How to choose one marketing priority for your small business
Before the Year Gets Noisy, Give Your Marketing One Job
September is when the rest of the year arrives all at once. Black Friday, Christmas, summer events, end-of-year campaigns, school holidays - all the things you meant to organise earlier suddenly need attention at the same time.
The usual response is to add more marketing to the list. Here's a different approach: choose one service, offer or program, and spend September marketing it properly.
This doesn't mean shelving everything else. Your existing work continues, and customers can still buy your other services or book your other programs. You're simply choosing one thing to give your attention to for a month - one priority, several marketing activities.
Won't marketing one thing get boring?
Choosing one service doesn't mean posting about the same thing on repeat until everyone's sick of it. It means finally taking the time to understand and explain it properly.
Who is it for?
What makes someone realise they need it?
What do they need to know before enquiring?
Why should they choose you over the business down the road?
What might be getting in their way?
And once they're ready, is the next step obvious?
Once you can answer those questions, you have something genuinely useful to guide your website, your emails, your social content, your local partnerships and your conversations with customers. Several activities can still be running - they're simply all working towards the same result.
It isn't about being less ambitious or doing less useful work. It's about putting more of your limited time and energy into the work that matters most - which is particularly important when marketing is only one of the many jobs on your desk this week.
Why one priority beats trying to promote everything
When every service is treated as an equal marketing priority, you can spend a lot of time mentioning everything without giving anyone a strong reason to choose anything.
Here's what a single September focus can look like for different types of local businesses:
An accounting firm might spend September growing its bookkeeping service. Not through one big public campaign, but through a mix of activity: contacting existing clients, reconnecting with past ones, networking at a local business event, mentioning it in the eDM, and writing a blog post on the benefits of outsourcing a tedious, time-consuming task - all while continuing to offer everything else.
A retailer might feature one product category for the month, building window displays, social content and staff conversations around it rather than trying to spotlight the whole shop at once.
A council, chamber or tourism body might concentrate on one upcoming event or membership drive, and use the month to genuinely sort out the booking, RSVP or sign-up process rather than just posting about it more often.
A community organisation might focus on volunteer recruitment or filling one upcoming program, and use the extra attention to fix up the systems around booking and follow-up.
The rest of the work doesn't disappear. One priority simply gets the benefit of sustained, joined-up attention instead of being one line in a long list.
Get specific about who it's for
Marketing legend Seth Godin's idea of the "smallest viable audience" is useful here. Instead of trying to make your marketing relevant to everybody, decide who most needs this particular service, and what would make it valuable to them.
A regional accountant probably doesn't need thousands of people to see a post. They might need twenty established trades businesses to understand they offer useful advice on managing growth and cash flow.
A local community organisation may not need "more awareness" so much as fifteen people in the area understanding what volunteering actually involves, and feeling comfortable putting their hand up.
More reach isn't always the goal. Better understanding, from the right people, is usually worth more - especially in a region where word of mouth still does a lot of the heavy lifting.
Get clear on why the service matters to the person buying it
You've probably heard plenty about knowing your "why." Kept simple, it's this: why does this service matter to the person paying for it, not to you?
Bookkeeping isn't valuable because the transactions get reconciled. It's valuable because the owner can see what's happening in the business before the bank balance delivers the news - and because leaving it to the last minute causes delays and mistakes.
A community transport program isn't valuable because it owns a minibus. It matters because people can get to appointments, shops and activities they might otherwise miss.
That's the story worth telling.
Choose your September focus
Pick one service, offer or program that:
You want more people to choose
Matters to the business or organisation
Solves a problem people recognise
You have the capacity to actually deliver
Makes sense for the next few months, not just this one
Then complete this sentence: In September, we will make it easier for __________ to understand and choose __________ because __________.
Make it specific enough to actually guide decisions. "In September, we will promote our consulting services" won't get you very far. "In September, we will help established local businesses understand how our cash-flow advisory service can help them make better decisions" gives you somewhere to go.
Turn the focus into action
With that sentence in hand, use it to:
Improve the relevant website page
Answer the questions customers regularly ask
Gather a useful testimonial or example
Create content that helps people recognise when they need the service
Check that enquiring, booking or applying is genuinely easy
Speak to customers, members or referral partners directly, not just online
You're not closing the doors to the rest of your business. You're making one important door much easier to find and walk through.
Give your marketing a job
You probably don't need more marketing ideas piled onto the rest of the year. What helps more is deciding what your marketing should achieve, who it needs to reach, and what you want those people to choose.
If that decision feels hard because everything seems important, the problem usually isn't a lack of ideas - it's the lack of a strategic marketing plan underneath all the activity to help you choose between them.
Before the year gets noisy, choose one thing worth understanding properly, and give it September.
If you'd like a hand working out what that one thing should be, a Strategic Marketing Plan that's relevant, doable and measurable is exactly the kind of work I love doing. Get in touch.
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.
