Marketing foundations

Good marketing starts long before you post, advertise or send an email. These guides cover the foundations: understanding your customers, thinking about your whole offer, writing a simple plan and setting goals you can measure.

Guides in this section

• How to write a marketing plan Target market, goals, channels and budget.
• Know your customer Low-cost ways to research your target market.
• The 5 Ps of marketing Product, price, place, promotion and people.
• Setting marketing goals SMART goals and simple measures.

Start with customers

business.gov.au notes that identifying your target market helps focus your marketing and improve your chances of success. Start with what you already know from sales, enquiries and reviews, and talk to customers.

Think about the whole offer

Marketing isn't just advertising. The 5 Ps, product, price, place, promotion and people, help you think about everything that shapes how customers see your business, and whether the pieces fit together.

Write a simple plan

business.gov.au describes a marketing plan as a way to define the strategy, activities and channels you'll use, and offers a free template and tool. A short plan covering your target market, what makes you different, goals, channels and budget is enough to start.

Set goals and measure

business.gov.au suggests SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Choose a few measures that link to your goals, record a starting point, and review regularly.

Be honest from the start

What you say about your business must be accurate and able to be backed up, as the ACCC explains. Build your marketing on real strengths rather than vague or exaggerated claims.

Where to go next

Once the foundations are in place, our digital guides cover search, local listings, email and social media, and our rules guides cover advertising claims, reviews, privacy and sponsored posts.

Five things worth knowing

1. Start with your customers, not your channels.
2. Set goals you can measure, and review results regularly.
3. Every claim must be accurate and provable, online and offline.
4. Get consent before marketing emails and texts, and make unsubscribing easy.
5. Never fake or manipulate reviews, and disclose paid partnerships.

A one-page plan is enough to start

You don't need a long document. A single page that answers a few questions can guide months of marketing: Who are your best customers, and what do they need? What makes your business a better choice for them? What do you want to achieve in the next 12 months, and how will you measure it? Which two or three channels will you focus on? How much time and money can you spend? What will you do each month? Keep it somewhere you'll see it, and update it as you learn what works.

A simple marketing routine

Marketing works best as a steady habit rather than an occasional burst. A simple routine might look like this. Each week, reply to enquiries and reviews, post or send something useful, and note where new customers came from. Each month, check your key measures against your goals, update your business listings if anything has changed, and plan the next month's content. Each quarter, review your marketing plan: what worked, what didn't, what customers are saying and whether your goals still make sense. Each year, look again at your target market, your offer and your budget, and check that your website, privacy policy and marketing practices still reflect how you work.

Common mistakes to avoid

Some mistakes come up again and again. Trying to be on every channel at once spreads limited time too thin. Measuring followers and likes rather than enquiries and sales hides what's really working. Making claims you can't back up, or burying important conditions in fine print, risks breaching the Australian Consumer Law. Emailing people who never agreed to hear from you risks breaching the Spam Act and annoys potential customers. Buying or faking reviews is illegal and can badly damage trust. And stopping too soon, before an activity has had time to work, wastes the effort already spent.

Getting help

If you want help with your marketing, business.gov.au lists government support and advisory services for small businesses, and many state governments offer small business advice, workshops and mentoring. If you hire a marketing agency or freelancer, agree clearly on what they'll do, how results will be measured and who owns your accounts, website and customer data. Remember that you remain responsible for what is published or sent in your business's name, even when someone else does the work.

About these guides

Marketers is an independent information site about marketing a small business in Australia. We aren't a marketing agency, consultancy, regulator or law firm, and we don't rank or recommend agencies, software or platforms. Our guides are general information written in our own words, with official sources listed on every page. They're not legal advice.

How we keep these guides current

We review each guide against its sources and show the date it was last checked. Regulators update their guidance and platforms change their features often. If you notice something out of date, please tell us through our contact page, and we'll check and correct it.

Questions we hear often

Small business owners often ask whether they need a marketing plan, how to get found on Google, whether they can buy an email list, and whether they can offer discounts for reviews. In short: a simple plan helps; helpful content and accurate local listings matter most for search; you need consent from each person you email, so bought lists are risky; and review incentives must apply to positive and negative reviews alike and be disclosed. Our guides explain each answer, with links to the official sources.

Try the email marketing checker

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