First, what counts as a small business here, and who are we writing this for? I’m aiming this at the typical sign or print operation, but there is relevance for smaller industry suppliers also. The BPIF tells us that three-quarters of UK printing companies employ fewer than ten people, and this article probably holds true for anything up to about twenty staff
Every marketing book tells you to build the brand first. Get the positioning straight, work out the story, and the sales follow. It’s fine advice if you’re Coca-Cola. For most small businesses it’s the wrong way round, and the reason is simpler than anyone likes to admit. They haven’t got anyone who can do that job properly.
Some elements of brand exist of their own volition, which means every business has a brand whether they actively build one or not. The sign over the door, answering the phone, how quickly quotes arrive, van graphics, website quality, invoice design, the salesperson’s mannerisms… that’s all brand. Reputation is brand. What customers think of you is brand. Those are arguably the only bits of brand you need to concern yourself with. Think reputation, not ‘brand strategy’.
Why? Think about who actually does the marketing in a small firm. Often it lands on whoever’s spare. The salesperson who can’t quite close but needs a desk, he’ll do it. The administrator who’s bright and organised and gets handed the status of ‘Marketing Manager’ in lieu of the paid promotion she’d rather have, and of course no training and no permission to spend a penny. Or even more typically it stays with the owner, who’s convinced he knows marketing better than anyone he’d hire, and who never once finds an afternoon to actually do any. That last one is the real problem, because his certainty is exactly what stops him bringing in the person who could. It’s hard to pay for expertise in something you reckon you’ve already cracked.
I don’t think these people are stupid. The trouble is everyone’s seen an advert, and print shops spend all day printing them for other people, so everyone assumes marketing is easy and they could do it. You wouldn’t dream of handing the year-end accounts to the work experience kid. The marketing, on the other hand, gets passed over without a second thought.
Then look at what we’ve put that person in charge of. Brand and positioning are the hardest things in the whole business to get right, and they’ve got one very nasty habit: when they go wrong, there’s very little evidence to tell you so. Someone prepares a presentation, the company’s most senior people sit in a meeting where everyone makes suggestions and nods a bit, and at the end there’s a fuzzy proposition the company then drags around for two years thinking it’s sorted. No bad number ever turns up to give the game away.
Lead generation is the opposite, and that’s the point of it. It fails in your face. A campaign that doesn’t work hands you ugly numbers with somebody’s name against them, and ugly numbers get noticed and fixed. You don’t need a genius running it, because the work tells you where it’s broken. Branding never does you that favour, which is exactly why giving it to someone without the prerequisite skills is potentially such an expensive mistake.
I’m not saying brand doesn’t matter. Give it to a skilled marketeer with sufficient budget and a few years later it will have won hands down, the textbooks have that right. But that isn’t the choice in front of a stretched little firm. The real question is simple: which marketing job can you hand to a non-specialist and still expect a reasonable outcome? Lead generation, you can. Brand strategy, you can’t.
Ogilvy, who everyone files under brand, came up in direct mail and spent his life saying the direct-response lot were the only ones who knew what worked, because they were the only ones counting. “We sell, or else,” he famously said. That’s the right instinct for a small business. Selling is a test, and plenty of brand activity quietly flunks it while looking busy.
The bit nearly everyone misses is the simplest. If one person can’t do the marketing properly, then stop pretending it’s one person’s job. Lead generation is the part that actually gets better when you spread it about. Emily the millennial knows how Facebook works, Gen Z Zakarie knows how to make a TikTok video, the press operator knows his way around Reddit. The boss has his book of contacts, and best of all the book-keeper has the names, addresses, phone numbers and emails of everyone who’s ever bought anything from you. Sit all those people down, explain that generating leads to build the business is a shared responsibility, get them listening to each other and trading ideas openly, and there’s a decent chance you’ll land on something that starts a few meaningful, commercially viable conversations. Real conversations with real buyers. That’ll be worth a good deal more than handing marketing to whoever fancies inheriting the copy of “How to Launch a Brand” the boss skim-read to earn his instant expertise.
Selling generates the customer feedback that eventually allows a stronger brand to emerge anyway. So do that selling first, get everyone pulling the same way, and count what comes back so you can see what works. The broader brand strategy can wait until you’re big enough to buy in the expertise to do it properly.
Bottom line. Avoid getting bogged down in complex brand strategy exercises for marketing when you’re a ten-person company that simply needs more customers to fuel growth. “We sell or else,” as Ogilvy said.
