The 4 marketing systems every business owner needs to build

May 26

In October 2023, I hit 100,000 followers on TikTok. There was one problem. My business wasn't making money.

I had made six figures in the prior twelve months. But as I leaned into social media to grow, I was getting views, comments and liked but it felt like the revenue had dried up.

And I wasn’t a first timer at any of this. Yes, it was my first business but I was an experienced marketer. I worked for years at a social media agency with clients like Nike and BMW. I'd seen what helps big brands make money on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. So if marketing felt hard for me, I figured there had to be thousands of service business owners banging their heads against the wall.

Now, of course, there’s a lot more context about what I was marketing and how I was running my business but in the years since that unfortunate turn of events, I’ve looked a lot more closely about how the internet is telling business owners to invest in their marketing and well… I have a lot to say. Which is why today I want to talk about the four marketing systems I think every business owner needs to build and the order to build them in, because in my experience, the order matters WAY more than most people realize.

Prefer to watch? Here's the video!

Why your content isn't converting to clients (and the four systems that will fix it)

So many business owners, especially small ones, want to believe there is one thing that will be their ticket to growth. A tool. A video format. A platform. They spend weeks trying to figure out what it is, moving from one thing to the next because the last thing didn't solve the problem.

But if the golden ticket existed, there wouldn't be thousands of accounts telling you how to grow on social media. People would have already solved the problem. They wouldn't need to follow three more accounts like that.

In my experience, if the first thing you’re thinking about is the platform, the video format, or the posting cadence, you've already lost. Marketing is far bigger picture than this and getting too quickly into the nitty gritty means you’re not seeing the forest through the trees. The first step to making marketing work for your business is thinking like a marketer.

Marketing is and always has been an art and a science. Most people are only working on the art. But there is a science of the things to put together that actually make marketing work.

Practically, marketing works more like a recipe. You can have the pans and the flour (like you have TikTok or a great hook idea) but the tools aren't helpful unless you understand the recipe. The reality is that there are a ton of ways to build awareness via marketing, just like there are a million variations of cookies. But if you understand the fundamentals, these variations don’t feel like different things, they feel like they’re all different levers you can pull in the fundamental system of marketing.

Even better, once you understand the recipe, you feel empowered to be able to start making adjustments for what works for you. You want your cookies to spread less, you can play with the butter. You want crispier edges, you can adjust the oven temperature. But if you don't know what you're working with, you won't know what to change.

But if there is one thing that stops a lot of business owners from converting views into actually clients, it’s this: there is nothing you can do to make a cake that takes 45 minutes bake in 10 and still taste good. If you saw an add for a skincare product that completely disappeared wrinkles overnight, you’d be skeptical. If a financial advisor called you to say they could make you a million dollars by investing in this one thing, you wouldn’t believe them. Yet, there are tons of accounts on the internet talking about how to go viral or how to convert at crazy high rates immediately. These are scams just like any other “get rich quick” scheme. The sooner that we can accept that good, sustainable marketing takes time, just like a cake takes time to bake, the sooner you can stop feeling like you're doing everything wrong just because you haven't seen results yet.

But now that we’ve got that very important caveat out of the way, let’s talk about the four systems that make up the recipe for marketing that will actually lead to real results.

System 1: A clear customer journey

Your customer journey is the path a person takes from discovering your business through marketing to making a purchase. It defines exactly where you want someone to go after they find you, and how many steps stand between that first interaction and a sale. Building this before anything else matters because without it, content will convert at such low rates that it’s actually a waste of time. In a recipe, the customer journey is the header of the recipe where you can see the what you’re trying to make, how many servings it should make and the general prep time. It sets you up to make sure all the marketing work you do actually leads to what you want.

Most people don’t see this as a marketing system, they see it as a sales system. And that leads to them deprioritizing it, because they “want to get marketing working first.” But marketing, especially content, is more successful when it’s clear what you want the viewer to do once they find you. If you aren’t clear on your customer journey, even you aren’t clear what you want them to do so it’s much less likely they’ll do it.

To set up your customer journey, think about things like:

What's the specific page or platform you want them to visit? Where are they going to be most comfortable making a purchase decision?
What qualification (if any) do you need to do from them before they can buy from you?
What information do they need from you in order to buy and is it clearly located wherever you’re sending them?
How many steps stand between that first interaction and the moment they buy? Fewer is better.

If you can't answer those questions with specificity, you have work to do on your customer journey.

This is the most expensive mistake to make when you're growing. If you spend any amount of time getting in front of more eyes before you've resolved the leaks in your current system, you're pouring more water into a bucket with holes. It's far better to fix the leaks when you're working with small numbers than to go viral and realize your ability to convert all those new people is minimal. Speaking from experience.

When my TikToks were going viral, people weren't clear on what to do next. Inquiry rates were lower than they should have been. Drop-off rates before purchase were high. That's a customer journey problem, not a content problem. It felt like all that work I’d put into marketing was for nothing and, even worse, I wasn’t confident that these new people who were finding me from viral videos were actually people I wanted in my audience.

