Most small and medium companies are not badly marketed. They are indistinguishable — describing themselves in words their competitors could use without changing anything. That is a positioning problem, and no amount of advertising budget fixes it.
Take your own website, and your three closest competitors’. Cover the logos. If a customer could not tell which is which, you are not competing on being better — you are competing on price, whether or not you meant to.
Being chosen requires being choosable for a reason: something true about you that the others cannot say, aimed at someone specific enough to recognise themselves in it. “Small and medium businesses” is not a target. It is a way of avoiding choosing one.
Narrow enough to be useful. The fear is always that narrowing loses customers; what it actually does is make the right ones recognise themselves.
Found by looking at what your best clients actually bought, which is regularly not what you thought you were selling.
Channels chosen for your market rather than for fashion, run so the pipeline does not empty the moment you get busy delivering.
The commonest failure we see is not a bad campaign. It is a decent campaign feeding a sales process that does not exist, into a person who was never trained to sell, tracked by nobody.
Which is why this is usually done together with the sales system. Generating demand and being able to convert it are one project with two halves.
If you get five different answers, or five vague ones, that is the work. Ninety minutes to look at it properly.
