When your business is changing, growing or heading in a new direction, your marketing needs to reflect who you're becoming, not just who you've been.
There's an awkward stage in business that I don't think we talk about enough.
You've made some big decisions. Perhaps you've hired someone, introduced a new service, raised your prices, started attracting different clients or decided that a particular part of your business just isn't where you want to spend your time anymore.
You're excited about what's next and possibly a bit terrified because you might not have all the people, systems or resources you need yet, but you know where you're heading.
Then you look at your website and it’s still introducing the business you started three, five or ten years ago. Your social media is also full of things you don't really offer anymore. Your photos don't include the people who now work alongside you and your calls to action are encouraging enquiries for the very work you're trying to move away from.
It's a strange feeling when the business you've worked so hard to build no longer quite represents the business you want to run
It happens more often than you might think, because growth doesn't always look or feel like success. We tend to talk about business growth as though it's a lovely, orderly progression.
More customers. More revenue. More people. Bigger opportunities.
But growth can be really, really uncomfortable.
Hiring your first employee means accepting that someone else will do work you've always done yourself. Raising your prices can mean letting go of customers you've worked with for years. Moving into a leadership role can mean stepping away from the hands-on work that made you love your business in the first place.
Sometimes growth doesn't even mean getting bigger
It might mean becoming more specialised, dropping an unprofitable service, reducing your working hours or choosing to work with fewer clients at a higher level.
For community organisations, change might involve new leadership, a new strategic direction, different funding arrangements or responding to changing community needs.
These are all significant shifts, and they rarely happen neatly. There's often a period where you're trying to maintain what you've built while preparing for something different.
That takes quite a lot of energy, particularly when you don't yet have the team or capacity to support the next stage.
Marketing, unfortunately, is often one of the last things to catch up.
You've spent years teaching people what to expect from you
Think about that for a moment.
Every photograph, website paragraph, social media post, customer conversation and recommendation has contributed to your reputation and is cached all over the internet informing not only people, but AI and algorithms.
You've taught people what you do, what you're good at and why they should choose you - that's valuable, but what happens when you've successfully built a reputation for something you no longer want to be known for?
Imagine you're a business owner who has spent years delivering a professional service personally
You've built wonderful relationships, earned referrals and established a reputation for doing excellent work. Now you've employed two other qualified people to deliver that service, but your website is still full of photographs of you. Your About page talks about your personal experience. Every testimonial mentions you by name and every social media post sounds as though you're the only person in the business.
And you're frustrated because customers keep asking specifically for you. Of course they do.
Your marketing has spent years convincing people that you're the reason to choose the business, so you can't expect that perception to change simply because you've added a couple of names to the Team page.
You have to deliberately build confidence in the people who are now part of the customer experience.
Introduce them, explain their expertise, let them share their thinking and make them visible in the places where customers are making decisions. Perhaps most importantly, start talking about what your business delivers rather than positioning yourself as the only person capable of delivering it.
You're not making yourself less important, you're creating a business that can grow beyond your personal capacity.
Your marketing is making promises on your behalf
This is where marketing and customer experience are so closely connected. Your marketing creates expectations about what it will be like to deal with your business.
If your website promises personal attention from the founder but clients are now working with a team, that expectation needs to be managed.
If you've moved from small, one-off jobs to more complex strategic projects, your messaging should explain the value of that work.
If your organisation has introduced new services, people need to understand who they're for, how to access them and what has changed.
And if you're entering a new market or trying to attract a different kind of customer, they need a reason to recognise themselves in what you're saying.
It's not necessarily a branding problem - you probably don't need a new logo, a different colour palette or an expensive website rebuild. You might simply need to update the way you explain your business.
That sounds easy enough, but it can be surprisingly difficult to see what needs to change when you're so close to it.
The difficult bit is deciding what to leave behind
I've been through this myself. Over ten years of Mac&Ernie I've changed the way I work, the services I offer and the kinds of projects I want to take on, and I've spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about how to explain those changes.
There's an emotional attachment to the business you've built, especially when your identity has been so closely connected to it.
You don't want to lose the relationships, reputation or trust you've worked hard to establish, but holding on to every service, every message and every description of what you do can make it difficult for people to understand where you're going.
Sometimes the hardest part of changing your marketing isn't writing the new words, it's giving yourself permission to stop using the old ones.
That’s something to consider before you start planning a whole lot of new content for next year.
Before you head into 2027, look at what you're still telling people
The summer break is an interesting time for small business owners. For some, it's the busiest time of year and for others, it's the first chance in months to have a proper think about where the business is heading.
It's often when decisions start to take shape.
A new service, a different way of working, another person joining the team, a new audience, or simply the decision that next year needs to feel different.
Before you start scheduling January's social media or planning another marketing campaign, I'd encourage you to consider three things:
First, what's changed?
Think about the reality of your business today. Your people, services, expertise, capacity, priorities and ambitions.
Second, what do you want people to understand about your business in 2027?
Not just what you do, but what you're becoming known for. What should someone confidently recommend you for? Who should they be recommending you to?
Third, does your marketing currently support that direction?
Take a look at the places people go to learn about you. Your website, Google Business Profile, social media, email communications and even the way you introduce yourself in conversation.
Are you giving people a clear, accurate picture of your business, or are you unintentionally sending them towards a version of it that you're trying to leave behind?
You don't need to have everything worked out to make a start - there's a temptation to wait until everything is ready.
When the new employee has settled in, or the website has been redesigned or the new services are perfectly packaged and the systems are in place.
But you can begin preparing people for change before every detail is finalised.
You can start introducing your team's expertise, talking about the problems you want to solve, sharing the direction you're moving in and helping existing customers understand what those changes mean for them.
You can start archiving content that no longer serves the business you want to be.
You can make the transition gradually and thoughtfully and you can stop investing so much marketing effort in attracting work that no longer fits.
Your business is allowed to change but people who know it just need a chance to come along with you. That doesn't mean abandoning what you've built. It means taking the best of it into whatever comes next.
And making sure your marketing helps you get there.
💛 Erika
Hi, I’m Erika McInerney - a marketing and customer experience strategist working with regional, suburban and small-town businesses.
I help you see where customers and revenue are leaking, build practical marketing strategies around your real capacity, and create systems that actually support your business (and your life).
Alongside one-on-one work, I partner with councils, business groups and organisations to deliver practical workshops that build marketing capability across entire communities.
If you’re ready for clearer strategy and more confident visibility, you can book a free discovery call, send an email or connect on social media.
