Things are falling into place for SMEs to shine.

For years, the big guys have had some pretty big advantages. Bigger teams, bigger budgets and long-established distribution and routes to market.

If you’re in the same market, it can feel like an uphill struggle to even gain any sort of traction. Things have and will continue to change.

The way customers discover and research businesses and products, decide who and what to trust and the technologies and platforms that support that decision-making are changing as quickly as customer attitudes, behaviours and values. The routes around that discovery and intent formation are less predictable.

The old advantages still matter, but they don’t guarantee success in this modern landscape. I think it creates a real opportunity for small and medium companies and challenger brands; not because they’re smaller but because the qualities that help businesses today are increasingly within their reach.

Let’s reframe what ‘SME’ stands for. Speedy, Meaningful and Empathetic.

These are the three qualities that can help them punch above their weight.

Speedy.

Behaviour doesn’t stand still. Where customers discover and ask questions. The way consumers navigate a passing interest through to considering and purchasing is evolving rapidly.

This might mean a tweak to the proposition, removing friction points from the buying process or showing up in new community places where potential customers are now hanging out.

Smaller companies are well positioned with fewer decision-making layers and decision-makers closer to customers on the frontline.

It isn’t necessarily about doing things faster but recognising and acting on something before the opportunity moves on.

Meaningful.

Brands could often get away with being seen and be generic enough not to deter certain audiences from growing. Now it’s about being relevant and specific.

By being more specific, you show your target audience the role your product or service plays in their life, the problem it solves, the occasion it matters in, and the friction it removes.

Not trying to be everything to everyone will shape not just how you promote, but how you develop the proposition, the product itself, the experience and how you communicate.

Being meaningful isn’t about getting attention; it’s about giving people reasons to care. Being meaningful gives you a greater chance of not only being understood, but chosen.

Empathetic.

This is the one area that really becomes harder to maintain as businesses grow because it’s harder to maintain those direct relationships.

A business owner might speak to customers. The person responsible for the service hears about the niggly little things that happen in the buying journey. The team can also understand why customers chose them and potentially what stopped them from buying again.

Every interaction is an opportunity to learn, and every relationship can earn trust. It doesn’t mean big companies can’t be empathetic, but scale can dilute that understanding with every degree of distance from the customer. Direct feedback becomes numbers on a dashboard, a cycle of quality questionnaires and feedback forms or commissioned research studies.

For smaller businesses, every customer can matter enormously. Listening, responding, keeping promises and putting things right become more than customer service. It’s a small business’ competitive advantage.

In a world where we can discover brands and products through someone’s recommendation, a community discussion, a review or a cited AI answer, that’s where trust matters. It always has, but now it’s amplified in this new world.

A different way to compete.

Speedy, Meaningful and Empathetic.

These aren’t exclusive to small and medium-sized businesses, and being great at one doesn't guarantee success. Being speedy without understanding what matters lacks discipline. Being meaningful without being discoverable can make a great proposition hide away. Being Empathetic without learning and adapting quickly becomes lip service.

The real opportunity is when they work together. Organising around those customers, with the people, knowledge and capabilities you already have alongside skills and leadership where you need it. You can determine what matters most to customers, respond to their needs and behaviours and build stronger relationships so they choose you again and recommend you to others.

It’s a different way to compete than trying to outspend or outdistribute. This is the opportunity for SMEs to become great at the things scale and size can’t guarantee.

What does your business excel at, and where could you sharpen up?

Things are falling into place for SMEs to shine.

Resource the outcome, not the department.

I've talked about organising around intent rather than channels. About measuring value so channel metrics don't dictate the strategy. And about dropping poor-performing activity to free up space for the things that matter.

Now the final piece of the jigsaw: how do we resource it, especially in a small or lean business?

When channels dictate budget and resource follow.

Someone looks after social. Someone creates content. An agency runs search and SEO. Someone else owns CRM and email. It makes sense if you think of marketing as a collection of channels. But we want to start with outcomes, with the business issue we're trying to solve.

Business issues need capabilities. The starting point is what needs to happen, not who in marketing can do it. And when you build around the outcome, the question changes.

Channel driven: "I need to solve our SEO issue."

Outcome driven: "Do we have the capability to be discovered by the right customers?"

Channel driven: "I need to activate CRM for existing customers."

Outcome driven: "What capabilities do we have, or need, to get more value from our existing customers?"

