Marketing Is Not Your Instagram Account

There is a conversation I have had with business owners countless times. I ask what they are doing with their marketing and the answer is usually something like, “We post on Facebook a few times a week, we’ve started doing more Reels and we probably need to get onto TikTok.” None of those things are necessarily wrong, but they do not really answer the question. They describe channels and activity rather than marketing itself.

If I ask what your marketing looks like and you tell me about Facebook and Instagram, you have described two places where you communicate. You have not told me who you are trying to reach, why those people should choose you, what makes you different, whether enough people know you exist, how easy you are to buy from, how much you should charge or what you are ultimately trying to achieve. Those are the questions that sit much closer to the heart of marketing.

This matters because many small businesses have gradually been taught to think that marketing means producing content. The weekly marketing conversation becomes a discussion about what to post, which photograph to use, whether something should be a Reel and how many times a week the business should appear on Instagram. The bigger commercial questions can disappear underneath a constant demand to keep feeding the platforms.

Marketing starts before the content

Marketing should start much earlier than the social media post. It begins with understanding the market, understanding customers and making decisions about how the organisation intends to compete. That might involve choosing the audiences that matter most, developing a proposition, thinking about pricing, improving the product or service, making the customer journey easier and deciding how the brand should be positioned in people's minds.

Social media can then help communicate those choices. It can introduce the business to potential customers, remind existing customers that it exists, demonstrate expertise, show personality and provide evidence of the experience being offered. What it cannot do is compensate indefinitely for an unclear proposition or a poor customer experience.

A restaurant that is difficult to book does not primarily have an Instagram problem. A gym that people struggle to distinguish from every other gym in town does not necessarily need more Reels. A trades business that receives plenty of enquiries but very few of the right enquiries may have a positioning problem rather than a content problem. Producing more communications can sometimes create the illusion of progress while the real commercial issue remains untouched.

Start with the business problem

One of the most useful questions a business owner can ask is not “what should we post?” but “what do we actually need marketing to achieve?” That small change in language can completely alter the work that follows because it forces the organisation to begin with the problem rather than the channel.

Perhaps the business needs more new customers. It might need to increase repeat purchase, generate more weekday demand, sell a particular service, improve customer retention or attract a different type of customer. Maybe plenty of people know the business exists but not enough understand the full range of what it offers. Alternatively, the problem might simply be that too few people in the local market have ever heard of the brand.

Once the objective is clearer, the choice of marketing activity becomes much easier. Instagram might still be part of the answer, but so might Google search, email, partnerships, local PR, outdoor advertising, signage, sponsorship, events or improvements to the website. Sometimes the most effective solution has almost nothing to do with producing more content.

That is why starting with a channel can be dangerous. If the first question is “what can we do on Instagram?”, the answer will inevitably be an Instagram solution. If the first question is “how do we get another fifty customers through the door each month?”, the range of potential answers becomes significantly broader.

Small businesses need strategy too

The word strategy can sometimes sound too grand for a small business. It can suggest consultants, boardrooms, research projects and enormous PowerPoint decks, when the reality for many local businesses is that the owner is also dealing with payroll, staffing, suppliers, customers and everything else that needs doing that day.

Strategy does not have to be complicated. At its core, it is about making choices. Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley's Playing to Win framework is built around a series of choices about what winning looks like, where an organisation will play and how it intends to win. Those questions are just as relevant to a small independent business as they are to a multinational company.

A café cannot realistically become the obvious destination for every possible customer simultaneously. It might decide that young families are particularly important, or that remote workers represent an opportunity, or that it wants to become known for the best coffee experience in town. Those choices then affect the product, layout, pricing, opening hours, communications and brand experience.

Without those choices, marketing often becomes a collection of disconnected activities. The business produces a leaflet, runs a Facebook competition, posts a video, sponsors something locally and then wonders which part of it worked. Activity has taken place, but there is no clear thread connecting it to a broader strategy.

Your followers are not the whole market

Another danger of equating marketing with social media is that platforms naturally focus attention on the people who already follow the business. Those customers are visible, responsive and easy to communicate with, which makes it tempting to treat them as the market.

Byron Sharp's work on mental and physical availability provides an important counterpoint. Brands grow partly by becoming easier to think of and easier to buy, and that requires reaching beyond the people who are already highly engaged. Most potential customers are not interacting with the business every week and may barely think about the category at all until a particular buying situation arises.

A local gym might have 3,000 Instagram followers while tens of thousands of people live within its wider catchment area. A restaurant may have an active group of loyal customers commenting on posts while many people living nearby have never considered eating there. A business can therefore have excellent social engagement and still have a significant awareness problem.

That does not make social media unimportant. It simply means that its role should be understood within a wider marketing system. The goal is not just to entertain the people who already know you. It is also to increase the probability that more people recognise, remember and eventually choose you.

Sometimes the best marketing work produces nothing to post

There is enormous pressure on businesses to keep producing. Platforms reward regular activity, agencies sell content packages and gurus repeatedly tell owners that consistency is everything. Before long, an afternoon without publishing something can start to feel like a marketing failure.

Yet some of the most valuable marketing work a business can do is completely invisible to the public. It might involve speaking to customers to understand why they chose you, studying where enquiries originate, analysing which services generate the best margins, improving a booking process or identifying where potential customers are dropping out of the journey. It could involve changing the proposition, building a better database, developing distinctive brand assets or forming a partnership with another organisation.

None of that will necessarily generate likes or comments that afternoon, but it may have a much greater impact on the business.

This is why businesses should be careful not to confuse visible marketing activity with useful marketing activity. Social media is appealing partly because you can see it happening. A post goes live, people react and something tangible appears to have been achieved. Strategy, research and customer understanding are quieter, but they often determine whether all that visible activity has any chance of succeeding.

If your marketing has gradually become an endless requirement to “post something”, it may be worth asking a different question. You might not need another content calendar or another month of social posts. You may need to understand what the business is trying to achieve, where the genuine growth opportunities are and which marketing decisions are most likely to move you towards them.

That is the part of marketing that interests me most. It is not simply creating more marketing activity. It is working out what the marketing should be doing in the first place.