How Do You Optimise Marketing?
If you have ever finished a month of posting, boosting and emailing and still could not tell me where your next customer came from, you are not alone. Most of the small business owners I speak with are not short on marketing activity. They are short on a system for knowing what to keep doing and what to stop.
That is what it actually means to optimise your marketing. Not doing more of it. Doing less of the wrong things and more of what is proven to work for your business.
I have spent 18 years building that system for UK small businesses, most of them here in Derbyshire and across the East Midlands, through Optimise Your Marketing. In this guide I will walk you through the practical steps we use with clients to turn scattered marketing activity into a process that reliably brings in leads.
Not sure how your marketing measures up right now?
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Get your free scoreWhat optimising your marketing actually means
Optimising your marketing is the process of getting more result from the resources you already have, rather than simply spending more to get more. It means being deliberate about your goals, honest about your data, and disciplined about cutting the activity that is not earning its place.
Too many businesses fall into the trap of copying what a competitor is doing. Everyone ends up running the same three social platforms, the same generic email offers, and the same paid ads, and the customer just gets marketed at from every direction. The businesses that win are the ones that know their own numbers well enough to do something different.
I see this constantly with SMBs in Derbyshire and the wider East Midlands. A trades business and a professional services firm sitting five miles apart should not be running identical marketing plans, yet they very often are, because nobody has stopped to ask what is actually working.
Start with goals and numbers, not channels
Before you touch a single channel, you need two things nailed down: what you are trying to achieve, and who you are trying to reach. This sounds obvious. In practice, it is the step almost everyone skips.
Write down what success looks like in the next quarter. More enquiries. Higher average order value. Better repeat business. Then define your audience specifically enough that you could describe them to a stranger: their industry, their size, their location, the problem that sends them looking for a business like yours.
Once you have that, every marketing decision gets easier, because you can ask a simple question of any activity: does this move me toward the goal, with the audience I actually want. If the answer is no, it does not matter how popular the tactic is elsewhere.
Set KPIs that actually mean something
Key performance indicators only work if they are specific, measurable, and tied to a timeframe. Website traffic on its own tells you very little. Website traffic that converts into enquiries at a known rate tells you everything.
The KPIs I ask every client to track from day one are enquiry volume, cost per enquiry, conversion rate from enquiry to customer, and average customer value. Everything else, likes, followers, impressions, is useful context but should never be the headline number on your dashboard.
Use your data before you use your budget
Data is the difference between guessing and knowing. Before you spend another pound on lead generation, look at what your existing numbers are already telling you: which pages get visited before someone enquires, which past campaigns produced customers rather than just clicks, and which months of the year your enquiries naturally spike.
We ran this exercise with a joinery business near Wirksworth. Their Google Business Profile was quietly generating more qualified enquiries than their entire paid social budget combined, but nobody had looked at the numbers closely enough to notice. Once we knew that, we shifted spend accordingly and enquiry cost dropped within the first month.
This is why test and measure has to sit at the centre of your marketing, not as an afterthought at the end of the quarter.
Automate the repetitive work, not the relationship
Marketing automation tools exist to take the repetitive tasks off your plate, things like follow-up emails, appointment reminders, and lead scoring. Used properly, this frees you up to spend your time on the conversations that actually close business.
Where I see this go wrong is when automation replaces the personal touch entirely. A well-run CRM should prompt you to make the right call at the right time, not send an impersonal sequence and hope for the best. For a small business, your relationships are still your biggest advantage over larger competitors. Automation should protect that time, not remove it.
How one Derbyshire retailer cut their cost per lead by a third
By auditing spend against actual conversion data and reallocating budget toward the two channels that were genuinely working, we helped a home and garden retailer in the East Midlands reduce cost per lead significantly within eight weeks, without increasing their overall marketing budget.
See how lead generation worksTest channels before you commit budget to them
There is no single channel that works for every business, whatever the latest trend piece tells you. Search, social, email, and paid advertising all have a place, but the right mix depends entirely on where your customers actually are and how they buy.
Run small, deliberate tests before you commit real budget. Give a new channel a defined trial period and a clear KPI target, then judge it on results rather than gut feel. This is how you avoid the common trap of pouring money into a platform because a competitor is on it, only to find your audience never was.
Your website and Google profile are doing more selling than you think
Your website is very often the first proper impression a prospective customer forms of your business, and for local SMBs your Google Business Profile is arguably doing just as much work. Both need to be optimised for search and for the person actually reading them.
That means relevant keywords, genuinely useful content, and a site that is easy to navigate on a phone, because most of your traffic almost certainly arrives on one. If your SEO and local marketing are not aligned, you are leaving enquiries on the table that your competitors are picking up instead.
Social media works when it is planned, not squeezed in
Used well, social media builds relationships with your audience and keeps your business front of mind between purchases. Used badly, it becomes a chore that gets done at 9pm on a Sunday with no strategy behind it at all.
Plan your content around what your audience actually wants to see, not what is easiest to post. Engage properly with comments and messages rather than treating the channel as a broadcast. And be honest with yourself about which platforms your customers are genuinely active on, rather than trying to maintain a presence everywhere at once.
How this fits into the BIG12 framework
Everything above, goals, data, automation, channels, website, social, is one piece of a bigger picture. Over 18 years we have distilled what actually moves the needle for SMBs into the BIG12 framework: 12 marketing pillars that cover every part of a business's growth, from brand and positioning through to CRM and test and measure.
Optimising your marketing properly means looking at all 12 pillars together, not just the one or two that feel most urgent this month. That is the approach we teach through our BIG12 framework training, built specifically for business owners who want a repeatable system rather than another one-off campaign.
See where you stand across all 12 pillars
The BIG12 Scorecard takes minutes to complete and shows you exactly which pillars need attention first.
Take the scorecardThe challenge is never learning. It is doing.
None of what is in this guide is a secret. Goals, KPIs, data, testing, none of it is new information. The gap for most businesses is not knowledge. It is time, and having someone hold you to the plan once the working week gets busy again.
That is the gap we exist to close. We do not hand you a strategy document and disappear. We work alongside Derbyshire and East Midlands businesses, week in and week out, to actually implement the changes that optimise their marketing and keep it optimised as the business grows.
If you have read this far, you already understand what needs to happen. The next step is making sure it actually does.
Book a free 90-minute audit with Stuart
We will look at your current marketing, benchmark it against the BIG12, and give you a practical set of actions to take. No sales pitch. No fluff. Just 18 years of honest advice applied to your business.
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