At Line2Lead, we strongly believe in the exchange of ideas among professionals who work with businesses every day. For this reason, today we are hosting a contribution from Nicola Onida, marketer and author of the book Marketing per PMI. In his article, Nicola addresses a topic we often encounter in our consulting work as well: the difficulty companies face when moving from tactics to strategy. Enjoy the read!
There are days when a company’s marketing looks more like a crowded stall at the local street market.
Phone calls, WhatsApp messages, the salesperson asking, “I need a brochure quickly!”, the designer writing, “Who’s doing the text for the post?”, the agency proposing, “Let’s run this campaign — it’s working really well for our other clients.”
At the end of the day you’ve done a thousand things, but if you ask yourself how many new customers you actually brought in, the answer is often just a shrug.
In many SMEs, marketing starts exactly like this: a collection of scattered initiatives, each with good intentions behind it, but none connected by a common thread.
It’s like building a house by adding rooms whenever you need more space: one for the warehouse, one for the sales office, one for marketing “because nowadays you have to.” After a few years, the result is disastrous. A floor plan no architect would sign, even under torture.
In this article I’ll take you inside this maze and help you move one step forward: from “doing something” to building a system that, over time, helps you generate customers in a more predictable and sustainable way for an SME.
Marketing driven by emergencies
When I walk into a company for the first time, the scene is almost always the same.
An owner carrying years of decisions made on the fly, a team doing its best to cope, and different suppliers who have left fragments of strategy sitting in drawers.
If you look closely, “emergency marketing” has a few recurring traits.
- The message changes depending on who is speaking: the salesperson promises one thing, the website says another, the catalogue adds a third.
- Actions are decided by the calendar, not by strategy: a trade fair, the Christmas season, the end of the quarter.
- No one can say with precision which activities actually generate leads, which ones bring customers, and which ones simply exist to “show that we’re there.”
Have you ever tried driving through dense fog with high beams on? It feels like you can see something, like you’re controlling the road, but the glare actually creates an even thicker wall.
When company identity fails to emerge
Every company has its own voice, even when no one recognizes it anymore.
There’s the company that speaks like a technical catalogue, the one that communicates with the enthusiasm of a brand-new startup, and the one still using the language of twenty years ago in a market that no longer exists.
Company Identity is not a slogan. It’s the way you present yourself when nobody is watching. It’s what your team says about you at the bar. It’s what a loyal customer would say if they recommended you to a friend.
When this identity is not clearly defined and brought into focus:
- marketing becomes a collage of generic phrases;
- content starts to look like that of competitors;
- customers perceive something “blurry,” even if they can’t explain exactly what.
It’s like having a pleasant voice but trying to speak while the music in a nightclub drowns you out. Only those who already know you will choose you. Those who don’t will mistake you for someone else.
my work with SMEs - and in the book (in Italian) Marketing for SMEs — the first step is always the same: stop the noise and put a few serious questions on the table.
- Who do we really want to speak to?
- What concrete problem do we solve?
- Why should someone who has never heard of us choose us today?
When these answers start to take shape, the company’s marketing process stops being a carousel of random actions and becomes an organized path.
From randomness to causality: building a marketing journey for SMEs
Maybe years ago it worked like this: a client woke up one morning, saw your post, and signed an important contract. Today that happens only in the fantasies of a few exaggerators. Anyone who understands business, sales, and marketing knows that a person’s journey toward your company looks more like a series of points to connect.
- A first contact: a piece of content, a trade fair, a phone call, word of mouth.
- A moment when trust begins: a useful piece of advice, a clear explanation, a demonstration of competence.
- A first choice: the accepted quote, the first order, the trial collaboration
- Confirmation: the second order, the renewal, the “I recommended you to a colleague.”
When people hear the term funnel marketingmarketing funnel, many imagine complicated software, endless automations, dashboards full of numbers, NASA-level computers. In an SME, the funnel is often simply a sequence of daily gestures: how you reply to the first email, what material you leave after a meeting, what happens after the first job together.
The point is simple: if these steps remain implicit, they live only in the heads of two or three people and never become a system. When one of those points disappears — a trade fair is cancelled, a salesperson leaves, a supplier goes away — the journey breaks. The customer stops, turns around, and chooses another path.
