Consistency Is the Only Small Business Marketing Strategy That Actually Works (And Also the Hardest One)

When I was a marketing consultant, clients would pay me $1,600 for a custom marketing strategy. I would spend three days thinking about nothing but their business, their audience, their goals, and what was actually realistic for them to execute. And after putting it all in a well-designed PDF, we'd get on the review call, they'd love it, and I'd hang up feeling like I'd genuinely set them up for success.

And then most of them wouldn't do it. Even though the plan was good and they knew it.

That made me realize the most important part of any marketing strategy was consistency—the willingness to execute the plan week after week, even when client work keeps you busy and life is lifeing.

I watched this happen enough times that it became a central belief I've built my entire career around: the perfect marketing plan is worth exactly nothing if you're not consistent in doing it.

Consistency is the thing that makes any marketing strategy work.

Tell me I’m wrong.

SEO compounds with consistency. Email marketing builds trust with consistency. Social media builds awareness with consistency…nothing in marketing works as a one-time event or a burst of effort followed by two months of silence.

But consistency isn’t the thing small business owners are directly chasing. Don’t get me wrong, they are chasing it, but they go after courses, templates, new tactics and channels thinking that adding that one new thing is going to transform their marketing. Transform it from being this thing they occasionally do without many results into the thing that makes their business go gangbusters.

And (I’ve already made this clear), but in my experience, the only thing that will actually maybe make that happen is showing up. Regularly. Over and over again. For a long enough period of time that the marketing starts to compound.

The data backs this up in a way that should be uncomfortable for all of us. In Enji's State of Small Business Marketing Report, 63% of small business owners said they only sometimes, rarely, or never complete their marketing tasks. Nearly two thirds (!!). So I know consistency is the thing almost every small business marketing strategy is missing.

Here's why consistency is so hard

Knowing you should be consistent and actually being consistent are two completely different things. And people know the “should” part of that statement because 44% of small business owners in Enji’s State of Small Biz report said consistency is the number 1 thing they know they should be doing but aren't. Almost half. Which means if you've been quietly beating yourself up about this, you're in very good company.

Here's what I think is actually happening with service-based businesses: client work always feels more urgent than your own marketing. Because it is. There are real deadlines, real dollars, and a real human who will or will not pay your invoice waiting on the other side. Your Instagram post has none of those things. So, when something has to give, it's always your marketing.

And for the consultants, coaches, designers, and photographers reading this (the ones who do creative or marketing work for other people) there's an additional layer that doesn't get talked about enough.

You hold your own marketing to a higher standard than you'd ever hold a client's.

You know too much. You can see every flaw in the caption before it goes out. You agonize over the email subject line. You rewrite the bio for the fourth time and still don't love it. So, it sits in drafts. Again.

That never happens with client work—partly because there's accountability, and partly because you're not second-guessing every word. You just do it because the job demands it be done.

But the fix isn't getting rid of your standards for your own marketing in the same of consistency. It's treating your own marketing the way you'd treat a client's—with a deadline, a plan, and the firm expectation that done is better than perfect. You'd never let a client's marketing sit unfinished for three months. Yours deserves the same standard.

What actually makes being consistent with your marketing possible

Here's the thing I've seen about the small business owners who actually show up consistently for their marketing: they are more motivated in some ways. They are more disciplined in others. And they definitely have removed the friction between deciding to do their marketing and actually doing it.

(Not apologizing for calling out those personality traits. With 11 years of working with small business owners under my belt, I can’t deny this is what I see.)

So, consistency is partly a personality trait. But is also very much a byproduct of having a system that makes showing up easier than not showing up. And most small business owners don't have that system—they have a long and color-coded list of ideas they open occasionally and a vague intention to post more this week.

What a real marketing system looks like in practice? A plan that lives somewhere you actually open, not buried in a part of your Asana account you never go to. Tasks that are broken down small enough to fit into a real week—not a theoretical week where you have three uninterrupted days for marketing. A structure that doesn't require you to start from scratch every month, because starting from scratch is exactly where momentum gets sucked away into oblivion.

And when the system is right, consistency stops being a willpower problem and starts being a workflow problem. And workflow problems are solvable.

The honest question worth sitting with—and answering for yourself

No strategy (no matter how good, no matter how custom, no matter how much you paid for it) does anything without a person executing it. I learned that from watching great $1,600 strategies I created collect digital dust. I've seen it confirmed hundreds of times since.

So, before you go looking for a better strategy, a different content approach, or a new marketing framework: audit your consistency first. Are you actually showing up for your marketing week after week? If not, is it because you don't know what to do or because you don't have a system that makes doing it realistic?

Those are different problems. And they both have very different solutions.

If it's either (actually), Enji can help you fix the problem.  It's a marketing project management tool designed to close the gap between your marketing plan (which it creates) and doing the plan—so the strategy you have actually gets executed. Try it at enji.co.

But whether or not Enji is the right fit for you, the work is the same: stop optimizing the strategy and start showing up for it.

Because consistency is the strategy your marketing needs.