What I've Learned About Marketing a Small Business From Working With Hundreds of Owners

After more than a decade of working with small business owners (first as a marketing consultant, now as the founder of Enji) I've had a front row seat to a very specific kind of frustration folks have when it comes to their marketing.

It's not the frustration of not knowing what to do. Most small business owners know way more about what they can do to market their products and services than they give themselves credit for. The frustration is about something else: their ability to get what they know they can be doing done. Between having a color-coded list of marketing ideas and actually getting those ideas into actual marketing week after week.

I've watched this pattern play out hundreds of times. And after all of it (the 1:1 consulting clients and supporting every small business owner in the Enji community) here's 4 lessons I've learned about small business marketing.

The best marketing plan in the world is worth nothing without consistency

I'll start with the hardest lesson because it's the one that changed how I think about what it takes to successfully market a small business.

When I was consulting, clients would pay me $1,600 for a custom marketing strategy. Three full days of work. A realistic (very because of who I am), thoughtful plan built specifically around their business, their goals, and what was actually doable for a small team. We'd get on the review call, they'd love it, and I'd hang up feeling like I'd set them up for so much success.

And then most of them wouldn't do it. The plan just died somewhere on their computer and the 20-page PDF collected digital dust.

This didn’t happen because the plan was bad. Not because they didn't care. The plan was good and they knew it. What never showed up was consistency in doing the plan—the discipline to execute week after week even when client work got loud and marketing felt like the least urgent thing on the list. In fact, one of the things a client said to me that eventually planted the seed for Enji was, “Now if you can just get all these tasks on my calendar, Tayler!” (Shout out to Karen of Blissfully Styled Events!)

This was not a one-off incident. In fact, in Enji's State of Small Biz Report, 44% of small business owners said consistency is the number one thing they know they should be doing but aren't when it comes to their marketing. Nearly half.

So, before anything else—before strategy, before tools, before any of the other lessons in this post—the lesson I learned is that the most important question you can ask yourself about your marketing is not "is my plan good?" It's "how am I going to show up for it consistently?"

I wrote a full post about this if you want to go deeper: Consistency Is the Only Marketing Strategy That Actually Works (And Also the Hardest One).

Overthinking is doing more damage to your marketing than you realize

Here's something I hear constantly on Enji's group coaching calls: small business owners openly admitting they know they're overthinking things. They'll say it out loud, almost relieved to name it.

And from where I sit, the overthinking shows up in two main ways.

The first is idea collecting. A lot of small business owners have an absolutely enormous backlog of marketing ideas—saved Instagram posts, bookmarked articles, a notes app full of content concepts, a swipe file they've been adding to for two years. The ideas are not the problem. The problem is that collecting ideas has become a substitute for executing them. It feels productive. But it isn't.

The second is perfectionism. The caption gets rewritten four times and still doesn't feel right. The email sits in drafts because the subject line doesn’t feel strong enough. The blog post has been "almost done" for three weeks because there's always one more thing to tweak.

Both versions of overthinking lead to the same place: marketing tasks that never get finished.

The reframe I come back to over and over (and the one I share constantly in the Enji group coaching calls) is this: the best kind of marketing is the kind you finish. Not the most perfectly crafted post. Not the most strategically sound email. The one that actually goes out.

"Perfect enough to post" is a standard worth adopting for most small business owners. Because a good post published today will always outperform a perfect post that never saw the light of day.

Bad marketing habits are keeping small business owners stuck—and you might not even notice them

Beyond overthinking, most small business owners have at least one marketing habit that's quietly working against them. And the most common one I see is this: trying to work on marketing a little bit every day.

It sounds reasonable. Even disciplined. But here's what actually happens: a little bit every day means small chunks of time every day, and small chunks of time are the first thing to get stolen by something more urgent. A client email. A phone call. A task that has a real deadline attached to it. Marketing has no deadline, so it is never the most important thing. Every time.

The result is a blog post that takes two weeks to write because you're working on it in 15-minute increments that keep getting interrupted. An email campaign that stretches across a month because there's never enough time to finish it in one sitting. Marketing that's always in progress and rarely actually done.

The fix is simply batching. Protecting a real block of time (a few focused hours, once a week) where marketing is the only thing on the agenda. A protected block with a real commitment behind it turns into marketing tasks that get finished. Half-assed daily intentions don't—said with love.

The second habit worth examining is skipping the marketing planning phase entirely. A lot of small business owners just post to post. They show up when they feel inspired, share what feels relevant in the moment, and hope it adds up to something. Sometimes it does. But more often it means marketing that goes in a dozen different directions without building toward anything in particular.

When you plan your marketing (even loosely) you can make sure you're marketing in the direction of your actual goals. That you're talking about the right things at the right times. That your content is building something instead of just filling space. Planning doesn't have to be complicated or time-consuming. It just has to happen.

Every single small business owner is capable of doing their own marketing

Here's the one I want to end on, because I mean it completely.

In over a decade of working with small business owners, I have never met one who genuinely couldn't do their own marketing. Not one. The people who struggle aren't struggling because the’re not smart or capable enough. They're struggling because they haven't found the system that works for them yet—or because the habits and overthinking patterns I described above are getting in the way.

The proof I'd point to is Danison of Bowtie & Brush, a Portland-based live wedding artist who paints stunning watercolor guest portraits at weddings and events. Danison's background isn't in marketing—it's in accounting. He was a CPA, formerly at Disney (which is so cool!). By every conventional measure, he's not who you'd picture when you imagine someone who's "good at marketing."

And yet after a year and a half of consistently using Enji to plan and organize his marketing and consistently check things off as done, Danison is growing his business in a real, measurable way. Not because he suddenly became a marketing expert. Because he showed up consistently, followed a system, and trusted that the work would compound over time.

Click here to learn more about how Danison uses Enji.

That's it. And that’s available to any small business owner willing to do the same.

Because you don't need a marketing degree—I don’t have one! You don't need a big budget or a team or a decade of experience. You need a marketing plan, a tools that helps you do it, and the  drive to consistency to show up for it even when it's inconvenient.

That distinction matters more than almost anything else I've learned.

Enji is the marketing project management tool built for small business owners who are done letting their marketing fall through the cracks. If you're ready to close the gap between your marketing plan and getting it done, try it at enji.co.