New Year: it’s time to get clear on your marketing goals

On Blue Monday, I'm reflecting on how important it is to set marketing goals for the year ahead - and daydreaming about staying at this hotel, wherever it may be.

As I write this on Blue Monday, with the ‘Bristol grey’ shade of sky peering in on me, I feel both a sense of mid-January ‘urghhh’ and a one of quiet optimism for the year ahead. Maybe you’re feeling the same: a bit down from all the drizzle, but looking forward to what you’ll achieve this year?

January is a great time to take stock of what happened in the last 12 months for your small business, and where you’d like to be this time next year. In fact, it’s essential to give yourself a bit of a plan to work towards by setting marketing goals, so that you know what you need to do, when you need to do it, and how much it’s going to cost.

Creating a new brand for Star Roofs meant that from their new website, to their advertising - and even their email footers - everything felt consistent.

Marketing goals: a small business success story

Take one of my clients, Star Roofs. They’re a husband and wife team who set up shop in September 2024, installing energy efficient conservatory roofing across the South-West. They reached out to me in January 2025 to ask whether I could help them develop a new website and brand. I’d never worked with a business in the construction / home improvement industry before, but nevertheless, the marketing principles are the same – and I was excited to work with them!

By April 2025, they had a fabulous new Wix-powered website, all based on a new brand that I developed for them. The new brand was essential, because it created a cohesive thread for their visual identity and voice right the way through their marketing. It means that when a potential customer sees a magazine ad, or a Google or Facebook ad that I run for them, and then visits their website, it all feels like the same company (and of course it looks great too).

Just 12 months after we started working together, Star Roofs has gone from a literal spare room industry, taking odd jobs like fixing conservatory leaks and clearing guttering, to bringing in hundreds of thousands of pounds of business from insulated panel refits, tiled conservatory roofs and amazing hup! new build conservatories – now with a dedicated installation team and warehousing space. Their goal this year is to double that again, and then some.

That sort of success wouldn’t have been possible without a belief from the team at Star Roofs in the power of marketing done right. It would have been so easy for them to simply try and get by, designing flyers themselves, and possibly even making their own DIY website on Wix or Squarespace. You never know, they might have done a decent job – but all that time spent on doing their own marketing would have eaten into the time they needed to spend on everything else.

For me, that's the most important benefit to working with a marketing professional: it gives you more time and the ability to focus on what you do best, which is running and developing your business. I'm here to set your marketing goals which will get you where you want to be.

"My husband and I started our small business in 2024. In October 2024 we realised to compete within the market we needed a website. After a lot of research and some astronomical quotes we found Chris. We have never looked back, Chris designed our website and manages it on a daily basis with updates reviews etc...It is an amazing website and has bought us many leads and compliments from customers. Chris really understands our business and is so invested it gives us such great support and Chris and his marketing strategies have definitely helped us grow us a Business, from designing print ads, internal forms to Google campaigns, ads . Chris now manages all of our meta ads and has built us a CRM system to track customer data and leads flow in on a daily basis. Chris has been such an instrumental part to the success of Star Roofs Ltd we highly recommend to get him on board if you need a marketing WIZARD to grow your business and bring success. The other companies that promise the world and don't deliver, don't waste your time or money, work with Chris and he will deliver at a fraction of the cost but give you 100% more. We truly cant thank you enough Chris."

Thankfully Star Roofs took the (admittedly slightly scary) step of getting in touch to ask me to help – that’s not easy when profit margins are tight, and a business is new. And whilst I’m delighted that our work together has been so successful, I’m also really pleased to say that it’s been a massively enjoyable project for me!

They know that I’ll be looking after their website on a daily basis: from monitoring new leads and pipeline automations into the Wix CRM, to Google integrations and new SEO-optimised website content. And any time they need a new advert for a local magazine, I’m here to help produce it. They’ve already saved thousands of pounds by switching their Meta and Google advertising from expensive lead generation companies, to being managed by me, all in one place.

Our next stop on the road to customer success for Star Roofs is a rock solid marketing plan for 2026, based on their business plan and objectives. That’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to this year: seeing their success snowball, and imagining what we’ll be talking about next January.

If you’re a small business owner reading this…

I can help you too – just like I've helped the team at Star Roofs. Whether you’re a new business who needs a new website and brand (without breaking the bank), or a content strategy, social media management or email marketing for your established business – pop me a message, and let’s explore where we can go together.