Heidy Rehman

Aug 16, 202328 min read

Your complete guide to designing a successful small business marketing strategy

Updated: Mar 8

Do you need to develop a new marketing strategy for your small business? Or perhaps refine your existing one? You might be working with a small business marketing consultant, designing the strategy yourself or still deciding if you need advice. In this comprehensive but easy-to-use guide I’ll show you the process an expert would follow. By the end you’ll have all the insights you need to decide the right way forward to develop a winning marketing strategy.

Your complete guide to designing a successful small business marketing strategy

This article is for anyone who needs a marketing strategy for their established small business or startup — whether you want to refine an existing strategy or build a new one from scratch. I’ll cover the whole strategy design process in some detail and discuss the questions you need to ask. I’m going to go step by step and avoid jargon – you should find it easy to follow even if you’re a newcomer to marketing.

If you'd prefer to jump to the relevant links, here's a list:

Be crystal clear about your USP

Identify the market niche you will target

Understand how to operate a marketing funnel using direct response marketing

Choose the right marketing channels

Use compelling key marketing messages

Understand the key marketing technology tools you may need

Take the right decisions on outsourcing

Bring it all together to maximise your profits

Avoid the common pitfalls in marketing strategy design

Appendix: Two approaches to avoid: Brand marketing and hard selling

Be crystal clear about your USP

The first step in designing your marketing strategy is to identify what it is you offer that your customers truly value. This is commonly known as your Unique Selling Point (USP). It’s the reason your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors.

Don’t do anything else until you’ve nailed your USP.

The purpose of the marketing strategy you’re going to build is to capitalise on your USP. If you mis-identify your USP, your marketing strategy is unlikely to deliver the results you want. And understanding your USP is not always as easy as you might assume.

First, it’s essential to hold in your mind the perspective of your customer, remembering that customers may not value your product for the same reasons you do. For example, the engineers at Ferrari may prize the vehicles they design for their remarkable engineering. Yet most customers never drive their Ferrari at top speed and may value the cars more for their eye-catching looks.

It's also essential to focus on product benefits not product features.

Customers buy a product for what it enables them to do or how it makes them feel. For example, nobody buys a Rolex to know the time. They buy one to reward themselves and, perhaps, to signal their financial success to other people. When a customer buys a luxury watch, they are choosing a piece of jewellery, not a timepiece.

Some USPs do something even more powerful than offering the customer compelling benefits – they take away the customer’s pain. If your USP solves a major pain point for customers, they should be even more eager to buy from you and even less sensitive to price. And that’s what your marketing strategy should zoom in on.

If you’re not used to analysing your own business in this way and you’re working with a small business marketing consultant, this is definitely an issue they should be able to help you with.

Once you’re sure you’ve identified your USP, it’s important to confirm your analysis by gathering feedback from real customers. If you’re a pre-revenue startup, you can still do this by placing a prototype of your product with potential early adopting customers.

Whatever else you do, don’t try to confirm your USP or find out how much customers would be willing to pay for your product by commissioning market research:

Customers usually know if they have a problem and they can often (but not always) diagnose what the problem is. But they usually don’t know what the solution is or how much they would pay for it until you present it to them.
Market research lends itself to dry, factual questions and answers but customers tend to buy for reasons that are more emotional than analytical. Buying decisions often appear analytical in hindsight but that’s because we tend to advance rational arguments to justify choices that we have already made for emotional reasons.

A market study may help you to estimate the potential size of your market. But when you’re seeking to specify your customers’ desires and priorities, you need to engage with them directly. There’s no substitute for getting out and talking to the people you want to sell to.

Identify the market niche you will target

Now that you’re clear about your USP, you need to identify the market niche that you’ll target with your marketing strategy.

A USP that’s a great match to customer needs in one market niche may play less well in another. So identifying your USP and choosing your market niche are often two sides of the same coin. I’m walking you through them sequentially but for many companies the processes may run in parallel.

Let’s examine what a market niche is and how we can segment a market.

Most markets are made up of several niches. A niche is a segment that differs from the rest of the market by virtue of a distinctive need or desire that drives what and how customers buy.

For example, some car buyers need a vehicle for supermarket shopping, others to commute to work and others for weekend family motorway journeys. Some buyers have more to spend, others less. Some are focused on comfort, others on safety, others on fuel economy and others on brand image.

So they all need a ‘car’, but for marketers, the concept ‘car’ is so broad as to be almost meaningless. A car manufacturer would instead seek to understand the needs of the buyers in each niche and then design and market vehicles for the niches where they think they’re best placed to compete.

