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What Should a Marketing Strategy Include? A Plain-English Guide for Small Business.
- tracyedgar
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
What Should a Marketing Strategy Include?
A complete marketing strategy should include five core elements: your market position, your ideal client profile, your messaging, your channel priority, and a 30-day action plan. Together, these give you the strategic foundation that makes every marketing tactic more effective.
Most small businesses skip straight to tactics. They post on LinkedIn, run Google Ads, or send a newsletter, without the strategic foundation that determines whether any of it will work. This guide explains what a marketing strategy actually includes, why each element matters, and how to build one for your business.
What is a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy is the thinking that sits underneath your marketing activities. It answers the questions that determine whether your tactics will work in the first place.
Who exactly are you trying to reach?
What do they actually care about?
How are you different from the alternatives they are considering?
What do you want to be known for?
Where should you be showing up, and where are you wasting your time?
A marketing strategy is not the same as a marketing plan. A plan is a list of actions. A strategy is the reasoning behind those actions. Without strategy, a plan is just a to-do list.
What should a marketing strategy include?
1. Your market position
Your market position defines the specific place you occupy in your market relative to your competitors, and the gap you are best placed to own.A useful market position is not "we provide excellent service" or "we have 20 years of experience." Every competitor says those things. A strong market position identifies the specific thing your competitors are not doing, or not doing well, that your ideal clients genuinely value.For a professional services business, this is often the most important and most overlooked element of a marketing strategy. Without a clear position, your marketing blends into the background.
2. Your ideal client profile
A marketing strategy needs a specific portrait of the person most likely to hire you, stay with you, and refer others. Not a vague demographic, but a detailed profile that covers who they are, what they are trying to achieve, what is getting in the way, how they make decisions, and what they need to hear before they will trust a new provider.Most small businesses serve a broader range of clients than they should. Getting clear on who you are actually built for makes every other marketing decision easier and more effective.
3. Your messaging
Once you know your position and your audience, your messaging follows from that. Messaging covers how you describe what you do, for whom, and why it matters, across your website, your LinkedIn profile, your proposals, and your conversations.Inconsistent messaging is one of the most common and most costly problems in small business marketing. When different touchpoints say different things, potential clients lose confidence before they ever reach out. A marketing strategy locks in the core language your business uses consistently everywhere.
4. Your channel priority
Where should you actually be spending your time and money?This is not a universal answer. The right channels depend on where your ideal clients spend time, how they typically find providers like you, and what you can realistically sustain over the long term. A clear channel priority stops you spreading effort across six platforms and seeing meaningful results from none of them.For most professional services businesses in Australia, the highest-value channels are Google search visibility, LinkedIn, and referral systems. But the right answer for your business depends on your specific audience and market.
5. A 30-day action plan
Strategy without action is just a document. A complete marketing strategy includes a clear set of priorities for the next 30 days, sequenced in the right order, so you know exactly what to do first and why.A 30-day plan bridges the gap between strategic thinking and daily execution. It takes the five elements above and turns them into specific, ordered actions your business can act on immediately.
Why do small businesses struggle to build a marketing strategy?
There are a few reasons this is harder than it sounds.
You are too close to your own business.
You know what you do in detail, which makes it genuinely difficult to explain it simply and compellingly to someone who has never heard of you.
The available frameworks were built for larger organisations.
Most marketing strategy tools and templates assume you have a dedicated marketing team, months of time, and a significant budget. They are not built for a founder-led business trying to get clarity in a weekend.
Referrals have masked the problem.
Many small businesses, particularly professional services firms, have grown largely through word of mouth. That means they have never had to articulate their positioning in a way that works for a stranger. When referrals slow down, the absence of a clear strategy becomes very visible very quickly.
How is a marketing strategy different for professional services businesses?
For accountants, lawyers, financial planners, consultants, buyers advocates, and business coaches, marketing strategy has some specific challenges that product businesses do not face.
Your service is intangible. Clients cannot see or test it before they buy. That means trust and credibility carry far more weight in your marketing than they do for a product business. Your positioning and messaging need to work harder to build that trust before any conversation happens.
Your reputation is built on relationships. That is a strength, but it also means most professional services businesses have underdeveloped marketing assets. Their website, their LinkedIn profile, and their written collateral do not reflect the quality of work they actually deliver.
Your market is often local or niche. That limits search volume, which means broad marketing strategies are often less relevant. A tighter, more specific strategy focused on a defined audience and geography will outperform a broad approach almost every time.
What does a marketing strategy look like in practice?
A complete marketing strategy for a small professional services business does not need to be a long document. It needs to be clear, specific, and actionable.
In practice, it covers:
A one-paragraph positioning statement that captures your market gap and why you are best placed to own it
Two detailed audience portraits covering your most valuable client types
A messaging guide covering your core value proposition, key proof points, and the language you use consistently
A channel recommendation with clear reasoning for where to focus
A sequenced 30-day action planThat is enough to make significantly better marketing decisions and to stop wasting time on tactics that are not aligned with your strategy.
Where to start
If you have been running on referrals and you are now looking for more consistent, predictable growth, the starting point is almost always the same: get clear on your positioning before changing anything else.
Understand the gap in your market that you are best placed to own. Build your messaging around that. Choose the one or two channels where your ideal clients are most likely to find you. Then act on that consistently.
If you want to work through this process for your own business, AutoStrategy was built to help small businesses do exactly that. It analyses your business, your competitors, and your market, then delivers a complete strategy report covering all five elements above, in plain English.
AutoStrategy by TracElement
TracElement Strategic Marketing is a Melbourne-based marketing consultancy helping Australian small businesses build the strategic foundation their marketing needs.
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