How many hours a week does this take?

About three, if the setup work is done first. Most of the cost of a small marketing plan is the building; running it is a short weekly habit plus one longer monthly review.

What should a small company do first if it can only do one thing?

Answer inquiries faster. It costs nothing, it needs no budget approval, and on most accounts it produces more booked work than any channel change would.

Do we need a marketing person?

Not at ten people. You need an owner for the work, which can be somebody with another job, plus a decision about which two channels you are serious about. A hire makes sense when the plan is working and the constraint becomes execution.

A Marketing Plan a Small Company Can Actually Run

The Marketing Plan a Ten Person Long Island Company Can Actually Run

Not the enterprise version scaled down. What fits when one person owns marketing alongside three other jobs, and what to cut so the rest survives a busy month.

By Jennifer Marlowe · November 12, 2026 · 3 min read

A marketing plan that a ten person company can actually run is short, has an owner, and has fewer channels in it than you want. Everything past that is a plan that gets abandoned in April, which is worse than not having one.

The reason plans fail at this size is never ambition. It is that they were written as if somebody would work on marketing full time, and nobody does. The person who owns it also answers the phone, quotes the jobs and chases the invoices, and when the season starts, marketing is the thing that gives.

So build for that. Here is the shape that survives.

Pick Two Channels and Be Serious About Them

Not five, done badly. Two, done properly, and the choice is usually obvious from where your work already comes from.

For most Long Island trades and practices that is search plus your local profile, because that is where people who already want what you sell go looking. For a business with a strong referral base it might be your profile plus reviews. For a product company it might be paid social plus email.

Anything not on the list of two is not a channel. It is a thing you might do if a week goes quietly.

The discipline this creates is the point. Two channels can be understood, measured and improved by one part-time person. Five can only be maintained, and maintenance is what stops the first time the phone rings.

The Weekly Habit: Thirty Minutes

One sitting, same day each week.

Look at the leads that came in. How many, from where, and did every one get a response.
Read the search terms on your paid campaign, if you run one. Add negatives for the junk.
Answer any new reviews, good and bad.
One post or update to the profile, if you have something real to say. Skip it if you do not.

That is it. It is thirty minutes and it is the difference between a channel that improves and one that drifts.

The Monthly Review: One Hour

Five numbers, written down in the same place every month so you can see a line rather than a point.

Spend, by channel
Qualified leads, by channel
Cost per qualified lead
Jobs booked from those leads
One sentence: what changes next month, and why

If you cannot fill in the fourth line yet, that is the project for the quarter, and it is more valuable than any channel change. The version of this an agency should be sending you is the same five numbers.

What to Build Once

The plan above assumes some things exist. Building them is a handful of days, and it is the part worth paying for or blocking out real time for.

A page per service you actually sell, and a page per town you actually serve.
A complete local profile, with the service area matching where your trucks go rather than a radius.
Tracking that can see a lead from arrival to job.
An automatic reply that goes out within a minute of any inquiry, setting a real expectation.
A named owner per window for who responds, including evenings.

None of these is recurring work. All of them make the recurring work smaller.

What to Deliberately Not Do

The list of what you are not doing matters as much as the list of what you are, because an unspoken maybe costs attention every week.

Write down that you are not doing: a posting schedule on four social platforms, a monthly newsletter nobody has time to write, video, a podcast, and any channel you cannot name a reason for. You can revisit in a year. Until then they are off the list, in writing, so nobody feels vaguely behind.

The Honest Failure Mode

The plan above does not fail because it is wrong. It fails in the first genuinely busy week, when the thirty minutes gets skipped, then skipped again, and by July nobody remembers whose job it was.

The fix is not discipline. It is that the weekly habit has a name on it and a time on a calendar, and that the monthly review is a meeting with somebody else in it, even a fifteen minute call. Marketing at this size survives on being witnessed, not on intention.

If you want the build half done for you before the season, that is what the free marketing audit turns into: a list of what exists, what does not, and what order to do it in.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many hours a week does this take?: About three, if the setup work is done first. Most of the cost of a small marketing plan is the building; running it is a short weekly habit plus one longer monthly review.
What should a small company do first if it can only do one thing?: Answer inquiries faster. It costs nothing, it needs no budget approval, and on most accounts it produces more booked work than any channel change would.
Do we need a marketing person?: Not at ten people. You need an owner for the work, which can be somebody with another job, plus a decision about which two channels you are serious about. A hire makes sense when the plan is working and the constraint becomes execution.