Channel, skill, capability

A channel is where you deliver. A skill is what someone can do. A capability is the ability to achieve an outcome, like being found by the right customers or getting them to come back.

Channels matter as points of delivery. Skills matter too. But you probably don't have the budget, or the need, to build everything just in case.

Your mix will change as you scale from £2.5M to £5M, and from £5M to £10M. What you need today might be different in six months. A fixed team built around today's channels is a risk.

The capability might already be in the building.

Take a simple outcome: more repeat purchases.

Your sales team already knows where the friction is in the process, what customers like and don't like, and what makes them buy again. Customer service probably owns the capability of trust, which helps people choose you, come back and recommend you. Your CRM or email tool is simply the point of delivery.

The gap might be one hire or support from an agency. It might be none; it might just be connecting people who've never been in the same conversation.

For a small business, this isn't about marketing specialists. It's about unearthing the knowledge that already exists inside the business and using it to solve a customer problem.

Bringing it together

That's the series:

Plan around intent, not channels.

Measure what drives growth, using marginal customer value to decide where the next £ goes.

Cut the unproductive and protect the proven.

Resource the outcome, not the department.

And that last £ might not buy a channel specialist at all. The smartest hire might be the one you don't make because you can unlock and connect what already exists.

What if the hardest marketing decision is deciding what to stop?

In an earlier post, I discussed organising around intent rather than channels, because the way customers discover and research businesses has changed dramatically in the last 12 months.

That speed of change, together with discovery fragmentation, makes it critical to understand what's working and what isn’t.

That brings us to strategy and decisions.

I’ve seen it happen time and time again. There's a hesitancy around dropping activity, and marketers try to keep all those plates spinning with less.

Less budget, less resource, and less attention. It’s easier to add another campaign, another channel, more content, more social channels.

Stopping something is so much harder.

Activity becomes its own proof of productivity. Who wants to be the person who shuts it off and sales drop?

The question needs to move from “what else should we do?” to “If we stopped doing this, what would happen?”

Would customers notice?

Would sales change?

Would the sales team be disappointed if we pulled it?

Would it help us reassign budget and time to something more productive?

The last question is important because marketing resources, especially in small businesses, are not unlimited. A finite budget, finite number of people and finite attention. It’s next to impossible to do everything really well.

Doing less can create more.

Stopping low-value activity can create more time to understand customers, investigate how they and the platforms they engage with are changing, find new signals of intent, and turn an insight into something useful.

Platforms change.

Algorithms change.

Customers are changing how they discover and buy.

Competitors are changing what they offer.

New communities appear, old ones become less relevant. Something that worked brilliantly six months ago can quietly become less effective.

Your strategy, plan, and team need to be ready to respond as intent develops. Standing still on last year’s activity is as bad as chasing the next big shiny new thing when you don’t really know what value it can offer.

Create the space and the focus to test, adapt, learn, prove and protect.

Test the things that could create new value.

Adapt when evidence tells you something isn’t delivering.

Learn from what your customers are doing rather than either assuming or dictating what you want them to do.

Prioritisation is a checkpoint throughout your strategy, delivery and measurement, and sometimes the best marketing move is subtraction.

What if the most useful marketing metric isn't a marketing metric at all?

A problem in growing businesses is that every part of marketing can have its own definition of success. Paid media talks about ROAS. SEO talks about traffic and rankings. Social talks about reach and engagement. Email talks about opens and clicks. Some channels can be linked to a cost of acquisition, and some can’t.

Then, at the end of the month, someone looks at sales and wonders why all those numbers don't seem to match up.

They often don't. 

Take attribution. A customer might see you on Instagram, search for you a few days later, read some reviews, visit your website twice, receive an email and then finally click a branded search ad before buying.

Last-click attribution gives the credit to that final click. All hail the Pay Per Click activity!

Did that click create the customer? Probably not. It may have just captured the intent that had already been created elsewhere. 

The same problem exists with vanity metrics.

If every channel is optimised against its own numbers, each can look successful while the overall customer journey gets more disjointed and foggier. Everyone is busy. Everyone has a dashboard that pulls something out as positive. Now it’s harder to align marketing effort with commercial value.

That doesn't mean channel metrics are useless. They are essential for managing activity in real time. They shouldn't be the metrics that determine where the next £ goes. 

Ask the team to answer this question. If we spend the next £1, what will it generate for the business? 

That moves the conversation to Marginal Customer Value.

What additional value will the next customer create? What happens if we increase investment here or here? What happens if we stop doing this? Are we creating new demand, or simply taking credit for demand that already existed?

