Every business does marketing.

You can’t choose not to market. You can say you don’t. You can have zero marketing budget. But it’s still happening.

You are interacting with the market. Every time you post on LinkedIn, have a coffee with a past client, or answer “what do you do?” at a networking event, you’re marketing.

And you’re probably doing a good job of it.

If you subscribe to the idea that the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing, then authenticity is the secret sauce.

And if your marketing is so authentic that even you don’t recognise you’re doing it, there’s an argument to say you’re doing it very well indeed.

If you’re still struggling with this, if you think you’re different, that yours is the agency that hasn’t done marketing, that you got here by some other process, then spend a moment thinking about your clients, and the services you provide, that they say they don’t do.

Branding

Everyone already has a brand even if they don’t think they do. Your brand is whatever other people think about you.

This is a good thing to say if you want to sound like you know what you are talking about.

You have to separate the intentional activity of branding from the brand.

Just like every business has a brand even if they don’t invest in branding, every business markets itself even if they don’t invest in marketing.

We don’t really have a convenient noun for this passive state of marketing, like “brand.” Our noun could be “market presence” or “interface with the market,” but those aren’t words a normal person would say. And that leads to the belief that if we aren’t marketing, there’s simply nothing there.

Which isn’t true.

The Marketing You’re Already Doing

Write down the last three leads you got that were worth anything. Ones that you either wrote a proposal for or were ready to.

Next to each of these leads, write down where it came from.

If you “don’t do marketing”, you’re probably writing “referral” or “network” next to these. These are two legitimate channels. Agencies that do do marketing have strategies for these channels. They invest in them and track the results.

There might also be “found us through the website” or “found us on Google.” Perhaps even the emerging “found us on an LLM” will appear.

For each of the channels write down what you’ve invested into them.

It was probably time. You went to a meetup (4 hours). You had coffee with two past clients (3 hours total). You posted on LinkedIn three times (1 hour). That’s 8 hours invested into your network channel. These actions are the tactics you’ve used for each of these channels, and the time you spent on them is your investment.

What you have now is the most basic representation of your current marketing plan. The channels you are investing in and the results you are getting.

You can see where this is going

A much bigger audit is possible. If you know how much your time costs, you’ve already got cost per acquisition metrics within reach. But given that at the beginning of this article we didn’t believe we did marketing, getting deep into the KPIs feels a bit much.

Don’t sign up for a marketing course. Don’t hire an agency. Don’t start posting daily on LinkedIn. First, understand what’s already working.

Don’t do intentional marketing until this is up and running and you understand and track the channels you’re using, how to track the leads coming from those channels, and how to track your investment into them.

Your Secret Weapon

Let’s finish with some good news. The marketing you’re actually doing (this networking, these referrals, this showing up authentically everywhere you go) is what everyone else is trying to achieve.

It’s the secret weapon of the small founder-led agency. Because you don’t have to try very hard.

Sure, marketing is a hat the founder has to wear. But unlike some of your other hats, the accounting hat, the HR hat, the operations hat, this hat, is one you were born to wear.

The return on investment of wearing this hat is big because you have that authenticity. You have the understanding of the craft. You have the understanding of your customer.

If you add an understanding of what’s working and what activities get the most bang for your buck, then you have a brilliant marketing plan.