If I’d been clearer on my customer journey, I would have been leading all the content on my social media, website, and email geared toward a specific set of steps. I’d have focused hard on what a client needed to make a decision (even if that was via research before I had real client interest) so that when they found me, I felt confident they’d convert. That way, when I drove traffic, I knew it’d lead to real business.

But how do you know what isn’t working in your customer journey to be able to fix it? Let’s talk about our next system…

System 2: Analytics from the beginning

Analytics are the tracking infrastructure that shows you whether your marketing is working. This is crucial for successfully marketing your business because tracking key metrics over time will help you identify where things are or are not working. It’s easy to be swayed by views and likes but the most important numbers to be looking at are conversion rates: what share of viewers click through to your site from social media pages or what percent of website visitors become inquiries or purchases, for example. Setting this up early, even when your numbers are small, is what gives you real data to make decisions about where to spend your time and what to cut. In a recipe, analytics are like the measurements - without this set up, you could put a tablespoon of salt in, instead of a teaspoon and end up with inedible cake.

Most business owners push analytics to later. They think they’ll get the content working, then set up tracking and optimize from there. But that’s completely backwards. Show me 10 business owners creating content but not seeing results and I’m guessing at least 8 out of 10 are not looking at their analytics closely. Show me 10 business owners creating content that’s driving meaningful revenue for their business and I’m guessing at least 8 out of 10 are looking at their analytics closely, at least once a week. That’s not an accident.

Monitoring your analytics closely, even at early stages, with small numbers, is crucial for building a marketing strategy that delivers.

Views and follower counts are easy to see. They're also not what tells you whether your marketing is working because there are too many factors at play and these metrics only show what people are interested in, not what people are interested in buying. What matters is conversion rate. How many views convert to a click? How many clicks convert to a discovery call booking? Those numbers show you whether a piece of content is actually doing its job.

If you don't have analytics set up from the beginning, you'll miss key insights when the numbers are still small enough to change course. You'll spend a lot of time creating content that feels productive but isn't moving what matters.

Here's the other thing analytics does: it keeps you honest. One of the most common recommendations I make to clients after opening their analytics is to cut platforms, not add them. Not because those platforms are bad, but because the data shows the time isn't worth it at that stage. You're almost always better off zeroing in on what's showing early traction and building there. On the other hand, analytics may point out that you’re actually not posting as much content as you think you are. The numbers can’t lie!

I set up analytics part way through the first year of my prior business. The things I started seeing were eye opening - my views and followers were growing but my conversion rate to things like booked calls and closed clients were going in the wrong direction. These were important trends I would have missed until way later if I hadn’t had my analytics to give me the honest truth.

Once you have a clear customer journey and analytics to keep you honest in the process, then you’re ready to build the system most people think about when they think about marketing…

System 3: A content creation system (not just content)

Acontent creation system is not just a camera and a spot to film. A content creation system is the repeatable process to consistently plan, create and post content. It’s not specific to any one platform - you can have a content creation system for blogs, TikToks, ads, podcasts, you name it. The key is that a system makes it possible for you to repeat this process over and over again - it makes content repeatable. A content creation system is key for successful marketing efforts because it provides structure and guidance to help you overcome decision paralysis and actually get content done without it taking enormous amounts of your time. In a recipe, this is the bread and butter step-by-step of mix this, sift in that, roll this out. It’s going to hold your hand while you create.

Almost all business owners know they should create content consistently. Many business owners try. But the ones who actually succeed are usually the ones who have some sort of system in place so they’re not sitting down at the computer trying to figure out “what should I create today?” Without this, most business owners either never start, or start and stop so inconsistently that there's never enough data to learn what's working.

But what does this actually look like? The tactical setup of a content creation system can vary between businesses. You can set it up in Notion or Asana, build it for podcasts or social media content. What most content creation systems have in common are:

An place where ideas go so you're never starting from scratch when you sit down to create
A progress tracker for an idea -this can be it’s status or treating it like a task to complete so you can tell when an idea has been executed)
Guidance or templates to help ease the creation process - can include best practices, structures you commit to following, etc.
Publishing checklist - a review/editing checklist to make sure you've got all the nitty gritty set up to optimize the content for it’s given platform, but also to keep the system itself clean

The reason this system comes after analytics is important: you need to already be thinking like the science side of a marketer before you build the production machine. You need to know what you're measuring before you build the thing that generates the content, so the content is pointed in the right direction from the start. And you need to have agreed on the key goal of the customer journey because a content strategy optimized for email sign ups will be different from one that’s headed to a website page to book a call. Having the fundamentals set up, mean that once it comes to execution, you’re clear what you need to do.

Most business owners either never start because the overwhelm is too much, or they start and spray content across platforms without being consistent enough anywhere to learn what's working. A content creation system addresses both.

(Just a note… if setting all this up sounds really nice but you are too busy serving your clients to have time to figure out where you want to build an analytics dashboard or which software to use to house your content creation system, this is what we do for our clients who are ready to outsource a portion of this process. Head here to learn more.)

