Before you spend another hour or another penny on marketing, please read this

If you run a small business and you’ve never looked at your website analytics, or you automatically delete the monthly email from your Google Business Profile without opening it, please give me a few minutes of your time.

It could save you thousands of hours and a lot of money over the life of your business.

I know that sounds like a bold claim, but stick with me.

Following my last blog about our free small business meet-ups, I had some lovely comments on Instagram. What struck me was that the people commenting had all done our One-Day Marketing Bootcamp, now called the Small Business Clarity Day, and/or worked with me one-to-one in a Focus Session. They understand what we teach at Coastal Media. They know how to filter marketing advice and, more importantly, they know how to work out what is and isn’t likely to work for their own business.

And that brings me to something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while.

Now, I know the word “formula” can sound a bit dodgy. We've all seen the Instagram adverts promising the secret to six-figure sales, a fully booked business or the dream of working four hours a week from a beach somewhere, usually from someone who reckons they've cracked a system nobody else knows about. That's not what we're talking about.

What I mean is having a sensible, repeatable way of understanding a business, working out where the problem really lies and deciding what to do about it.

I’ve spent a lot of my career doing exactly that. Straight out of university, I joined one of the UK’s biggest advertising agencies during a transformation project. PwC had been paid to help the agency shift its business towards small businesses as core clients, and I was the first employee working on that project. I learnt a huge amount about how to understand businesses, their customers and the things that would help them grow.

I was then headhunted to do similar work elsewhere, became a consultant and continued developing that approach as marketing changed. Over the years, I refined it, tested it and worked out how to make it more practical.

When I moved to Norfolk, I started looking at how I could use that experience differently. For much of my career, I’d used this knowledge to help graphic design agencies, web design agencies, paid social agencies and other marketing agencies support small businesses. I wanted to use it more directly to help small businesses understand their own marketing and make better decisions for themselves.

Because…having this knowledge is power. You might not have the budget to pay someone to help you with your marketing, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have access to the knowledge that helps you make good decisions. Or you might have the budget, but simply want to do it yourself. Either way, you deserve to understand your own business and work out what is right for you.

Matt then joined Coastal Media and developed that approach into something we could actually teach small businesses directly. We've taken years of experience and turned it into a practical way for business owners to understand their own businesses, work out what they need and make more confident decisions about where to spend their time and money.

And the reason I care so much about this is that I see the same thing happening again and again. Business owners spend hours doing something because someone has told them it’s important, without stopping to check whether it’s the thing their business needs.

Let me give you an example.

Imagine two small businesses. They have similar sales targets and both want to increase their sales from 10 to 50 a week.

On the surface, they have exactly the same problem. They need more sales.

But when you look a little closer, you discover that the first business has around 80 people visiting its website each month and 15 inquiries. Most of its customers find it through word of mouth and social media.

The second business has around 1,000 website visitors a month and 30 enquiries. People find it through search engines, Google Ads, PR and social media.

Same target. Same current sales. Very different businesses.

For the first business, the problem might be that not enough people know it exists. It may need to increase awareness and find ways of getting in front of more potential customers.

For the second, getting more people to its website might be the last thing it needs. It already has plenty of visitors. The problem could be that people arrive and don’t understand what makes it different, can’t find the information they need, don’t feel confident enough to buy, or find the process of getting in touch or making a purchase too complicated.

That business might need to work on its website, messaging, offer or customer journey before spending another penny trying to attract more visitors.

These figures are just an illustration, of course. You need to understand the whole business and its customers before deciding what the numbers mean. But hopefully you can see the point.

If we gave both businesses the same advice, one of them could waste a huge amount of time and money doing something that doesn’t address its actual problem.

And yet, this is exactly what we see small businesses doing all the time.

We let Dr Google and Dr Instagram diagnose our businesses. Someone tells us we need to be on TikTok, so we start making videos. Someone says SEO is essential, so we pay for it. Someone else says we need to post three times a day, so we squeeze another task into an already impossible working week.

We’d never expect a doctor to hear that we’re tired and immediately recommend a heart transplant without asking any questions or running any tests. We’d expect them to investigate what might be causing the problem before deciding on treatment.

So why don’t we do the same with our businesses?

When I work with businesses through the Go Digital programme, I regularly see people who are putting an incredible amount of effort into Instagram. They’re creating brilliant content, engaging with people and driving lots of visitors through to their websites. They are doing so much right.

But then you look at the website and realise it doesn’t really explain what they offer, doesn’t feel like the business they’re trying to build, or makes it surprisingly difficult for someone to book, buy or get in touch.

