TL;DR: Stop adding more to your marketing to-do list. Start by asking your next 10 customers how they found you, then find the leaks in your current process and automate the fixes. The quickest way to get a personalised answer is to take the free AI Opportunity Assessment: 3 minutes, 11 questions, a full report.
A decorator in Halifax showed me his marketing to-do list last month. Twenty-three items on it. SEO. Google Ads. LinkedIn. A new website. Email campaigns. TikTok (yes, TikTok). He had been staring at it for six weeks and done precisely none of them.
He is not unusual. Most small business owners I speak to have some version of that list. Someone told them they need to be on Instagram. Their accountant mentioned Google Ads. A mate who runs a gym swears by Facebook. And now someone is banging on about AI.
So they do nothing. Or worse, they try everything at once and none of it gets done properly.
Here is what I actually tell people.
Start with what is already working
Before you spend a single pound on anything new, answer one question: where are your current customers actually coming from?
Word of mouth? Google? A specific referral partner? Social media? Leaflet drops?
Most business owners do not know. They have a vague sense that “most of it is word of mouth” but they have never checked. So the first job is not to start marketing. It is to start listening.
Ask your next 10 customers a simple question: “How did you find out about us?” Write it down. Not in your head. On paper, in a spreadsheet, wherever you will actually look at it again.
After 10 answers, you will have a pattern. And that pattern tells you where to put your energy first.
If 7 out of 10 came from Google, you do not need TikTok. You need to make sure your Google presence is as strong as it can be. If they are all coming through one referral partner, you need to look after that relationship and find three more like it.
That is the starting point. Not a 23-item to-do list. One question, 10 answers, one pattern.
You did not go into business to be a marketer
Here is the thing most marketing advice gets wrong. It assumes you have time. It assumes you want to learn about click-through rates and conversion funnels and SEO meta descriptions.
You do not. You are a plumber. Or a carpet fitter. Or a mortgage broker. You went into business because you are good at what you do, not because you enjoy writing LinkedIn posts at 9pm.
So the second step is not “do more marketing.” It is to make your happy customers work harder for you. Two things:
First, get in the habit of collecting feedback. Not just reviews (although reviews matter). Start with feedback to you. A quick text or a short conversation at the end of a job: “How was that for you? Anything we could have done better?” That does two things: it catches problems before they become bad reviews, and it identifies the customers who are genuinely delighted.
Second, start conversations with those happy customers about their personal network. I know a garage owner who asks every satisfied customer one question: “How many cars are at your address?” Adult children. Partner. Second car. He offers a small incentive to bring the other cars in for a service or an MOT. That one question has become his single biggest source of new business. No ads. No social media. Just a smart conversation at the right moment.
Find the leaks, then automate the fixes
Once you know what is working and your happy customers are doing some of the heavy lifting, the next step is not to pile on more marketing activity. It is to find the leaks in your current process.
When a potential customer calls and you cannot answer, how long before you call back? When you send a quote, when do you chase it up? If someone fills in your website contact form on a Tuesday evening, do they hear from you before Wednesday lunchtime?
These are the leaks. And for most small businesses, they are haemorrhaging money without the owner even realising.
The good news is that most of these leaks can be plugged with simple automation. Getting feedback from customers can be automated. Sending a follow-up after a quote can be automated. Answering the phone outside hours can be automated. Sending a reminder when a service is due can be automated.
The point is not to add more jobs to your plate. You already have enough of those. The point is to offload the actions that have real impact when they happen consistently, and let a system handle them so you do not have to remember.
What happens when you actually do this
I worked with a landscape gardener called Tom, local to me in West Yorkshire. His wife had been handling the phones and doing the social media posting while he was out on jobs. Then she went on maternity leave and all of that stopped.
Calls were going unanswered. Quotes that used to go out same day were taking two to three days. And once they went out, nobody was chasing them up. Tom was losing customers he would normally have snapped up.
We set up three things:
- A missed call text-back service powered by an AI agent. When Tom could not answer, the agent would respond, answer the caller’s questions, collect the information Tom needed to price the job, and book an appointment into his diary.
- A simple cost calculator so that quotes could be done quickly and sent the same day, rather than sitting in a pile for three days.
- A follow-up AI agent that chased outstanding quotes automatically, instead of leaving them to go cold.
Within three months, Tom’s turnover was up 52% on the previous year. Not because he spent more on marketing. Because he stopped losing the customers who were already trying to give him money.
And the second result? Tom’s wife decided not to come back to working with him. The systems had replaced her role entirely.
You do not need more marketing
You need to know which marketing to do first.
Start by finding out where your customers are actually coming from. Make your happy customers work harder for you. Then find the leaks in your process and automate the fixes.
The answers are usually simpler, and cheaper, than you think.
Not sure where your biggest gap is? The free AI Opportunity Assessment takes 3 minutes, asks 11 multiple-choice questions, and sends you a full report showing the quickest fix you can make to your business today.
