The closing eBook of the GoToMarket.biz series. The principles you've read across the first seventy eBooks are the same for every small business. The shape they take is not. This eBook walks through the major industries a small business owner is likely to be in, shows how the everyday marketing job changes in each, and ends with a way to build your own industry playbook.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 45 minute read
Chapter 1
Why Industry Context Matters
Why the same go-to-market principles take very different shapes in different industries, and how to read your own industry honestly.
There's a recurring conversation that happens when small business owners get together. One owner describes a piece of marketing advice they've heard, another nods politely and then says, quite gently, that wouldn't work for me. They are not being difficult. They are usually right. And yet the advice they were given wasn't necessarily wrong either.
The gap is industry context. The same principle - that follow-up matters, that reviews build trust, that you need a clear offer - looks completely different in a roofing business and a yoga studio. If you don't see that gap clearly, you end up either trying to copy tactics that don't fit your world, or dismissing real principles because the example didn't sound like you.
This chapter sets up the lens for the rest of the eBook. It explains the dimensions on which industries actually differ for marketing purposes, why generic advice tends to ignore them and how to honestly assess your own industry's shape before you decide what to do next.
The full chapter walks through the six dimensions that make industries different for marketing - and shows how the same principle takes a very different form depending on where your business sits on each.
The six dimensions that actually matter
Industries differ in dozens of ways, but for marketing purposes only six really change what you do day to day. The first is buying frequency. A plumbing customer might buy from you once every five years, while a cafe customer buys three times a week. The second is decision speed. A flooring installation gets researched for weeks; a sandwich at lunch gets decided in seconds. The third is trust requirement. A children's dentist needs deep trust before the first appointment; a phone case shop needs almost none. The fourth is local versus distance. Some businesses live and die on a five-mile radius; others sell to anyone with internet access. The fifth is seasonality. Some industries have steady demand all year; others compress most of their year into three months. The sixth is referability. Some industries get most new customers from word of mouth; others get almost none.
Where your business sits on these six dimensions tells you most of what you need to know about which marketing principles to lean on and which to deprioritise. A high-trust, low-frequency business needs a lot of reviews and a slow nurture before purchase. A low-trust, high-frequency business needs to be visible at the moment of decision and never disappoint. The principles are the same; the weighting is completely different.
Why generic advice tends to ignore this
Most generic small business marketing advice is written by people whose own business is itself a small business - usually a coach, an agency or a software company selling to small businesses. The advice they give tends to reflect what works in their industry, which is not necessarily what works in yours. That's not malice. It's the simple fact that most people write about what they know, and what they know is the shape of their own business.
This is why so much of what you read sounds vaguely off when you try to apply it. The post telling you to build an email list of ten thousand subscribers makes sense for a course creator and almost no sense for a roofer. The advice to post on LinkedIn three times a week is gold for a consultant and a waste of time for a hair salon. The advice to run a podcast is brilliant for a business-to-business agency and largely irrelevant for a takeaway. None of it is wrong in its own context. All of it can mislead if you forget the context isn't yours.
How to read marketing advice from outside your industry
Ask whose business the advice was written from - a coach, an agency, an online seller, a tradesperson or a clinician?
Check whether the buying frequency, trust requirement and channel mix match yours before you copy the tactic
Strip the tactic back to the underlying principle, then ask what that principle looks like in your industry
Reading your own industry honestly
Before you can apply the rest of this eBook, it's worth taking five minutes with a piece of paper to honestly score your industry on the six dimensions. Most owners get this roughly right but skip the exercise, which means they never make their priorities explicit. Write down your industry. Then for each dimension, mark where it sits. How often do customers buy? How quickly do they decide? How much trust is needed up front? How local is the business? How seasonal is demand? How much of your new business comes from word of mouth?
When you read those six answers in a row, your industry's marketing priorities almost write themselves. A long buying cycle and high trust need patient content and reviews. A short buying cycle and low trust need visibility and convenience. A highly local business needs Google Business Profile, neighbourhood word of mouth and a local search presence above almost everything else. A national online business needs none of those and lives or dies by its product pages, email and reviews. The exercise is small. The clarity it gives you is large.
Borrowing from neighbouring industries
The other thing this exercise does is show you which other industries are most similar to yours, and therefore most worth borrowing ideas from. A children's dance school and an independent veterinary practice are technically in different industries, but they sit in the same corner of the dimension grid - high trust, local, recurring, heavily referred. They can borrow happily from each other. A solo bookkeeper and a one-person consulting business sit in another corner - high trust, business-to-business, low frequency, sold by reputation. They have far more in common with each other than either does with the cafe down the road.
This is one of the most under-used moves in small business marketing. Owners tend to look only at their direct competitors, which means they all end up doing the same thing. Looking at businesses that share your shape but not your industry is where the genuinely fresh ideas come from. The chapters that follow are organised this way deliberately - by shape, not by sector - so you can read your shape's chapter and one other shape's chapter for ideas to bring back.
What this means for the rest of the eBook
The next five chapters each describe one big shape of small business in the way it actually lives. Chapter two takes the local services shape: high local, high trust, low to medium frequency, lots of word of mouth. Chapter three takes the business-to-business and professional services shape: long sales cycles, deep trust, sold by reputation. Chapter four takes the health and wellness shape: very high trust, recurring, local, regulated. Chapter five takes the shop and hospitality shape: high frequency, in-person, location-led. Chapter six takes the online and digital shape: distance, channel-dependent, scalable. Chapter seven shows you how to combine the relevant pieces into your own one-page playbook.
What to do this week
Take ten minutes today to score your business on the six dimensions: buying frequency, decision speed, trust requirement, local vs distance, seasonality, referability. Write the answers down. That single page will guide everything you read in the rest of this eBook, and quietly inform almost every marketing decision you make from now on.
Recurring principle for this chapter: review results and improve the system. For the foundation of why principles matter more than tactics, look back at What is Go-to-Market?. For the chapter that fits your industry next, jump ahead to the one that matches the shape you just scored.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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