The options for segmenting a market are endless and really depend on the particular market you operate in. The way you would segment the market for garden tools would be different to the way you would segment the market for jeans, for example.

Having said that, here are a few examples to help you get started:

A B2C company might segment its market based on how customers use a product (e.g. priority of performance vs reliability, fashion vs function). It might segment its potential customers by age, sex, marital and parental status, income, interests, values and so on.
A B2B company might segment its potential customers by industry or company size. The way the buyer uses a product or the criticality of that product to the buyer’s workflow might also be a basis for segmentation. So might buyer expertise or the importance to the buyer of price vs lifetime cost of ownership.

When deciding which niche to target, it can help to create an ‘avatar’ of your ideal customer(s). For example, what could be their family status, job, income and spending patterns, home ownership status, interests, values, social media presence and other personal characteristics? While an avatar is an archetype, it’s common to give each one a name (Jim, Sarah etc.).

Creating an avatar turns each of the customer niches you have identified into something relatable. This can help you get inside the mind of your target customers to spot marketing opportunities or risks that you might otherwise overlook. For example, how would your avatar approach a purchasing decision and what factors would prompt them to buy?

If you find that one avatar is sufficient to cover your target niche, that’s great. If you find you need four or five, you may need to narrow how you are defining your niche.

Segmenting your market into niches may feel like a lot of work. But if you target the totality of a broad market, it’s likely you will struggle to build a successful business. Small businesses usually prosper by picking their best niche and focusing on it:

Marketing to a niche is more likely to generate sales. If you target your marketing narrowly, you will come across as a specialist. You may put off people who need something quite close to what you are selling but you will strongly attract those people who need exactly what you’re selling. For example, if you need a made-to-measure shirt, would you contact a general tailor or someone who specialises in made-to-measure shirts? If you come across as a jack of all trades, people will assume you are a master of none. That’s the route to making no sales at all.
Marketing to a niche is more cost effective. By focusing your marketing on your chosen niche, you'll save money by not marketing to people who are less relevant and therefore less likely to become your customers.

It’s not easy to stay focused on a niche. It can feel as if you are turning your back on customers and leaving money on the table. If you’re using a small business marketing consultant, one of their jobs should be to help you stay disciplined by reminding you of the benefits.

There’s a saying in marketing that the perfect market niche is an inch wide (i.e. very specialist) and a mile deep (i.e. lots of people want it).

‘A mile deep’ is an ideal scenario that may not be met. But if you have compelling USP, you’re likely to have more than enough potential customers — the challenge is to reach them and convert them into buyers. That’s what we’ll look at next.

Understand how to operate a marketing funnel using direct response marketing

Armed with the insights you have built up so far about your USP and your market niche, it’s time to define the approach you will use to reach your target customer and sell to them efficiently and effectively.

The marketing model I’m going to walk you through is called direct response marketing. This approach is central to most digital marketing strategies but is equally relevant to offline strategies which remain important in many industries. It’s the go-to approach for most small businesses.

Direct response marketing focuses on the needs of a specific customer group and proposes a clearly defined solution to their problem or desire. The aim of direct response marketing isn’t to make an immediate sale. The objective is rather to encourage people who think they may be interested in what you’re selling to identify themselves, provide their contact details and start a conversation.

You achieve this by offering an incentive. The incentive could be relevant information about their problem, insightful advice about solutions you offer that could solve the problem, news about special offers or promotions you’re running and so on.

By sharing this kind of valuable content, you help potential buyers clarify their needs, learn more about your product or service and persuade them of your expertise. Some buyers will realise that their problem requires a different solution. Others will decide that a product from one of your competitors is a better match to their needs. But if you execute correctly, those for whom your product is the right solution will progress to making a purchase.

This approach is efficient for buyers and sellers alike. Buyers learn how to solve their problem and, when ready, are in a position to buy the product that best meets their needs. Sellers can reserve their most intensive and costly marketing and selling efforts for the people who — based on their behaviour — appear the most likely to make a purchase.

Sellers usually design the details of their direct response marketing strategy with the help of a framework known as a marketing funnel. Acquiring a solid understanding of the marketing funnel framework will enable you to appreciate why direct response marketing can be so effective.

First of all, why the term ‘funnel’? Because a funnel is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. Lots of people are going to hear about your brand — this happens at the ‘top of the funnel’. But only some of them – your ideal target customers — will end up buying from you. Making a purchase happens at the ‘bottom of the funnel’.

