What Gets Remembered
A framework for marketing built on precision, patience, and trust.
Image by Amy Morris, Brand Identity Creative
Ask three different business owners what the end of their day looks like and you will get three different answers. For one it is a single set of hands closing out a till alone. For another it is a small team locking up after running payroll for a dozen people who did good work that week. For a third it is a founder closing a laptop after a day spent equal parts selling, building, and putting out fires no one else saw coming. Different scales, different rhythms, different worlds, and yet all of them answer to the same word.
Small and medium-sized business is the label marketers reach for to describe this range, and the instinct, faced with a category this wide, is to widen the message to match it. The better instinct, and the one that produces work worth trusting, is to narrow the lens until it rests on someone in particular and discover a way to relate. What follows is a way of thinking about that narrowing: four ideas, taken in order, that describe how a business earns the attention of the businesses it hopes to serve.
ICP: Know Them the Way You Know a Friend
Knowing a customer like a friend that has scale requires a single, clear-eyed understanding, one that can hold several people within it, the solo owner-operator, the second generation stepping into a family business, the shop with a handful of employees and a manager, and still feel coherent. What unites them is the texture of their days.
The common mistake is speaking to the category rather than the person inside it. Phrases like "built for small business" could describe almost anything to almost anyone, and in reaching for everyone, they arrive at no one. The aim instead is a kind of specificity that feels almost intimate, precise enough that a reader thinks, this was written with me in mind, rather than, I suppose this could apply to me.
Take a piece of software built for the businesses that make up Main Street. Rather than trying to serve every small business everywhere, it might define itself by a single defining trait that crosses industries entirely: the owner who is also the one doing the work, with no layer of management standing between them and the counter, the chair, the truck. Knowing that person well, the way you would know someone after years of dinners together, means understanding what keeps them up past midnight, what they already spend money on without complaint, and what success looks like from exactly where they are standing.
Channels: Go Where They Are
Once that person comes into focus, the next question is where they spend their days.
The owner of a Main Street business is seldom reading a newsletter in a quiet inbox or scrolling a professional feed between meetings. Their attention lives in the gaps between the work itself, ten minutes before opening, the drive home, the last hour with financials. What reaches them tends to arrive by way of another owner nearby, a trade association meeting, a supplier they have worked with for years, a community that has nothing to do with marketing at all.
This is where the width of the category shows itself most clearly.
Consistent Message: One That Earns a Second Look
The instinct under pressure is to reach for more, more sends, more channels, more reminders that the offer still stands. What earns a second look is quieter: language shaped around the problem in front of them, arriving because they created the moment, a closer look, a return visit, a question asked.
Trust built this way rests on two things. relevance and showing up. Relevance, provides a sense of being understood as a particular business. And follow-through, delivers what was promised.
Experience: Trust Sets the Pace
An audience that trusts you can receive a well-timed offer as help. This is why the order matters more than the tactics: understand the person clearly, find where they already are, earn their trust through the care taken in how you speak to them, and then thoughtfully deliver the ask or solution.
The businesses that reach this world well are the ones willing to narrow first, to find the person inside a label that fits almost everyone, to learn where that person already spends their days, to earn trust before asking for anything, and to let that trust, unhurried, set the pace of everything that follows. It asks for patience most marketing no longer has time for. It also happens to be the approach that lasts, long after the lights are off and the books are closed for the night.
Written and edited by Ashley Etling