price would have attracted people shopping for the cheapest option, and those aren’t the clients who stay.
Your website is full of this kind of evidence too. Most of it is sitting there unread.
Read what people type into your search box. If your site has a search box, every search is a customer telling you, in their own words, what they came for. Those words are often not the ones on your pages. We wrote more about this in Your search box is market research you’re not reading.
Read your Search Console queries. Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows which searches made your site appear, and which ones people clicked. If your site is set up with it, look at the list of searches. You’ll find phrases you never thought to use, and services people are looking for that you barely mention.
Ask recent customers why they chose you. Do it the way Dana did. A quick call or a short email. Ask why they picked you, what nearly stopped them, and what they’d tell a friend. Write down their exact words. You’ll use them later.
Read your reviews, and your competitors’ reviews. Your reviews tell you what people value enough to write down. Your competitors’ reviews tell you what customers in your trade care about, and what they complain about. A pattern of complaints about a competitor (“never calls back”, “hidden fees”) is a gap you might fill.
You’re not looking for proof that you were right. You’re looking for the words and reasons your customers actually use. If they surprise you, good. That’s the point.
And then choose who you’re for, and who you’re not
Once you’ve listened, you’ll notice that your customers aren’t one group. They’re several, and they want different things.
Dana looks at her list of clients and sees three groups:
- Small business owners who want their books kept tidy all year, and someone to call when a letter arrives.
- Retirees who want their tax return done right, once a year, with no surprises.
- People in a mess: years of unfiled returns, a worried phone call, and a need for someone calm.
Each group wants something different. Each would be won over by different words. One website can’t speak to all three equally well, and if it tries, it ends up speaking clearly to none of them.
So Dana makes a choice. She’ll lead with small business owners. They’re the clients she serves best, they stay longest, and they’re the ones who keep saying “you answer the phone”.
This is the step most owners resist, because it feels like turning people away. It isn’t. Dana still takes retirees. She still helps people in a mess. She just doesn’t write her website for everyone at once. Leading with one group doesn’t stop the others from calling. It makes sure the group you want most recognizes themselves the moment they arrive.
Pick one group, or two at most. The ones you serve best, and the ones you’d most like more of.
Then put it on your website.
Write one clear “who it’s for” line. Somewhere near the top of your home page, say plainly who you help. Dana’s might read: “Bookkeeping and tax for small businesses in Southern Indiana.” A visitor who fits should think “that’s me” within a few seconds. A visitor who doesn’t should still understand what you do.
Write your pages for that group. Go through your main pages and ask: would a small business owner (or whoever you chose) feel this was written for them? Use their situations, their worries and their words. Dana’s services page stops listing every form she can file and starts describing the year of a small business owner: the quarterly worries, the January panic, the letter that arrives in March.
So decide the two or three things you want to be known for
Now you know who you’re for. The next question is what you want them to think of when your name comes up.
Not ten things. Two or three. People only remember a few things about any business, and if you don’t choose them, they’ll choose for you, or forget you entirely.
The best ones come straight out of step one. Dana doesn’t need to invent anything. Her customers have already told her:
- You can reach a real person. They answer the phone.
- Plain answers. Nobody feels stupid asking a question.
Those two things are true, they matter to small business owners, and the big firms don’t do them well. That’s a strong place to stand.
Then comes the part that takes discipline: saying the same few things, every time, everywhere. It will feel repetitive to you long before it feels repetitive to anyone else. You read your own website every week. Your customers glance at it once or twice a year. By the time you’re sick of saying it, they’re just starting to notice.
Here’s how that shows up on your website.
Your headline. The biggest words on your home page should carry one of your chosen things, in your customer’s words. Dana’s old headline was “Professional accounting services you can trust”. Every accountant in the country could use it. Her new one is “Bookkeeping where someone actually picks up the phone.”
Your About page. Most About pages are a timeline: founded in this year, moved offices in that year. Rewrite yours to show why you’re known for those two or three things. Dana’s tells the story of why she started answering every call herself, and why she still does.
Every page saying the same few things. Your services pages, your contact page, your Google listing, even your email signature should all point back to the same two or three ideas. Not word for word every time, but recognizably the same. If you’d like a structure for this, What should your business website say? Five questions to answer first walks through it.
Use your customers’ words, not yours. Remember the exact phrases you wrote down in step one. “Didn’t make me feel stupid” is better copy than anything most of us would write ourselves, because it’s what a real person actually said.
But before you spend anything, decide how you’ll know it worked
This is the step almost everybody skips. And it’s why so many owners end up saying “marketing doesn’t work”. Often it did work, a little, or it didn’t, but nobody could tell, because nobody decided what “working” meant.
So before you spend a cent, decide what you’re trying to change, and how you’ll count it.
