Marketing in a small business rarely gets assigned. It falls to whoever has a free afternoon, which produces steady activity and no direction. The recognisable symptoms are a social account that goes quiet for six weeks, a website nobody has read in a year, and a set of tools nobody can fully account for. The fix is naming one accountable owner with a stated objective and a standing review.
How it happens
Nobody decides that marketing should be unowned. It arrives by accretion. The office manager sets up the Facebook page because someone should. A nephew builds the website one summer. A supplier's rep talks you into a directory listing. Someone signs up for an email tool during a quiet week in February.
Each decision was reasonable in isolation. Together they form a marketing function with no strategy, no budget, no measurement, and no single person who could tell you what any of it is meant to achieve. The business is spending money and time, sometimes a surprising amount of both, on a collection of activities that were never compared against each other.
The symptoms
- The last social post is six weeks old, and the one before it was three months earlier. Bursts of effort followed by silence is the signature of work with no owner.
- Nobody has read the website in a year. Services you no longer offer are still listed, and the service you built the last two years around is not mentioned.
- There is a subscription nobody can explain. A tool charged monthly that was set up for a campaign that ended, still billing.
- You cannot say where last month's enquiries came from. Not roughly. At all.
- Marketing decisions are made by whoever calls you. Directory salespeople, platform reps, and whoever emailed with an offer that week set the agenda by default.
- The busy season arrives before the campaign does. Work that needed six weeks of lead time starts the week demand peaks.
- Nobody knows the logins. The Google Business Profile is verified to a former employee's personal address.
- Nothing is ever stopped. Activities accumulate and none are retired, because retiring one requires someone to have judged that it is not working.
Four or more of those describes most small businesses, and it is not a competence problem. It is a structural one.
What it costs
The visible cost is the tools and listings nobody audits. That is usually the smaller number.
The larger cost is opportunity. Enquiries that arrive during a silent stretch and are not followed. The busy season entered without a plan, so you take whatever walks in rather than the profitable work you would have chosen. A competitor with an owned marketing function occupying the search results you should hold, not because they outspent you but because they were consistent.
There is a quieter cost too. Marketing done in stolen half-hours is never reviewed, so nothing improves. Year five looks like year one, with the same tools and the same assumptions, in a market that has moved considerably in that time.
Doing marketing versus running it
These get conflated and they are separate jobs.
Doing is producing the posts, writing the pages, sending the emails, and managing the ad account. It is executable in blocks and can be distributed across several people or handed outside.
Running is deciding what gets done and what does not, holding the budget, reading the results, and killing the things that are not working. It cannot be distributed. It needs one person with authority and a standing slot in the calendar.
Most small businesses have partial coverage of the first and no coverage at all of the second. Adding more doing to a business with no running produces more activity and the same result, which is why hiring a part-time social media person so often disappoints.
Naming an owner
The owner can be internal or external. What matters is that the role is explicit and carries four things.
A stated objective
In business terms with a number attached. "Twelve additional commercial enquiries a month by September" is an objective. "Grow our online presence" is a mood.
Budget authority within a limit
An owner who must seek approval for every $200 decision cannot move at the speed the work requires. A monthly ceiling with discretion inside it is enough.
Access to everything
Domain, hosting, analytics, Google Business Profile, ad accounts, and the email platform. Gathering these is often the first useful week of work, because it reveals what is running that nobody knew about.
A standing review
Same slot each month, on the calendar, with the owner presenting what changed and what happens next. A review that only occurs when someone remembers is the same as no review.
The practical route for most businesses
Very few small businesses can justify a full-time marketing hire, and the half-measure of loading it onto an existing employee is what produced the situation in the first place. The arrangement that works is an external owner carrying the running, with the business supplying what only it can: the customer knowledge, the photography, the approvals, and the answers.
That is what a properly structured retainer is for, and it is the difference between having marketing done to you and having it run for you. The first month is usually an inventory: what exists, what it costs, what it produces, and what should be shut off. It is common for that exercise alone to pay for itself.
Frequently asked questions
Who should own marketing in a small business?
One named person with an objective, budget authority within a limit, full access, and a standing monthly review. Whether they sit inside the business or outside it matters far less than the role existing at all.
Can the owner run marketing themselves?
Some do it well, provided it is treated as a scheduled responsibility rather than something to do when the day allows. The common failure is not capability but the calendar, since the work reliably loses to whatever is urgent that morning.
Is a part-time marketing hire a good solution?
It solves execution and rarely solves direction. Someone producing posts still needs an objective, a budget, and a standard to work to. Without those, the output is more consistent but not more effective.
How do I find out what marketing we are currently paying for?
Work through twelve months of card and bank statements looking for recurring charges, then check the domain registrar, hosting account, and every advertising platform for active subscriptions. Most businesses find at least one they had forgotten.
How long before an owned marketing function shows results?
Conversion and technical improvements show within weeks. Local search improvements usually take one to three months, and content programmes three to six. The first visible change is normally that you can answer where enquiries came from.
What should be reviewed each month?
Enquiries and their quality first, then what was done, what changed, and what is being altered as a result. A review that is only a dashboard walkthrough tells you what happened without producing a decision.
West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.
Nobody actually running your marketing?
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