Several acronyms exist to describe the phases of the marketing funnel that your customer prospects pass through on their journey towards making a purchase. I have used a simple four stage model of Awareness, Interest, Action, Loyalty (AIAL). You may hear many other acronyms such as AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) — these are generally variations on the same theme.

Here’s a table with an overview of the process and the terminology.

Marketing funnel segments and how they operate

Let’s examine the stages of the marketing funnel in more depth. This will give you the knowledge you need to choose which marketing channels will work best for your business at each stage of the funnel. (I’ll cover marketing channels in detail in the next section).

Awareness: This is the stage at which a person becomes aware that they need to solve a problem or that they have a desire to reach a goal. They won’t previously have heard of your brand and they may not yet even know what kind of product they need. This is when they begin scanning the market for a solution that can help them.

At this stage, you should aim to make possible sales prospects aware of your brand and attract them to visit one of your platforms. This would commonly be your website or your social media pages. It could equally be a bricks and mortar store (although most people nowadays do their preliminary research online).

Interest: If a Visitor is willing to share their contact details, this provides evidence that they’re interested in the type of product you sell and that they might eventually make a purchase. That means they have now become a Prospect. By capturing their contact details, you’re able to start a dialogue with them (with their consent).

After confirming that products are available in the market that may solve their problem, the Prospect seeks to narrow down what they need. This could include quantifying the benefits of different types of products as well as identifying several brands that might be suitable to buy from. They might do this by returning to browse product pages on your website for more insight, by opening and reading your marketing e-mails and so on.

At this point, you should aim to accomplish two outcomes. First, by sharing valuable content that helps the Prospect to inform themselves, you bring forward the point at which they may buy. Second, by helping the prospect, you demonstrate your expertise and start to win their trust. And who doesn’t prefer to buy from a trusted expert?

After sufficient research, the Prospect decides they definitely want to make a purchase and identifies at least one brand they could buy from. At this stage, you need to engage with the Prospect in finer detail.

For example, having already explained the benefits of a new washing machine (lower water and energy consumption, cleaner washing etc.), you would provide details of the models that could fit the Prospect’s criteria (maximum load size, colour, price, customer ratings etc.).

Action: When a Prospect is close to making a definitive decision between brands, you may wish to offer final inducements (e.g. low interest credit) to tip the balance and get a sale over the line.

At last, the Prospect makes their purchase and becomes your Customer.

Loyalty: The relationship between you and your new Customer should continue after purchase. Often the marketing expenses to acquire a new customer offset all the profit of the first sale. But because you have provided so much value, the customer should have had a great experience with your brand.

You can now encourage repeat sales with activities such as satisfaction calls or questionnaires, periodic re-marketing and loyalty bonus offers. You can also encourage the customer to recommend your brand to their friends, family or colleagues — personal testimonials are probably the most powerful form of marketing. Ideally they will become an evangelist for your brand.

Generating repeat sales usually requires limited extra marketing expenditure so companies often make most of their profits from repeat buyers.

Choose the right marketing channels

You should now have a good understanding of how direct response marketing works. The next question is: which marketing channels should you use at the various stages of your marketing funnel?

Some marketing channels are better suited to certain stages of the marketing funnel than others. Some are more useful for generating new prospects, others for building brand loyalty and others still for getting sales over the line.

Additionally, most channels are better suited to some types of products or services than others. Ask yourself: where do the potential buyers of my product hang out? Which channels will enable me to reach them? For example, you might market cruise holidays in print magazines that are read by wealthy, older people but you wouldn’t use social media influencers to market industrial machinery.

I have introduced the most common marketing channels in the table below and indicated the purposes for which they are most commonly used. As you work through the list, remember that your strategy needs at least one channel to tackle each stage of the marketing funnel:

Capture the awareness of the visitor and persuade them to engage in a dialogue
Nurture their interest, inform them, demonstrate your expertise and build trust
Close the sale
Maintain and enhance their loyalty and turn them into repeat buyers

I’ve split the marketing channel descriptions into three groups, following the common marketing industry convention:

Owned media. You don’t necessarily actually own these channels (e.g. your social media pages). But you do have full control of the content you publish and the data you gather (e.g. contact details). You won’t incur pay-per-use type costs, although creating content involves cost.
Paid media. As the name suggests, this is promotional activity you pay for directly. Paid media mainly comprises various forms of advertising.
Earned media. You ‘earn’ the exposure you gain in these media, usually by providing interesting and engaging content to third parties that they redistribute in various ways. The most common example is PR. So the channel is not directly paid for but creating content involves cost.

