Marketing Made Simple: Five Steps for a Small Business

Pull your last twenty to thirty invoices and sort them by the profit you kept after the job closed. Look at the top third. Those jobs usually share a service, a type of property, a price band, a part of town and sometimes a season. Write one sentence that describes that customer and put a real place name in it. Something like “homeowners in the older neighborhoods on the north side who need a panel upgrade before they can add a heat pump” is a sentence you can act on.

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 operative words are “value for customers.” Writing something of value to a customer you've never described is guesswork, and guesswork is what makes marketing feel expensive. There's a longer walk through that idea in what marketing is and why it matters to a small business, and a second customer can wait until the first one is producing.

An offer names the service, says who it's for, states where you'll do it, explains what happens after someone contacts you, and tells people how the price works. Write it in the fewest words that stay honest. A useful editing test comes from Google Ads, where “The headline fields for responsive search ads support up to 30 characters. The description fields support up to 90 characters each.” If your offer can't survive thirty characters, what you've written is still internal language.

The same page says “you can provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for a single responsive search ad,” with a floor of three headlines and two descriptions. Write fifteen short versions of your offer even if you never open an ads account. Ten of them will be junk, and the survivors become your homepage headline, your voicemail greeting, the first line of your estimate and what your crew says at the door. An offer that reads the same in all four places is why customers remember you.

Here's what belongs in the finished version, and every line should survive a read by somebody who has never met you:

• The service in the words a customer would use, so “panel upgrade” beats “electrical infrastructure modernization.”
• The area you cover, named the way locals name it.
• What happens next, with a time attached: a call back the same day, an on site quote within forty eight hours.
• How pricing works, even when you can't post a price. A range, a flat diagnostic fee or “we quote after a twenty minute visit” all beat silence.
• One reason to believe it, such as the number of these jobs you finished last year.

There are a dozen places you could spend marketing money, and you can see the full menu in the twelve types of digital marketing or the plainer overview in what digital marketing actually is. Two is the number a small team can run well. Three is where the follow up starts slipping and the reporting turns into an argument.

For most local service businesses the first channel is a Google Business Profile, because it's free and it catches people who are already searching for the work. Google's guidelines say “If your business either has a physical location that customers can visit, or travels to customers where they are, you can create a Business Profile on Google.” That covers nearly every trade. The same page warns that a business serving customers at their address “can't list a ‘virtual’ office unless that office is staffed during business hours,” so a mailbox address will catch up with you.

The second channel depends on how fast you need the phone to ring. Paid search buys attention this week at a price you set, and it stops the day you stop paying. Content and local search take months to move, then keep working without a daily bill. If you already have a customer list, email and text reach the cheapest audience you'll ever have, which is usually the fastest money in the whole plan. Choose the one that matches your cash position, then leave the other ten alone until these two produce booked jobs.

If you pick content, Google is blunt about what earns visibility. Its guidance on people first content says “If the ‘why’ is that you're primarily making content to attract search engine visits, that's not aligned with what our systems seek to reward.” Write the pages a customer needs before they buy: what the job costs and why, what the process looks like, what goes wrong on these jobs and what you do about it.

Every channel in step three ends the same way. A phone rings or a form lands, and the next few minutes decide whether that money turned into work. Settle now who answers between seven in the morning and seven at night, what happens to a call that arrives while everyone is on a roof or under a house, and how long a web form can sit before somebody touches it. Write the answers on one page and hand that page to whoever covers the phone.

Then build a follow up schedule and keep it boring. A call back the same day, a text the next morning with the quote attached, a call on day five, and one last note two weeks out will recover work you're currently writing off. Most lost jobs are quotes nobody touched a second time, and reviewing lost inquiries is a faster win than any new campaign, because that traffic is already paid for.

Five numbers tell you whether the month worked: qualified inquiries, booked jobs, what you spent, cost per booked job, and average gross profit per job. Write them on the same sheet every month. Anything else you might track is supporting detail for one of those five, and it can live in a tool you open twice a year.

In Google Analytics, the actions worth counting are called key events. Google's help page says “A key event is an event that measures an action that's particularly important to the success of your business,” and adds that “Any event you collect can become a key event.” Mark the form submission and the tap on your phone number. Leave the other events unmarked so your report stays readable a year from now.

Google Ads calls the same idea a conversion, and its help page defines a conversion action as “a specific customer activity that is valuable to your business.” You decide what goes on that list, which means you can keep it to the two or three actions that lead to money. Cost per booked job is the number to bring to any meeting about marketing, and this breakdown of cost per booked job explains why it beats cost per click for a service business.

Say you run a six person electrical company and you want a bigger share of panel upgrades. Every number below is an assumption you'd replace with your own, and the third column says exactly where each one comes from.

Now the plan has a rule you can test against reality. If your ads report a cost of $95 per qualified inquiry, something has to give: the close rate, the profit per job or the number of jobs you're chasing. If the cost lands at $40, you have room to raise the monthly target or add a second service. The arithmetic works the same whether you buy clicks, mail postcards or knock doors, and you can run your own version in the lead cost calculator.

The job count deserves one more look before you spend anything. Ten jobs is a marketing target only if your crew can install ten panels that month, and planning marketing around real capacity saves you from the worst month in this business, the one where the phone works and the schedule doesn't.

1. Week one. Sort the invoices, write the customer sentence, draft fifteen versions of the offer and keep three.
2. Week two. Set up the two channels. Claim or clean the Business Profile, rewrite the one page that matches the offer, and set the budget from the table above.
3. Week three. Write the answering rules and the follow up schedule. Record a voicemail greeting in the offer language. Tell the crew what changed and why.
4. Week four. Turn on the key events and the conversion actions, then log the five numbers for the first time even though the sample is small.

Repeat week four every month and change nothing else for a quarter. The second month is easier because the sentence, the offer and the answering rules are already written, so the standing work shrinks to reading five numbers and adjusting one thing. If you want a baseline on what your site and profile are doing before you touch any of it, the free website audit gives you something to compare against in thirty days.