20+ Years of Marketing Advice That Will Make You More Money

Last updated: November 2026 · Written by Adrian Prokopiec, 20 Minute Marketing · 10 min read

I've worked in marketing for more than 20 years, and these days I run digital marketing for national brands while building 20 Minute Marketing. Platforms have come and gone in that time. The principles that make money haven't changed much at all.

This post is for New Zealand small business owners who want the short version: the lessons I keep coming back to, written so you can act on them this week. There are no secret tactics here, and I've deliberately left out the dramatic success stories you see elsewhere. Where I use an example, it's an illustration with round numbers, not a client story.

1. Know your numbers before you spend a dollar

A question small business owners often ask is "what's a good cost per lead?" The honest answer is: it depends entirely on what a customer is worth to you. A $60 lead is cheap for a builder and ruinous for a café.

Two numbers matter most. Customer value is the gross profit (not revenue) you make from an average customer over the time they stay with you. Cost to acquire is everything you spend to win one paying customer: ads, tools, discounts and the time you put in. Marketers call these LTV and CAC.

Here's an illustration with round numbers. Say you run a window-cleaning business in Hamilton. An average customer books four cleans a year at $150 gross profit each and stays about two years: that's roughly $1,200 in gross profit. If one in four quotes becomes a customer and each quote request costs you $40 in ads, you're paying about $160 to win a customer worth $1,200. That's a healthy business to advertise. If the same customer only booked once, the maths changes completely.

A common rule of thumb is to aim for customer value at least three times your cost to acquire. Below that, growth gets fragile. To set this up properly, our guide to tracking marketing ROI for a small business walks through the spreadsheet, and the business.govt.nz site has free tools for pricing and cash flow that help you get the gross profit figure right.

2. Fix the offer before you buy more ads

When a campaign isn't working, most owners change the ad. Far more often, the problem is the offer behind it. An offer is everything a customer gets and has to do: the price, what's included, how quickly they get a result, how much effort it takes and how much risk they carry.

You can make almost any offer stronger by making it faster, easier or less risky for the customer. Think of a guarantee, a fixed price instead of an hourly rate, a clear start date, or doing the paperwork for them. Our guide to creating an irresistible offer has a step-by-step process.

On pricing, I'd rather see owners raise prices gradually and watch what happens than discount to win work. Discounts attract the most price-sensitive customers, who are rarely your best ones.

3. The first few seconds do most of the work

Whether it's an ad, a landing page or a social video, most people decide in a moment whether to keep paying attention. That means the headline, the first line or the first few seconds deserve most of your effort.

Write for someone who doesn't know you, is in a hurry and is reading on a phone. Clear beats clever. Say what you do, who it's for and what happens next. If you have an hour to make an ad, spend most of it on the opening. Our landing page conversion tips and website conversion checklist show where this matters most on your site.

4. Do more of what works before you try something new

New channels are exciting. They're also expensive to learn. Before you add one, ask whether you've really got everything out of the channel that already works. Usually the answer is no: you could post more consistently, run a few more ad variations, or ask more customers for reviews.

Volume reduces your reliance on luck. If you need one great ad, make ten and let the results tell you which one it is. If you need more referrals, ask every happy customer rather than the occasional one. Once more volume stops helping, improve what you're doing. Only then try something new, and give it months, not weeks, to prove itself.

Whatever channel you use, show up on it regularly. Whether that's LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube, consistency matters more than the platform. Our social media strategy playbook for NZ small businesses shows how to make that sustainable in 20 minutes a day, and if you advertise on Google Ads, the same "more, then better, then new" order applies.

5. Go narrower, not broader

When growth slows, the instinct is to widen the net. More often, the faster path is to get better at serving the customers who are already most valuable to you.

Try this exercise:

1. List your customers from the last 12 months.
2. Mark the best fifth: the ones who spent the most, were easiest to serve and got the best results.
3. Look for what they have in common: industry, location, size, how they found you, what problem they had.
4. Rewrite your website, ads and content to speak directly to that group.

You'll often find your best customers cluster in a way you hadn't noticed. Speaking directly to them makes your marketing cheaper and your work more enjoyable. Our guides to creating buyer personas and competitor analysis help you sharpen the picture, and Stats NZ data can help you size a niche before you commit to it.

6. The money is in the follow-up

Most people who enquire aren't ready to buy that day. They're comparing, checking with a partner or waiting for payday. Businesses that follow up promptly and keep in touch win a large share of the work that slower competitors simply forget about.