Building a system that generates customers means designing that journey and consciously deciding which points must never be missing.
Ever.
The goal: building an organized SME, not a perfect machine
There was one company I worked with that, on paper, was “already doing marketing.”
They had a recently redesigned website, a LinkedIn page, an Instagram profile, occasional Meta campaigns, and a couple of trade fairs each year. On paper, every piece made sense. Put together, it looked like a puzzle with missing pieces.
We sat down with the owner and the team and mapped what they considered the “normal path” that turns an unknown contact into a customer. Huge gaps appeared:
- no clear moment to ask for contact details;
- no content explaining the real value of their solutions;
- no structured follow-up after a successful first project.
After putting aside the initial frustration, we started with just a few elements:
- a website page designed to answer real customer questions, not to boast about how good the company is;
- a sequence of communication steps after every first project (email, phone call, deeper materials);
- a simple way to collect names and contacts at trade fairs and avoid losing them once back at the office.
As you can see, we didn’t build a digital amusement park full of unnecessary attractions.
We allowed what already worked to breathe, while removing the weight of activities that consumed energy without producing results. After a few months, the numbers started telling a different story: fewer “curious” inquiries, more conversations with genuinely interested people, and a higher percentage of returning customers.
The tools an SME can actually sustain
Whenever an SME opens the door to marketing, it risks finding itself in front of an endless catalogue — especially today with artificial intelligence. Social media, newsletters, podcasts, videos, webinars, automation, CRM systems, chatbots.
The risk is filling the company with “things to do” that no one will ever manage consistently. A system that generates customers is not built by accumulating tools, but by choosing a few and using them well.
For many SMEs this means:
- a website that is not just a showcase, but a place where interested people find answers and can leave their contact details
- a continuous communication channel (newsletter or regular content) that keeps the relationship alive with clients and prospects;
- a few structured moments of interaction: events, demos, company visits — designed not as random occasions but as steps in the journey.
Every tool has an invisible cost: time, attention, energy.
When this cost is ignored, the company fills up with profiles, platforms, and accounts that slowly age alone in a corner. So the real question becomes: what can we realistically maintain for at least the next six months?
In the book "Marketing for SMEs" I collected exactly these kinds of decisions: what a small or medium-sized business can realistically do with the people and resources it has, without chasing the latest trend.
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Data that speaks like people
At some point in the journey, numbers enter the picture. And people usually think this is the most boring part: charts on the wall, dull spreadsheets, numbers that look like hieroglyphics.
Yet they are signals telling you whether the path you designed actually makes sense. To interpret this in an SME, you don’t need an astronomical observatory — just the right level of attention. A few simple indicators are enough:
- how many contacts arrive each month and from where;
- how many of those people become customers;
- how many customers return at least a second time;
- which products or services truly generate margin.
When these numbers start being tracked consistently, conversations inside the company change.
The mythical phrase “we’ve always done it this way” gives way to more precise questions: “Does this channel bring customers who actually improve our balance sheet?” “Is this activity costing us time or creating value?”
A system is not something you set once and leave untouched.
It should be seen as a living organism: you observe, adjust, remove, improve. Every improvement, even a small one, moves the needle toward growth.
From chaos to system: one step at a time
When you’re caught in the vortex of “doing marketing,” it’s easy to think the only solution is starting everything from scratch — reinventing the wheel. In reality, the most powerful shift happens elsewhere: the moment you decide to look at your activities as a single journey rather than a checklist of tasks.
Moving from operational chaos to a system that generates customers means:
- recognizing your identity and placing it at the center of your messages;
- designing the journey a customer takes with you, from the first contact to the moment they return;
- choosing a few tools you can use consistently;
- listening to the numbers that matter.
Nel mi lavoro con Facile Web Marketingand in the pages of Marketing for SMEs, this is the common thread connecting projects, real cases, and tools: helping companies build stronger foundations under the marketing actions they are already doing, without turning them into something they are not.
Your company does not need to become a perfect spaceship.
It needs foundations solid enough so that every decision, starting tomorrow, is not a stroke of luck, but a step inside a system that — day after day — learns how to generate the right customers for you.
Nicola Onida
From operational chaos to strategy: how an SME can move from “doing marketing” to building a system that generates customers