If you’re working with a small business marketing consultant, this is one of the stages of the strategy design process where their expertise can be most valuable. By making yourself familiar with the main marketing channels and how they are most commonly used, you’ll be better able to collaborate with them in the design of your strategy.

If you’re designing your marketing strategy yourself, you’ll likely need to dive more deeply into the details of how each channel works. You’ll also need to understand its advantages and disadvantages. I’ve written a separate article about how to decide between the various marketing channels that drills down into the specifics. It should help you draw up a shortlist of channels for incorporation into your marketing strategy and eliminate the rest from consideration.

How to choose the right marketing channel

Use compelling key marketing messages

Now that you’ve finalised the channels you’ll use to identify, engage with and convert customer prospects, you need the right marketing messages to do the job. These key messages are not the same as the content you may create for your website or for blog articles. They are the ‘copy’ that must trigger readers to take the action you want.

For example, your Google ads must prompt searchers to click on them using just a few compelling words. Landing pages on your website need to persuade visitors to buy your offer or sign up for your marketing e-mails. You need great titles for those e-mails to encourage people to open them.

Some basic principles apply to creating all good marketing copy. For example, adopt the perspective of the customer, focus on benefits not features and leverage well-established core techniques for how to influence people’s behaviour. Additionally, every channel has some unique dos and don’ts.

Beyond that, the specifics of how to craft a compelling marketing message fall outside the remit of a marketing strategy guide like this. It’s a huge subject in its own right and the best copy for your business will depend on the unique combination of your USP, your target customers, your chosen marketing channels and many other factors besides.

If you plan to write your own copy or hire an expert copywriter but would like to better understand how to tell good copy from bad, I’ve included three books in my suggested further reading list. They explore copywriting from different angles and are full of expert ‘how to’ advice and creative inspiration.

Understand the key marketing technology tools you may need

To implement your marketing strategy, you need a suitable technology infrastructure.

At the centre of your technology infrastructure, you need a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Your CRM system contains a database where you can store the contact details of visitors to your website and social media sites.

On top of that, you can use various analytics software tools to track the behaviour of visitors to your website or social media sites (e.g. pages visited, buying history and so on). In time, this should enable you to build up a detailed profile of your prospects and customers. You can feed these valuable data into your marketing strategy development and into targeted or personalised marketing initiatives.

NB: You need a person’s consent to store and use their data. The UK rules are contained in the Data Protection Act 2018, which incorporated into UK law the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Many technology tools such as CRM systems and e-mail marketing solutions are designed to facilitate GDPR compliance, but it’s still your responsibility to comply.

Some of the other marketing technology tools that businesses commonly use include:

Organic search. To create website content that is optimised for search (SEO — Search Engine Optimisation), you need data on keyword volumes and ranking difficulty, backlinks and much more. Leading providers of SEO tools include Ahrefs, Moz and Ubersuggest (by Neil Patel Digital).
Web analytics. Google Analytics can capture detailed data on the behaviour of visitors to your website (visitors by demographic, pages visited, time spent, purchases etc).
Social media. Social media monitoring solutions enable you to monitor activity on your social media pages as well as trends relevant to your brand across the wider social media landscape. Social media scheduling tools enable you to compose and publish posts across all your social media channels from a single platform. Vendors include Buffer, Hootsuite, HubSpot, Sprout Social and many others.
E-mail marketing. Your CRM system should have in-built e-mail marketing capability. Although you can usually integrate third party solutions if you wish, such as Mailchimp.
Artificial intelligence (AI). Marketers are adopting new AI techniques in their strategies and campaigns — and to improve productivity.

Which types of tools are important for you and which vendors best meet your needs will depend on your unique business, strategy and goals. But this should provide you with some initial pointers to set you off in the right direction.

If you’re using a small business marketing consultant, they should know the pros and cons of the main technology solutions and data providers from their work with other clients. Qualified advice from them about which solutions would best meet the unique needs of your business should be very valuable and generate a good return on any fees you pay them.

Take the right decisions on outsourcing

To develop the best marketing strategy for your business, you don’t want to design the perfect solution for an ideal world that doesn’t exist. You need the strategy that will be most effective and workable for your business at its current stage of development.