The problem many business owners run into is when they’re showing up regularly, creating content but not seeing the results they want yet. They think they have the wrong recipe or they want to give up completely. What’s usually happening in these moments is that their in one of the frustrating times in a recipe that requires patience - think the proofing time for a loaf of bread or when the cake is in the oven. You can want that cake to be done sooner, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for you to get your results now without compromising something else.

The recipe of marketing takes time and part of that time is showing up and putting in the reps before you see results. If you’re struggling with this moment, this article dives way more into how to reframe this in your mind. Because results from marketing work need a certain number of repetitions. You can get them over three years or three months, depending on how consistently you output.

Once you’re consistently creating content, you can move on to the final system.

System 4: Content repurposing

A content repurposing system takes content you've already created and reformats it for additional channels, so one piece of work reaches multiple audiences. One idea lives in multiple places, increasing your opportunity to be found by algorithms, search or AI tools, without requiring dramatically more hours. For a service business owner with limited time, this is the most efficient way to extend your content's reach without producing more from scratch. In recipe language, this is like making chocolate truffles with the cake trimmings from your round or mixing two different bowls of dough with two different mix-ins so you can have two types of cookies in the same baking cycle.

Content repurposing is the icing on top, not to mix my metaphors here too much. It makes content feel more sustainable over time, especially for service providers running a business alongside their content. But it's also the one you build last because it cannot exist until you have a consistent content output and you want that content to be working, actually driving results, otherwise you’ll just be multiplying content that’s not doing anything for you.

In my business, each YouTube video becomes a blog post (that you’re reading right now). That one idea now lives in two places and has two chances to get found. I’m working on doing this same exercise to repurpose these ideas for LinkedIn posts. The opportunities only continue from there. One idea, in more places to be found by more people browsing with real questions. By AI tools. By search engines. One piece of work, multiple doors.

What was missing in my 100K-follower era

When I look back at those four systems and map them to where I was in October 2023, the gaps are obvious.

My customer journey wasn't set up. When people found my videos, they weren't given a clear next step, and most of them didn't take one. The few who did inquire had a high drop-off rate before they actually bought. I was creating plenty of content, I had plenty of visibility but I wasn’t converting it.

My analytics were actually in place, which is part of why I noticed something was off at all. The data showed that conversion rates were falling really low. Views and engagement were climbing. Clicks and conversions weren't. That gap is what told me the problem wasn't the content itself.

My content creation system was functional enough to produce thousands of videos. But because it wasn't locked into a clear customer journey, a lot of those videos were building followers, not building a business. And the content repurposing was happening but it was just exacerbating the problems above.

If you're a small business owner who's been creating content and wondering why it isn't translating to clients, you're probably not doing the wrong things. You might just be doing them in the wrong order. Start with the customer journey. Build the analytics. Then build the content system. Then, once all of that is working, add the repurposing layer.

Marketing doesn't have to feel like a mystery. It's a recipe. You just have to follow the steps.

Frequently asked questions

How do I build a marketing system for my small business?

Start with your customer journey before you touch content creation. Get clear on where you want someone to go when they find you and how many steps stand between discovery and purchase. Remove any unnecessary steps you can. Then set up basic analytics to track conversion rates, not just total views or follower counts. Only after those two pieces are solid should you formalize a content creation process. Repurposing, the fourth system, comes last. The order matters because each system builds on the one before it. Jumping to content creation before the customer journey is clear means producing content that doesn't connect back to revenue.

What marketing metrics should small business owners actually track?

You have to track the metrics like views, likes, and follows but what really matters are conversion rates. View to profile view rate. Profile view to website. Website page view to call booking. Look for not the overall number but the percentage, which tells you how well things are working. When you're operating with small numbers early on, conversion rates are what show you whether a piece of content or a platform is worth your time, and those are the numbers that lead to real business decisions.

Do I need to be active on multiple social media platforms?

Not necessarily, and probably not early on. When time is limited, being everywhere at a mediocre level and seeing no results is worse than doing one or two channels well. Analytics may point you in one direction but it’s also perfectly okay to choose a platform based on what you can be consistent at, because the platform works for your personality is totally fine too. Starting there and expanding over time is a much better use of limited bandwidth than trying to maintain a presence everywhere. One of the most common things I recommend to clients after opening their analytics is to cut platforms, not add them.

What is a content creation system and do I need one?

A content creation system is the repeatable process that lets you produce content at the consistency and quantity needed to see results. It typically includes an idea repository so you're never starting from scratch, a way to track the creation process, and a per-platform checklist for format and publishing so you're executing consistently rather than reinventing the process each time. If the overwhelm of figuring out what to create keeps you from starting, or if you're producing inconsistently and can't tell what's working, a content creation system is what changes that.

When should I start repurposing content?

After your customer journey is clear, your analytics are running, and your content creation system is functional. Repurposing makes each piece of content do more. But if the first three systems aren't in place, repurposing doesn't fix the gaps. It multiplies them. Get the foundation right, then add the repurposing layer to extend the reach of work you're already doing.