It won't be the only metric you need, and it won't always be possible to measure precisely. But as an indication of growth performance, it gives marketing, commercial and finance a much more useful conversation to have.

It won’t be about which channel won, but where the next £ can create the most effective additional value.

Now that’s a conversation that a business owner and a finance team will be happy to have with marketing.

Build around intent, not channels: Why growing businesses need marketing leadership, not just marketing activity.

Marketing can look very busy from the outside.

You might have someone managing social. An agency running paid media. Someone looking after the website. Email campaigns going out. SEO work happening. Content being produced. You might even have a marketing manager doing a very good job of keeping all those plates spinning.

As the owner or founder, you can still find yourself asking: Is all this working together? Are we spending money in the right places? What should we stop doing? Where should the next £ go? Why are we getting traffic but not enough customers? Why are customers choosing us, or not choosing us? Perhaps most importantly, who is looking at the whole picture?

That is often where a growing business doesn't have a marketing problem. It has a marketing leadership problem.

The world around your marketing has changed

The challenge is getting harder because customer behaviour is changing faster than many businesses can reorganise around it. People discover businesses through social content, communities, creators, recommendations and reviews. Increasingly, AI is becoming part of how people research and compare too. They can form an opinion about you without ever visiting your website or speaking to your sales team. They can discover you in one place, research you somewhere completely different and eventually buy through another channel altogether.

Meanwhile, many businesses are still organised around the places they publish. Search does search. Social does social. Email does email. An agency does paid media. Someone else looks after the website.

Each might be doing a perfectly reasonable job, but the customer isn't experiencing your business as a collection of channels. They experience one business. That's where things can start to break down.

The paid media is generating customers, but nobody is asking whether those customers are the right ones. Social is getting engagement, but nobody knows whether it is helping create demand. The website is getting traffic, but something in the journey is stopping people buying. CRM is sending campaigns, but the business isn't clear on how much additional value they are creating.

Everyone is busy. Nobody is necessarily looking at the system.

Start with the customer, not the channel

This is why I think we need to start organising marketing around intent, rather than channels.

What is the customer trying to do? What do they need to believe before they'll act? Where are they looking? What's stopping them? What happens when they decide they're ready? And what happens after they buy?

Those questions are more useful than starting with, “What should we do on Instagram?” or “How much should we spend on Google?”

They force you to look at the whole journey.

You need to give people a reason to choose you. That's where proposition, positioning, brand, storytelling and customer understanding matter. You need to be discoverable when intent appears, wherever that intent happens to be. That might be search, social, a community, a recommendation, a review, a creator or an AI-generated answer.

You need to make it easy for that intent to become action. The website, sales process, order journey, proposition and payment experience can all create friction.

And once someone buys, you need to think about what happens next. Retention, repeat purchase, loyalty and recommendation all influence what that customer is ultimately worth.

Underneath all of it, you need enough intelligence to understand what is happening and decide what to do next.

You don't necessarily need five teams to do all of this. You need someone to make sure all of it is being thought about.

That might be the business owner. It might be an experienced marketing leader. It might be a great marketing manager who has developed into that role. It might involve agencies and specialists around them. The important thing is that someone is looking beyond the individual activities and asking whether the whole thing is working.

Marketing is bigger than marketing

This is where the role of marketing leadership becomes interesting. If you don't control the whole customer journey, you don't control everything that determines whether your marketing works.

You can create a brilliant campaign. You can drive someone to the website. You can persuade them to buy.

But then the product disappoints.

The delivery is late.

Customer service doesn't resolve the problem.

The experience doesn't match the promise.

What happens then?

The cost of your next customer just got harder.

This is why I think trust should be treated as part of the growth system, not something that sits outside marketing. It leads to a question I increasingly think marketing leaders should ask:

Would you spend some of your marketing budget to fix a customer service problem?

It sounds like the wrong budget.

Imagine customers are abandoning because the buying process is confusing. Or complaints are damaging recommendations. Or a delivery issue is creating poor reviews. Or the product isn't quite delivering what your marketing promises.

Would spending another £10,000 on media necessarily be the best way to create another £20,000 of value? Or could fixing the problem make everything you're already spending work harder?

If fixing a customer problem makes more of your existing marketing effective, isn't that part of marketing performance?

That's the shift.

Marketing doesn't have to own every problem, but good marketing leadership needs to recognise when something outside marketing is preventing marketing from working. Sometimes the best marketing decision isn't another campaign. It's fixing the things that get in the way.

