How to Avoid a Costly Fail: Your FREE Marketing Plan for Small Business

By Mark J. Evans MBA, Founder of 360 Strategy

Most Founders Do Not Have a Marketing Problem. They Have a Clarity Problem.

I have sat with countless leaders and founders over the years. Judged on panels. Heard endless pitches. Sat in rooms where brilliant, driven people have stood up and told me about their idea with complete conviction.

And I keep hearing the same thing.

"I have a great idea."

Good. I believe you. Now let me ask you one question.

Do your target customers think it is a great idea?

The room goes quiet. Nine times out of ten the answer is some version of the same thing. "I have not asked them yet."

That is where businesses begin to unravel. Before the first invoice. Before the website. Before a single penny of marketing spend. The idea never got tested against the people it was built for.

Idea. Test. Idea. Test. It is the most basic rhythm in business, and it is the one most people skip.

Without a tested value proposition there is no plan worth having. Without a plan you are not running a marketing strategy. You are running on luck. And luck is not a business model.

The biggest mistake I see at every stage – startups, growing businesses, and established teams trying to scale, is treating marketing as something you do after the important work is done. Marketing is not a department or a campaign. It is the process of understanding who needs what you have, why they need it, and how to reach them. Everything else follows from that.

Without that clarity, everything else is noise. The social posts, the ads, the website, the networking. All of it lands flat because the message underneath it is blurred.

You cannot market what you cannot explain.

The Problem Lives Upstream

The founders I work with are working hard. Most of them are working too hard, in too many directions at once, with no way of knowing which activity is actually moving the needle.

When you do not know precisely who you are talking to, what they care about, and what result you help them achieve, every marketing decision becomes a guess. And guesses compound. Three months of guessing looks like three months of wasted effort and a growing suspicion that marketing does not work for businesses like yours.

It does work. The foundations just need to be in place first.

What Those Foundations Look Like

In my experience, most small business marketing problems collapse into the same six questions.

Who specifically has this problem? A real person, not a demographic.

• What is happening in their world that should not be happening? Their words, not yours.

• What does it cost them in time, money, stress, or risk to leave it unsolved?

• What result do you help them achieve, and how quickly?

• How do you reach them consistently in the next 30 days?

• And what is the one number that tells you it is working?

  
  

Answer those six questions honestly, and you have a marketing strategy. One that tells you where to focus and what to leave alone for now.

The difficulty is that most founders never stop long enough to answer them properly. There is always something more urgent. A client to serve, a proposal to write, an invoice to chase.

Why I Built the 360 Marketing Aide: How to Build a Simple Marketing Plan in 30 Days

I built the 360 Marketing Aide because I wanted to put the thinking process directly into founders' hands. A working tool that is progressive in their time, where they come out the other side with something real.

It is free. It is step by step. Fifteen steps in total, with one clear action at each stage. Built around your business, your time, your budget, and where you are right now.

It covers problem clarity, target customer focus, customer interviews, offer building, message construction, landing page basics, lead capture, channel focus, and tracking. In that order. Because order matters.

You build the message after you understand the problem. You choose the channel after you have an offer worth putting in front of people.

It ends with a clear view of your next move. One move.

If you have been doing marketing activity without a clear strategy underneath it, this is a good place to start.

Try the 360 Marketing Aide here, it is free to use.

A Practical Note

The Aide is a thinking tool. It slows you down long enough to answer the questions most founders skip because they feel like preparation rather than progress.

Preparation is progress. Clarity is the fastest route to traction.

At the end of the Aide there is an option to book a free 15 minute clarity call. We will look at your problem statement, your offer, and your next 30 days. No agenda beyond helping you leave with one clear next move.

Use it when you are ready.

Mark J Evans is the founder of 360 Strategy, a growth advisory and marketing consultancy working with founders and SME leaders across Scotland and the UK. See how we approach marketing strategy here.