Wednesday, November 11, 2026
You take on almost any customer who'll pay, so your marketing, pricing and team get pulled in three directions at once. A simple market-sizing exercise shows SME owners the one slice worth aiming at this year.
Last updated 13 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: United States.
You posted again this week. You boosted it, you tagged it, you even paid for the ad. A few likes, maybe a comment from someone who was never going to buy. You want your marketing to pull in customers who actually want what you sell, without you having to shout louder every week. What you've actually built is a message aimed at "anyone," which is why it lands with almost no one — including, most expensively, the people who drain your time and never convert.
A 2026 industry report from COSMarketing Agency found small businesses in the US are wasting up to 40 cents of every marketing dollar on leads that were never a fit in the first place (COSMarketing Agency, 2026). That's not a budget problem. It's a targeting problem wearing a budget costume. When you market to "anyone who might want this," you spend real money attracting the half of your inquiries who were always going to be slow to pay, hard to please, or gone after one job — and you never free up the time or money to go looking for the customers who actually make the business worth running.
Marketer Russell Brunson's Hook, Story, Offer framework — built out as a Value Ladder — starts from a single, specific buyer rather than a broad audience, then stacks offers from a small first step up to the real relationship. In plain terms:
Kevin saw this done properly with the physiotherapy brand PhysioAction and with Ellis Co, a facilities and solutions business. Neither started with a slogan. Kevin had them sit down with real customers and ask, plainly, why they'd actually chosen and stayed. The positioning that came out the other side wasn't written in a boardroom — it was lifted almost word for word from the customers who already loved the business. It worked precisely because it wasn't written for everyone; it was written for people who sounded exactly like the ones already in the room.
Try it this week: pull up your five best customers from the last twelve months and write down, in their words if you can, why they picked you. That sentence — not a brainstorm, not a rebrand — is your new hook.
"Kevin has some amazing ideas around marketing, things we would have never thought of ourselves. He also helped us through the process of getting into supermarkets. He has gone above and beyond what he needed to!"
Amy Nixon
Icehouse Coaching Programme
Narrowing the message feels like turning away business, so most owners widen it instead and hope volume covers the gap. This isn't for you if you're genuinely running a true commodity business where nobody cares who they buy from — a handful of categories work that way. For everyone else, the fix isn't a bigger audience. It's a sharper one, built from the customers you'd clone if you could.
A sequence of offers, from a small first step to the full relationship, built around one specific buyer rather than a broad audience — a structure popularised by marketer Russell Brunson.
It feels riskier but usually isn't — a broad message is already failing to convert most of the audience it reaches; a narrow one converts far more of a smaller, better-fit group.
From your own best customers. Ask five of them, in their words, why they chose and stayed with you, and use that language directly.
If you can't name your five best customers by face, that's the exercise we start with.
Monday, September 21, 2026
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Monday, September 21, 2026
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Monday, September 21, 2026
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Thursday, September 17, 2026
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Thursday, September 17, 2026
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Thursday, September 17, 2026
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Thursday, September 17, 2026
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Thursday, September 17, 2026
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Thursday, September 17, 2026
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Thursday, September 17, 2026
A new NielsenIQ study found 58% of shoppers don't care if it's your brand or the store's own. Here's the 3-step test to see if your FMCG brand earns its price premium.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Chasing every dollar of revenue isn't a growth strategy — it's a collection plate. Here's the four-question filter Kevin uses with clients before any deal gets signed.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Most SMEs treat marketing spend like rent — fixed, tolerated, never questioned. Here's the 70-20-10 test-and-learn loop that turns it into compounding evidence instead.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Same-day response feels fast — it isn't. Here's the five-minute speed-to-lead system that turns warm enquiries into customers before a competitor gets there first.