All that social media work could be going to waste because the next step in the customer journey isn’t working properly. The answer isn’t necessarily to post more often or get better at Instagram. It might be to fix the website they’re already sending people to.

Another business might spend £1,000 on SEO, only to find that national chains with huge budgets, specialist teams and years of investment are dominating the search results. That doesn’t mean SEO is always the wrong choice, but it does mean you need to understand your market, your competition and what is realistically achievable before deciding where to spend your money.

These are extreme examples, but they illustrate why understanding your business matters so much.

I have yet to work with a business where the problem turned out to be exactly what the owner initially assumed it was. Sometimes the original instinct is partly right, but the real issue is usually more complicated than it first appears.

This is why we start with understanding the business rather than jumping straight into marketing tactics.

And you don’t need to become a data analyst to get started. You can learn an enormous amount simply by looking at a couple of places that many small businesses either ignore or don’t realise they have access to.

The first is your website analytics. If you have a website, you should be able to access information about the people visiting it, how they find you and what they do when they get there. The exact information available will depend on how your website and analytics are set up, but it can help you start asking the right questions.

Are people actually visiting your website? Where are they coming from? Which pages are they looking at? Are they reaching the pages where you explain your services or products? If you’re getting plenty of visitors but very few enquiries, what might be stopping them from taking the next step?

The second is your Google Business Profile. If you don’t have one, you really should look into getting one. I genuinely struggle to think of a business that wouldn't benefit from having a properly set-up profile, although exactly how you use it will depend on what you do and who your customers are. I'll save the details for another blog, but for now, it's worth knowing that it can help people find your business on Google Search and Maps, and you can access performance information showing how people discover and interact with your profile.

If Google sends you a monthly performance email, don’t just delete it. Open it. Have a look at what it’s telling you.

These two places won’t give you every answer, and the numbers won’t automatically tell you what to do next. They’re a starting point. You still need to understand your customers, your offer, your capacity and the experience people have when they come across your business. But they can help you stop guessing and start investigating.

I also want to be really clear about something, because I don’t want anyone reading this to think I’m suggesting Instagram isn’t useful.

We use Instagram ourselves, and it works amazingly well for us. It’s a brilliant way to share what we’re doing, connect with people, build relationships and get our work in front of small businesses who might benefit from it.

In fact, as soon as I’ve finished writing this blog, where do you think I’ll be posting it? Yes, that’s right. Instagram.

The point isn’t that Instagram is bad or that you should stop using it. It’s that you need to understand what you want your marketing to achieve, whether it’s helping you achieve that and what happens after someone discovers you there.

A big following isn’t necessarily a successful marketing strategy. If you have a million followers, but they’re all in Australia and your business is a local service in Wymondham that doesn’t sell online, those numbers might look impressive without doing much to help you pay the bills. On the other hand, a much smaller audience of the right people could be incredibly valuable.

The same applies to website visitors, Google searches and pretty much every other marketing metric. Numbers are only useful when you understand what they mean for your business.

Matt and I look at our own data every month, without fail. Not because we’re obsessed with statistics, but because it helps us make decisions calmly and deliberately. We can see what’s working, what might need attention and where our time is likely to make the biggest difference. It means we’re less likely to jump from one new idea to another simply because someone has told us we should.

Running a small business is stressful enough without spending your evenings trying to keep up with every new marketing trend, only to wonder why none of it seems to be making life any easier.

This is also why we developed our Small Business Clarity Day. It’s not about handing you a magic formula or telling you that every business needs to do the same things. It’s about giving you a practical way to understand your own business, identify what needs attention and work out what to focus on next.

Sometimes that will be Instagram. Sometimes it will be your website, your offer, your pricing or the way people book with you. Sometimes it will mean realising that the thing you’ve been worrying about isn’t actually your biggest priority at all.

We charge £95 for the day, including lunch, because we want to make this kind of support accessible to as many small businesses as possible, while still making sure we can run our own small business too. We know how much time and money small business owners can spend trying to work everything out themselves, and we want to help people make informed decisions without having to invest hundreds or thousands of pounds in consultancy.

You can find out more about the Small Business Clarity Day here, and how we work at Coastal Media.

But you don’t need to book anything or buy anything to take the first step. If you haven’t looked at your website analytics recently, go and find them. If you have a Google Business Profile, open that monthly email instead of deleting it. Spend a little time getting curious about what the information might be telling you.

...and please don’t immediately add another five things to your to-do list. The point is to understand what’s happening before deciding what, if anything, you need to change.

Because before you spend another hour creating content, another penny on advertising or another month trying to master a marketing tactic, make sure you’re solving the right problem.

Your time is just as valuable as your money. In a small business, you rarely have enough of either to waste.