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Strategic Marketing Made Simple: Insights from Our Small Business Workshop

By Jen Byron of Jen B Marketing Founder & Fractional CMO
Jen B Marketing’s passion is supporting small businesses to learn and grow their businesses with smart, strategic, and refined marketing campaigns.

Thank you to The CATYLYST for the opportunity to host a Strategic Marketing Workshop for Small Businesses on September 11, 2025. During the workshop, we had an interactive presentation on how to make strategic marketing easy to understand.

Breaking Down the Wide World of Marketing

Marketing has many functions within a business from developing your brand identity, audience details, market research, campaigns to help drive lead generation, revenue, and sales.

There are many variations of marketing including:

  • Strategic Marketing
  • Website Development and Management
  • Search
  • Content Marketing
  • Social Media
  • Digital Marketing
  • Offline Advertising
  • Data Analytics

They can play together or stand alone. We focused on what was included in Strategic Marketing and the Channels available.

Strategic Marketing

Strategic marketing is your company’s recipe incorporating all your unique and custom stages, elements, and tactics.

We built our marketing strategy recipe together while also mixing the ingredients for a homemade cake.

The first step is getting right size mixing bowl which is your Marketing Strategy. Then we add in each individual basic ingredient.

  • Mission and Value Statements
  • Brand Identity
    • Logo, Brand Guides, Messaging, etc.
  • Target Audience
    • Who are you trying to attract to take an action and focusing your messages toward
  • SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
    • You should perform a SWOT on your own businesses along with 2-3 competitors
  • 4 P’s (Product, Price, Place, Promotion)
    • What is your product/service
    • How much are you charging (keep in mind that you don’t want to be too low or too high either)
    • Where are you going to promote or get your message out to your target audience
    • What actions are you asking your target audience to take otherwise known as your CTA (Call-To-Action)
  • Customer Journey
    • Put your customer hat on and take all the steps as if you’re the customer to make sure you don’t confuse, lose, or offend them
  • Calendar of Focus
    • Develop an annual calendar including all the major holidays, special day for your company like anniversaries and customer appreciation, things that may affect sales (good or bad) like Black Friday or Elections (takes consumer attention away from their normal lives and sales are proven to dip)
  • Goals
    • Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) for your overall marketing, each campaign, and individual channel

Next, you have all your ingredients mixed up, you must select the right pan to back your cake which relates to what size of campaign are you creating – small, medium, or large. Within your campaign, you’ll have select the right marketing channel to support your message and goals.

Once the cake is baked, you should try it to ensure it taste it just like you need to measure your campaigns to ensure they’re performing correctly or gives you the chance to make optimizations as needed.

There are several ways to enjoy cake or do your marketing campaigns.

  • Homemade – Full Marketing Strategy
  • Boxed Cake – DIY
  • Snack Cake – Skipping the Strategy Stage and moving right to just running Social Media or one individual marketing channel
  • Store Bought Cake – This is having someone do your campaigns without doing the strategic marketing stages.

Now of these options are wrong or bad. We wanted to share good, best, and better.

If you had the choice, which would you prefer to eat?

The good news for your marketing strategy is you don’t have to start over each time unless you have a new product/service or change in the main ingredients, so you can jump right to setting goals and building the campaigns.

Diving Into Marketing Channels

Our philosophy for small businesses is always focus on FREE Marketing Channels first and refining them to drive maximum results before adding on paid options.

Also, not all channels make sense for all businesses, so you don’t have to feel overwhelmed to use all of them. The biggest key is being consistent.

Marketing Channels – Owned (aka Free)

  • Website – Lead Magnet, Blogs, Testimonials
  • Google Business Profile – Customer Reviews, Events, Special Pricing, Map, Hours
  • Search – Keywords/Key phrases, Content is Key right now with all the changes in how people do searches on AI and not clicking on the responses received
  • Social Media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, Pinterest, Alignable, YouTube, Neighborly, NextDoor, Other
  • Email Newsletter
  • Networking & Partnerships
  • Promotions – Speaking Engagements, Workshops, Seminars, Community Programs, etc.
  • Other – Publicity, Whitepapers, Referrals Program, Collaborations, Podcasts – Your Own or Appearances, Handouts/Flyers

Paid Marketing Channels/Advertising

If you’re ready to add in paid channels, there are two standard formulas to determine how much to spend.

Standard Percentage of Annual Revenue

  • Standard 12-20%
  • Formula
    • Annual Revenue X Standard Percentage = Marketing Budget

Goal Driven

  • Assign a Goal for each Campaign, Product, or Revenue Stream
  • Formula
    • (Customer Cost Acquisition X Campaign Goal) + Fixed Marketing Costs = Marketing Budget

Paid Channels

  • Social Media
  • SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
    • Search, Digital, Video, Local Service Ads
  • Traditional (aka Offline)
    • Print, Radio, TV, Direct Mail, OOH (Out of Home – Billboards, Bus Boards)
  • Digital
    • Remarketing, Native Ads, Display, Video, Content, Programmatic (Streaming Video Commercials), Podcasts, Mobile, SMS (Text), Other
  • Other
    • Affiliate, Influencer, Sponsorships, Product Placement, Promotional, Merchandise, etc.

Now that you have your Strategic, Campaign Size, Channels, and Creative/Messaging, it’s time to Implement your plans.

  • Break down your Marketing Campaign Channels into a month-by-month plan
  • Your plan needs to be Specific
    • Assign a Frequency on how often you’re going to run your channel each month than break it down even further to each week
    • How often does it need to be updated – your creative, messaging, CTAs, Pricing, etc.
    • Time Allocation Needed – how much time is it going to take to make all the changes, revise or update the plans
    • If doing Paid, assign a budget spend level to each Channel

Your plans need to be nurtured and revised or optimized every month or quarter depending on what your data is saying or if you’re achieving your goals

Marketing does not have to be complicated, intimidating, or expensive. Take it one step at a time and rely on the experts when needed.

At Jen B Marketing, we’re always open to talking marketing and getting to know our fellow entrepreneurs so we can support each other. You can find more about us at jenbmarketing.com. Or let’s grab coffee.