Dana keeps it simple. Right now she gets a handful of enquiries a month from small business owners. In six months, she wants noticeably more. That’s the goal. Not “more brand awareness”. Not “more followers”. More enquiries from the group she chose.
A good goal is one you can count, tied to the group you chose, with a date attached. It doesn’t need to be fancy.
Your website is where most of this counting happens.
Track the ways people get in touch. Every form someone sends, every tap on your phone number, every tap on your email address. Each of those is an enquiry. If your website isn’t counting them, you’re flying blind. This takes some setting up, but it only needs doing once.
Look at the numbers every week. Not every day (that’s just noise) and not once a year (by then it’s too late). A short, regular look tells you whether things are moving, and lets you change course early.
This is where the weekly report every Stoei site comes with does its work. Every Monday, a plain-English report lands in your inbox. No logging in, no remembering to look. It shows how many people came, where they came from, which pages they read, what they searched for, and who got in touch.
Used well, that report is a marketing tool, not just a scorecard:
- Which pages people read tells you what they care about. If Dana’s page about catching up on unfiled returns gets far more visits than she expected, that’s worth knowing.
- What people searched for tells you what to write next. Each search phrase is a possible article, a question for your FAQ, or a word to use on a page.
- Where your visitors are tells you whether you’re reaching the area you serve, or attracting people from three states away who’ll never become clients.
- Who got in touch tells you whether your message is landing. If visits go up and enquiries don’t, the words probably need work, not the ads.
Without numbers, every decision is a feeling. With them, you can see what’s working and do more of it.
Only then do you choose where to spend
Now, and only now, you get to the part most people start with: what to actually do.
By this point, the decisions are much easier. You know who you’re talking to, what you want to say, and how you’ll measure it. The question isn’t “should I run ads?” any more. It’s “what’s the best way to get this message to these people?”
We’ve covered why that order matters in Before you spend on ads, do the marketing. Here, the key idea is that your effort should be split two ways.
Building your name over time. This is the slow work. Being known, trusted and remembered by the people you chose, so that when they need you, you’re the name they think of. It doesn’t bring in calls next week. It brings in calls for years.
Asking for the sale now. This is the quick work. Reaching people who need you today and making it easy for them to act.
Most small businesses do only the second, because it feels more urgent. But if you only ever ask for the sale, you have to keep paying to be noticed, and the moment you stop, the phone goes quiet. If you only build your name, you might be well liked and still short on work this month. You need both. How much of each depends on your business, but very few businesses do well with only one.
And notice where choosing channels comes in: last. Facebook, Google ads, flyers, sponsoring the Little League team. Pick the ones where your chosen group actually spends time, and that suit the job: building your name, or asking for the sale.
Your website plays a part in both.
For the long game: articles. Every useful article that answers a question your customers ask is another way for the right people to find you, and another reason to trust you. Dana writes about the questions small business owners keep asking her: what to keep, when to worry about a letter, how to get ready for tax season. Those articles keep working long after she writes them. (If your blog has been quiet for a while, it’s worth reading An empty blog is worse than no blog.)
For the long game: your Google listing. Your Google Business Profile is the free listing that shows up on Google Maps and beside search results, with your hours, photos and reviews. For a local business, it’s often the first thing people see. Keep it complete, keep it current, and make sure its description says the same two or three things as your website.
For now: clear calls to action. A call to action is the button or line that tells a visitor what to do next: “Call us”, “Book a time”, “Send a message”. Every important page should have one, and it should be obvious. Dana puts her phone number at the top of every page, because “you can reach a real person” is the whole point.
For now: easy booking. If someone is ready to talk, don’t make them hunt. A simple way to book a call, straight from your website, turns a visitor who’s ready today into an enquiry today.
And then you go back to the start
Marketing isn’t a project you finish. It’s a loop.
Three months after Dana started, her weekly reports show something she didn’t expect. Her article about catching up on unfiled returns is her most-read page, and the people reading it are mostly local. The group she set aside, people in a mess, is finding her anyway.
So she goes back to step one. She calls a few of those new clients and asks why they chose her. She looks at what they searched for. And she thinks again about whether that group deserves a page of its own.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. You find out, choose, decide, measure and act. Then the numbers send you back to finding out, with better questions than you had the first time.
So where do you begin this week?
Start small. Pick three customers who chose you in the last year, and ask each of them one question: “Why did you choose us?” Write down their exact words.
That one step will tell you more than any ad campaign, and it costs you nothing but a few phone calls. You might find, like Dana, that the thing you were about to promote is not the thing your customers value at all.
If you’d like to talk it through with someone, we’re happy to help. We do this work before we build any website, because a good-looking site with a muddled message still won’t sell. Book a 15-minute call. No pitch. Tell us where you are, and you’ll get an honest answer about what to do next, even if the answer is that you don’t need us.