Most small businesses don’t have limitless resources. Part of resolving resource trade-offs in strategy design involves deciding whether to carry out activities in-house or outsource them to expert agencies or freelancers:

Time. You and your staff have a finite amount of time and you need to conserve it for activities that are most critical to your success. Is this part of your marketing strategy critical? Would you have more impact spending your time on other tasks?
Cost. Paying an agency or freelancer to do a job normally costs more than hiring an employee. If you would prefer to outsource, could you afford the additional expense? Or is it possible that the outsourced option would deliver a far better result that would more than offset its higher cost? On the other hand, a role might not be big enough to keep an employee fully occupied, in which case outsourcing might even be cheaper. Don’t forget the indirect costs of employees (office overheads, holiday and sick pay, employer National Insurance contributions, hiring and management costs) and of agencies (search costs, monitoring costs, etc).
Expertise. Would a competent person be available to hire as an employee? Would you or your staff be able to master the skill and do it yourselves? Or would the time and effort required be far too onerous?

Here are my thoughts about general principles:

If the task is important for your success and you can find an expert agency or freelancer who you trust, who is affordable and who you think will get good results, then outsource. Each marketing channel has idiosyncracies that might trip you up if you do it yourself.
If the role is critical and outsourcing is unaffordable, then you will have to take a crash course and become good at it quickly. But if it’s a nice-to-have activity rather than a must-have, skip it. You can spend more on a different marketing channel for now and revisit the issue later.
Even if you outsource an activity, you still bear the cost if performance is poor. Agencies and freelancers may slack off if they think you’re not monitoring their performance. You need to build up enough knowledge of the activity to be able to evaluate and challenge your provider.

If they need to, many small business entrepreneurs should be able to do a lot of their own content marketing (social media posts, e-mail marketing etc.). The catch is that it may take you some time to learn how to do it well. You must understand the interests and needs of your target customer, learn the basic principles of crafting a strong marketing message and be able to write lively, engaging and fluent copy.

If organic search is important and you need to create content for your website, you would also need keyword data and some non-technical SEO know how. These are, however, acquirable.

If you’re using a bespoke website rather than a template, it’s critical to use a web design agency or freelancer with strong technical expertise in optimising sites for organic search (i.e. getting your site’s coding right). If you’re using a template from a major vendor (e.g. Shopify, Wix, WordPress) you don’t need to worry about coding issues (unless you plan to incorporate something unique to your site).

I don’t think it’s advisable to run your own Google Ads unless you really believe you are an expert.

I think you should be able to do your own PR if you need to. It requires similar skills to content writing and you must learn the basic rules of the road before you start, but it’s not complicated.

If imagery is important (photos, videos, graphic design), you must hire a professional.

If you do plan to outsource some of your marketing activity, there’s nothing more valuable than a first-hand recommendation of an agency or freelancer. If you’re using a small business marketing consultant, they may be able to introduce you to someone good from a network of industry contacts.

Bring it all together to maximise your profits

We’ve covered almost all of the essentials of designing your marketing strategy. But there’s one key point we haven’t touched on yet — your strategy needs to be profitable.

From a marketing perspective, the factors that drive your profits at any given level of scale are:

The average profitability for you from each new customer. This is a function of the price you can charge for your product (which should be linked to the value it provides to your customers) and the cost to produce and deliver your product or service (before deducting marketing costs). For simplicity, let’s assume here that each new customer buys only one product.
The average cost you incur to acquire each new customer — commonly referred to as your customer acquisition cost (CAC). You calculate this by dividing your total marketing costs by the number of first-time purchases generated.
The value of repeat sales. This is a function of the share of your new customers that buy again and the frequency with which they do so.

At first sight, it might seem as if you just need to optimise all three factors and you will maximise your profits. However, it’s not as simple as that because the three factors may pull in opposite directions.

For example, let’s say you have identified the customer niche where your product USP resonates most strongly. Customers in this niche often become loyal repeat buyers. But you find that reaching and converting these customers is very expensive. By contrast, another customer niche exists where your product USP resonates less strongly and you generate less repeat buying but your CAC would be much lower. Which should you target?

The way to answer questions like these is by testing each market segment in small, low-cost trials and recording the different financial outcomes. Be guided by your informed convictions, i.e. about what should work best while being open to trying out different options. With this approach, you can identify which combination of factors should deliver the most profitable outcome.

Sometimes, you will only be able to pin down the right choices for the individual parts of your marketing strategy once you have evaluated all your viable strategy options in the round.