At minimum: reply to every enquiry quickly, follow up on every quote, and keep past customers on an email list. Our guides to a welcome email sequence and email automation workflows make this mostly automatic. Just make sure you have consent: in New Zealand, commercial emails and texts fall under the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007, and the Department of Internal Affairs explains what the anti-spam law means for businesses.

7. Give away the know-how, sell the doing

Some owners worry that sharing useful advice for free will stop people paying them. In my experience the opposite is true. Free, genuinely useful content shows people you know what you're talking about. Most will never buy, but the ones who want it done properly, or done for them, will come to you because you've already helped them.

Make your free content specific and practical: a checklist, a short how-to video, a pricing guide. End it with an invitation to get help applying it to their situation, not just "follow for more". Our guide to turning one idea into ten pieces of content helps you get more mileage from each piece, and personal branding for NZ small business owners shows how to put your own expertise front and centre.

8. Prove it, don't promise it

"Quality service" and "best prices" mean nothing because everyone says them. What persuades people is evidence they can see: a before and after photo, a recorded walkthrough, a real review, a live demonstration, specific numbers you've actually measured.

Only claim what you can back up. In New Zealand, misleading claims and reviews fall under the Fair Trading Act 1986, enforced by the Commerce Commission. Tracking your results has a nice side effect here: once you measure, you have true, specific things to say. Our guide to getting more Google reviews is a good place to start building proof.

9. If you don't track it, you're guessing

Many small businesses don't track marketing results, sometimes because it feels like hard work and sometimes, honestly, because they'd rather not know. But you can't improve what you don't measure, and tracking often improves results on its own because it makes you pay attention.

Start simple: ask every new customer how they heard about you, use the traffic acquisition report in Google Analytics to see which channels send visitors, and review a handful of numbers each week. Our list of five marketing metrics to track weekly keeps it manageable.

10. People need reminding more than teaching

You will get bored of your own message long before your customers notice it. Most people see only a fraction of what you post, and new people find you every week. Repeating your core message, your best stories and your strongest offers isn't lazy. It's how they sink in.

Take your best ideas and present them in different formats (a post, a video, an email, a page on your site) and for different customers. If something worked once, it will probably work again.

Put this to work in 20 minutes

1. Minutes 1 to 7: Work out your rough customer value: average gross profit per sale multiplied by how many times a typical customer buys.
2. Minutes 8 to 12: Divide that by three. That's roughly the most you should spend to win one customer.
3. Minutes 13 to 17: Look at your last month of marketing spend and new customers. Are you under or over that number?
4. Minutes 18 to 20: Pick one lesson above that would make the biggest difference and put a 20-minute block in your diary to start on it this week.

Where to go next

If you're still setting up the basics, begin with where to start with digital marketing as a NZ small business and the five pillars of digital marketing. If Google is your weak spot, why most businesses fail on Google and how to fix it and our walkthrough of Google's small business hub are practical next steps.

If you want a structured path through all of this, see what to learn first when marketing your own business, then compare our digital marketing courses or start with the Essentials course, which covers the foundations in 20-minute lessons. For more on the free resources available to NZ owners, the marketing learning modules on business.govt.nz are worth a look.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most important marketing metric for a small business?

Comparing what a customer is worth to you over time (gross profit, not revenue) with what it costs you to win one. If customer value is comfortably higher, usually at least three times, you can afford to grow through marketing.

Should a small business start with low prices?

Not by default. Low prices can help you win early customers and testimonials when you are new, but long-term discounting attracts price-sensitive customers. It is usually better to improve the offer and raise prices gradually while watching how many people still buy.

Why is my advertising not working?

Usually it is not the channel. The most common causes are a weak offer, an unclear headline or opening, a page that does not convert, or no follow-up after the enquiry. Check those before you change platforms.

How much should I give away for free?

Give away genuinely useful know-how that solves a narrow problem, and charge for applying it to someone's situation or doing it for them. Most people will never buy, but the ones who do will already trust you.

How do I know which marketing is working?

Ask every new customer how they found you, use Google Analytics to see where website visitors come from, and review a few key numbers weekly. Over a few months the pattern becomes clear.

Keep reading

• Where to start with digital marketing as a NZ small business
• Social media strategy for NZ small businesses: the 2026 playbook
• Personal branding for NZ small business owners
• How to create an irresistible offer
• How to track marketing ROI for a small business