Efficiency isn't the same as value

This brings us to another problem. Marketing has become very good at measuring things that are easy to see.

Clicks. Impressions. Cost Per Acquisition. Return On Ad Spend, Last-click attribution.

These are useful. But they can become dangerous when they become the definition of success, because an efficient channel isn't necessarily creating additional value for the business.

The question I increasingly want to ask is: What will the next £ actually create? Not just, “What did the last £ produce?”

If you put another £1,000 into paid media, what additional value will it create?

If you doubled your social output, what would you expect to happen?

If you stopped the activity for a month, what would you lose?

That last question is particularly useful. Not because everything needs to prove itself immediately. Brand, content, Search Engine Optimisation and customer experience can all create value over longer periods. If nobody can explain what an activity is supposed to achieve, what evidence would tell you it is working, or what you would expect to lose by stopping it, it's difficult to know whether you are investing or simply maintaining activity.

Your existing channel metrics still matter. They help you optimise the activity in front of you, but they shouldn't be the only thing deciding where the business invests.

Your bank balance doesn't care about ‘Return On Ad Spend’. It cares about value.

So, what does this mean if you have a small team?

You don't need to suddenly build a large marketing department. You don't need another 80-slide strategy, and you don't need to try every new channel because customer behaviour has changed.

You need clarity.

You need to understand what the business is trying to achieve and what customers are actually doing. You need to identify where the biggest opportunities and friction points are. You need to decide what matters now, and what doesn't.

Then you need the right capabilities around the table.

Some of those capabilities may already exist inside your business. Some might sit with an agency, specialist or trusted adviser. Some may need to be hired and sometimes the biggest gap is simply someone experienced enough to decide what is needed and make the different pieces work together.

That doesn't necessarily mean hiring a full-time marketing leader.

For some businesses, it means developing the marketing person they already have. For others, it means building their first proper marketing capability. For others, it means bringing together a fragmented mix of agencies, freelancers and internal people.

There isn't one answer, and that's important, because good marketing leadership shouldn't arrive with a pre-packaged solution. It should start by understanding the business.

So where do you start?

I don't think you start with a 90-day marketing plan template. You start by asking better questions.

What are we trying to achieve?

What are customers actually doing?

Where are we creating demand?

Where are we losing it?

What is getting in the way of customers choosing us?

Which activity is creating value?

What are we doing because it works, and what are we doing because we've always done it? What does the business need that it doesn't currently have?

Once you understand that, the next step becomes much clearer. You can decide what to protect, what to stop, what to fix and what to test. You can bring the right people together, whether they're employees, agencies, freelancers or specialists. You can start making changes and learn from what happens.

And then you do it again.

90 days, a quarter, is a cycle that fits a business, and 90 days is better understood as a rhythm, not an end point.

You spend the first part understanding what's really happening. Then you prioritise where to focus. You act on the things that can make a difference. Then you learn from the numbers, from the customer and from what the business is telling you.

Then the cycle starts again. Understand. Prioritise. Act. Learn.

The point isn't to produce a perfect 90-day plan. It's to build a business that gets better at responding over time.

Good marketing leadership isn't about doing everything

An owner who has built a business to a certain size can often become the accidental head of marketing. They make the big decisions. They approve the agency. They look at the numbers. They have an opinion on the website. They know what customers are saying.

But eventually, there are too many moving parts to keep joining together. That's often the point where a business doesn't necessarily need a bigger marketing team; it needs marketing leadership.

Someone who can understand the commercial objective, get close to the customer, figure out what matters, challenge what doesn't, develop the people already there, and bring in specialist expertise where it's needed.

Someone who can sit between the business and the marketing activity and ask a deceptively simple question:

Are we doing the right things, for the right reasons, for the right customers?

Sometimes an owner can provide that leadership themselves. Sometimes an existing marketing leader can grow into it. Sometimes the business needs someone to come in alongside them for a period, when it needs senior thinking but doesn't necessarily need another full-time executive.

That's the space I'm interested in, not adding more marketing for the sake of it. Helping businesses understand what they need, build the capability around it and turn marketing into something that works as part of the business rather than alongside it.

Build around intent, not channels.

Connect the work.

Measure the value.

Keep responding to the customer.

That's what I think modern marketing leadership should enable.

Dave Ody | Aloud To Think

Senior marketing and commercial leadership without the full-time cost.