Avoid the common pitfalls in marketing strategy design

Designing a marketing strategy for your business is a complex undertaking. If you follow the path set out above, you should be well placed to succeed. But just in case, here are some of the more common pitfalls to avoid:

Rushing to action. Be enthusiastic — but don’t allow your enthusiasm to run away with you. Don’t assume you just need to do ‘more marketing’. Before you start choosing marketing channels or creating marketing content, stop to check that you’ve really clarified your USP and your target customer niche.
Doing ‘random acts of marketing’. This is when a company bounces from one marketing channel to another driven by articles in the media or recommendations from acquaintances. You must focus on the channels that are best for pitching your product USP to your target customers.
Defining your target audience too broadly. It’s imperative to define your niche and focus on it. There’s a saying in marketing: If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one.
Unsuccessful outsourcing. The more specialised a function is, the more likely you are to outsource it to an expert. That makes life tricky — even if you outsource an activity, you still own the results. But it’s vital not to give up on complex areas like Google Ads or website design as ‘black boxes’ that you will never understand. Remember that you don’t need to be an expert on the inputs to evaluate the outputs. For example, you can measure the customer acquisition cost from your Google Ads. You can measure the technical performance of your website and where you rank in Google search for your target keywords. Be informed and, if results seem poor value for money, challenge your provider. Otherwise you are putting your success at risk.
Failing to measure the RoI (return on investment) from your marketing. Many small businesses don’t systematically evaluate the return they get from their marketing channels and campaigns. The returns from digital marketing in particular are measurable. Marketing should be a constant exercise in optimisation — if it’s working then do more of it and if it’s not working, stop and try something else. If you’re not measuring it, it can’t be optimised.
Ignoring customers after they have bought from you. Whatever line of business you are in, getting the first sale over the line from a new customer is usually costly, in time or money or both. Happily that first sale should lead to many lucrative repeat sales and positive referrals. But this will only happen if you keep yourself at the forefront of their mind and make them feel truly valued.

Appendix: Two approaches to avoid: Brand marketing and hard selling

If you’re a newcomer to marketing strategy, you might not have heard of direct response marketing before reading this article. You may have been more familiar with two other types of marketing that I’ve mentioned only in passing: brand marketing and hard sales tactics.

These two approaches are very different to direct response marketing in ways that make them unsuitable for most small businesses.

Brand marketing is the practice of publishing slick ads and commercials that promote the image of a brand on TV, in magazines, on billboards and so on. They don’t promote a specific product. Even if a campaign incorporates a specific product — let’s say a car — it won’t tell you much about the car itself (specifications, pricing etc.).

Furthermore, brand marketing is not focused on a defined target audience. The ads are one-way — the viewer is passive and can’t engage with the brand even if they want to. And there is no practical way of measuring the results from a particular campaign.

Brand marketing is mainly used by big companies with very big marketing budgets that wish to allocate a portion of their marketing budget to generalised brand promotion. They also have the luxury of being able to wait a long time for ads to pay back. This is not a small business approach.

Hard selling is the practice of hitting a prospect with a sales pitch for a product on the first contact. It’s a very inefficient way to try to sell and you should avoid it. Here’s why:

High costs. If you use direct response marketing and a marketing funnel framework, you filter for prospects who are most likely to buy before you engage with them to try to make a sale. By contrast, a hard seller spends most of their time pitching to people who are completely uninterested in the product they’re selling. It’s very inefficient — face to face selling, whether in person or over the phone, is expensive. You should use it on prospects that appear likely to buy and may just need a final effort to meet their requirements and close the sale.
Lost prospects. A hard selling approach fails to capture prospects who are interested in the product you sell but are still at the research stage. A marketing funnel approach captures their contact details and nurtures a relationship until the point at which they’re ready to buy.
Missed sales. If the prospect is interested in the product you sell and is ready to buy, a hard sales approach can potentially generate a sale. Yet there is also a risk that the prospect is put off by the hard sell and decides to buy from your competitor instead. Think about it — how likely are you to buy from a pushy salesperson that you have only just met? Wouldn’t you rather buy from someone you know, who has demonstrated expertise and who you have come to trust?

Your complete guide to designing a successful small business marketing strategy

Be crystal clear about your USP

Identify the market niche you will target

Understand how to operate a marketing funnel using direct response marketing

Choose the right marketing channels

Use compelling key marketing messages

Understand the key marketing technology tools you may need

Take the right decisions on outsourcing

Bring it all together to maximise your profits

Avoid the common pitfalls in marketing strategy design

Appendix: Two approaches to avoid: Brand marketing and hard selling

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