A practical eBook for the owner who knows they need a few good tools to run their marketing, but is tired of being sold a different one every week. The job here is to give you a short, sensible toolkit and the rules for keeping it that way.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 35 minute read
Chapter 1
What a Small Business Marketing Toolkit Really Needs to Do
The seven jobs the toolkit must cover, the jobs you can ignore and the order to tackle them in.
Before you choose any tool, it helps to know what jobs the toolkit is actually for. Most owners pick tools the other way round - they hear about a product, sign up, then try to work out where it fits. That's how you end up with three things that overlap and one important job that nothing covers.
There are seven jobs a small business marketing toolkit really needs to do, and three or four jobs that sound important but rarely earn their keep at this scale. Naming them in order makes the rest of the choices much easier. You stop comparing products and start comparing answers to a question you can write down.
This chapter is the one-page brief for the rest of the eBook. Read it slowly, write the seven jobs out for your own business and notice which ones are currently uncovered, doubled up or being done by the wrong person.
The full chapter names the seven essential jobs, sets out the three jobs you can quietly ignore at small scale and gives you a one-page audit you can fill in for your own business in twenty minutes.
The seven jobs the toolkit must cover
First, a place a customer can land and find out what you do. That's a website, even if it's only one page. Second, a way to take an enquiry, a booking or an order without it getting lost. That's some combination of contact form, booking tool and order system. Third, somewhere your customers and prospects are stored, with their permission to be contacted. That's a customer list, sometimes called customer list software, sometimes a marketing list, occasionally still a spreadsheet. Fourth, a way to send those people the occasional useful message. That's an email tool. Fifth, a way to be findable when someone searches for what you do. That's a Google Business Profile and the basics of search ranking. Sixth, a way to take payment cleanly. That's a payment tool. Seventh, a way to see what's happening - which page people land on, which message they replied to, which booking turned into work. That's a small amount of analytics.
Notice what's not on that list. There's no social scheduling tool. No fancy automation platform. No video editor. No SEO tool. No paid advertising platform. Those can be useful for some businesses, but they aren't part of the core toolkit. They sit on top.
The jobs you can ignore at small scale
Three categories of software get sold hard at small businesses and rarely earn their keep until you're much bigger. The all-in-one marketing platform that promises to replace five tools - usually it does each job worse than the dedicated tool would. The advanced reporting tool that builds dashboards - you don't have enough data yet for the dashboards to be useful. And the customer journey orchestration tool - it's solving a problem you don't have yet at this scale.
If a salesperson tells you that you need one of these now, ask what specific problem in your week it solves and what you would stop doing once you have it. If they can't answer in plain language, you don't need it yet.
The seven core jobs - your toolkit checklist
A website where someone can land and understand what you do
A way to take an enquiry, booking or order without losing it
A customer list with permission to contact
An email tool to send the occasional useful message
A Google Business Profile and search ranking basics
A clean way to take payment
Enough analytics to know what's working
The order to tackle them in
The order matters. If you do them out of order you end up paying for tools you can't yet use properly. The order that works for almost every small business is: payment first, because you need to be paid; website second, because the rest of the toolkit refers to it; enquiry capture third, because there's no point in traffic you can't catch; customer list fourth, because the list is where compounding value lives; email tool fifth, because the list needs a way to be contacted; Google Business Profile and search basics sixth, because they bring traffic to the site; analytics seventh, because there's no point looking at numbers until there are some.
Most owners do this in roughly the opposite order. They start with social and analytics and work backwards. The result is busy with no money landing. Reversing the order is one of the quickest wins available.
How to audit your current toolkit
Open a single document. Make seven rows, one for each job. In each row write three things: what tool currently does the job, what it costs you a month, and how confident you are it's actually working. If a row is empty, that's a gap. If two rows have the same tool name, that's overlap to investigate. If you can't remember what a tool does, that's a candidate to cancel.
This single document is the most useful thing in this eBook. Every later chapter is just zooming into one row of it. Owners who keep this document up to date spend a fraction of what owners who don't spend, for the same or better results.
What to do this week
Spend an hour writing the seven-row document for your own business. Don't change anything yet. Just write down what's there. By the end of the hour you'll know whether you have a tool problem, a coverage problem or a discipline problem. Most owners discover they have all three.
Recurring principle for this chapter: review results and improve the system. For more on the bigger view of your marketing operation, look back at the Customer Retention eBook. For the next step on choosing the front door of your toolkit, look ahead to the chapter on your website tool.
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.
Members-only chapter
Become a member to read the full chapter
Members get the complete chapter, the step-by-step plan, the templates and the checklists. Cancel anytime.
