What Does "Optimise" Mean in Marketing? A Straight Answer for SMBs
I get asked this a lot, usually by a business owner who has just been told by an agency that their campaign needs "optimising" and has no idea what that actually means or what they are being asked to pay for.
It is a fair question. The word gets thrown around constantly in marketing without much explanation, and it is even in our own company name. After 18 years running marketing for SMBs across Derbyshire and the East Midlands, I think business owners deserve a plain answer rather than jargon.
In this post I will explain what optimising your marketing actually means, why it is different from just "doing more marketing", and where a small business should start if they want to get more from the budget they already have.
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Optimising marketing means using data to improve the results you get from the budget and effort you already put in. It is not about spending more. It is about finding out what is working, doing more of that, and fixing or stopping what is not.
That is different from most SMB marketing, which tends to be set up once and left alone. A website goes live in 2021 and nobody touches the wording again. A Google ad gets written and never tested against an alternative. An email goes out to every contact regardless of whether they opened the last three.
Optimisation is the discipline of going back over that work, testing it, measuring it against a goal, and refining it. It sits at the heart of our BIG12 framework, because without it, every other pillar of your marketing decays over time.
Why guessing costs more than testing
Most small business owners I meet in Derbyshire are not short of marketing activity. They are short of a way to know what is actually paying off.
Marketers who commit to a genuine test and learn approach are 1.5 times more likely to report significant year on year revenue growth than those who do not. Conversion rate optimisation is now the second most used optimisation technique among marketers, just one point behind audience segmentation. This is not a fringe activity any more. It is standard practice among businesses that are growing.
The good news for SMBs is that testing has become easier, not harder. Nearly 56% of marketers say improving conversion rates is much simpler today than it was a decade ago, thanks to better tools and clearer data. You do not need an agency's budget to start. You need a willingness to look honestly at what your numbers are telling you.
"Most Derbyshire business owners are not failing at marketing because they are not doing enough. They are failing because nobody has gone back to check whether any of it is working." Stuart Baddiley, Optimise Your Marketing
The three places most SMBs should optimise first
1. Your website
Your website is usually the single biggest lever. Small changes to headlines, calls to action, page load speed, and form length routinely produce double digit improvements in enquiry rates. Most SMB sites have never been tested at all.
2. Your search and Google presence
SEO and your Google Business Profile are two of the highest return areas to optimise because so much local search traffic in the East Midlands never gets past the first page. Optimising here often means fixing basics: outdated opening hours, missing service pages, slow mobile load times.
3. Your follow up and CRM
A huge share of SMB revenue is lost between enquiry and sale simply because nobody follows up properly. Optimising your CRM and follow up sequence is often the cheapest, fastest win available, because the customer has already raised their hand.
A joinery business that stopped guessing
One Derbyshire joinery client came to us convinced their website simply "did not generate enquiries". We ran a proper test and measure audit, found the enquiry form was seven fields long and buried below the fold on mobile, and cut it to three fields above the fold. Enquiries rose within the first month, without a single extra pound spent on advertising.
See how we test and measureCommon mistakes SMBs make when trying to optimise
The most common mistake I see is changing too many things at once. A business owner rewrites the homepage, switches ad platforms and relaunches their email newsletter in the same fortnight, then has no way of knowing which change actually caused the improvement, or the drop. Proper optimisation means changing one thing, measuring it against a clear goal, and only then moving to the next.
The second mistake is stopping too soon. A test run for three days rarely tells you anything useful, particularly for a local business where enquiry volumes are naturally lower than a national brand. Give a change enough time to gather a meaningful amount of data before deciding whether it worked.
The third, and probably the most common, is optimising the wrong thing entirely. I regularly meet Derbyshire business owners who have spent months perfecting their social media graphics while their website enquiry form is broken on mobile. Optimisation only pays off when it is aimed at the part of your marketing actually holding you back.
How to start optimising without a big budget
You do not need expensive software to begin. Start by picking the one part of your marketing that generates the most enquiries already, whether that is your website, your Google Business Profile, or a single ad campaign, and focus your first round of optimisation there rather than spreading thin.
Next, define what success actually looks like before you change anything. That might be enquiry rate, cost per lead, or email open rate. Without a clear number to improve, you have no way of knowing whether a change has actually helped.
Then make one change, give it a fair amount of time to run, and compare the result honestly against your starting point. If it worked, keep it and move to the next area. If it did not, that is useful information too. Either way, you now know something you did not know before, which is the entire point of optimising in the first place.
How optimisation fits into the bigger picture
Optimising your marketing is not a one-off project. It is a habit, and it is one of the twelve pillars in our BIG12 framework, sitting alongside things like lead generation, brand positioning and social media. You can have excellent activity across all eleven other pillars, but if nobody is checking what is working, you are running blind.
If you want to see exactly where optimisation should sit on your priority list, our BIG12 Scorecard benchmarks your current marketing against all twelve pillars in a few minutes, free.
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Take the BIG12 ScorecardQuick questions about marketing optimisation
Is optimising my marketing a one-off job or ongoing work?
Ongoing. Customer behaviour, competitors and platforms all keep changing, so something that was optimised last year can quietly stop working this year without anyone noticing.
Do I need expensive tools to optimise my marketing properly?
No. Most SMBs already have enough data in Google Analytics, their CRM or their ad platform to start. The barrier is usually time and know-how, not tools or cost.
What should I optimise first if I can only focus on one thing?
Whichever part of your marketing already brings in the most enquiries. Improving something that already works tends to pay off faster than trying to fix something that has never generated results at all.
The challenge is never learning. It is doing.
Most business owners I speak with already understand, in broad terms, that they should be testing and refining their marketing. That has never really been the gap. The gap is finding the time, the discipline, and the honesty to actually do it, week after week, alongside running the business itself.
That is exactly where we come in. Over 18 years working with SMBs across Derbyshire and the East Midlands, we have built the systems and the habits that make optimisation something that happens automatically in the background, rather than something that gets forgotten every quarter.
You do not need to become a data analyst to optimise your marketing properly. You need someone checking the numbers regularly and telling you plainly what to change.
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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