Marketing tactics that actually work, with real examples.
Most lists of marketing tactics are noise designed to make you feel behind. Here are the few that reliably produce customers, with examples, so you can stop collecting tactics and finish a couple.
There is no shortage of marketing tactics. There is a shortage of finished ones. The average owner has a half-built ad account, a dormant newsletter, a social account they post to when they remember, and a nagging sense that everyone else knows a secret. The problem is almost never a lack of ideas. It is spreading thin across too many, so none of them ever gets enough fuel to prove itself. Here are the tactics that actually produce customers, with real examples, and the discipline to make a few of them work instead of all of them badly.
The rule that comes before any tactic
Before the list, one principle that decides whether any of it works: fund a few tactics properly rather than many poorly. Every channel has a warm-up cost. Search ads need a few weeks of data before they mean anything. A new audience needs repetition before it converts. Split a modest budget five ways and you pay all five warm-up costs and finish none of them.
The U.S. Small Business Administration makes the same point in its guide to marketing and sales, which tells owners to choose their channels, set a budget for each, and compare the cost to the revenue it generates. If you cannot tie a tactic to revenue, you cannot tell a winner from a money pit. So pick two or three of them, fund them, run them long enough to read the results, then add the next.
Tactic 1: claim and work your Google Business Profile
For any business with a location or service area, this is the highest-return tactic there is, and it is free. The Google Business Profile is what puts you in the map results when someone searches for what you do nearby, and those searchers have high intent. Example: a dentist who completed their profile, picked the precise category, added real photos, and gathered recent reviews started appearing in the local map for "dentist near me" and filled gaps in the schedule, all without spending on ads.
The work is unglamorous and most competitors skip it: accurate hours, the right category, real photos, and a steady habit of reviews. That neglect by everyone else is exactly why doing it well moves you up.
Tactic 2: turn happy customers into reviews and referrals
People trust other people far more than they trust your advertising. Nielsen's long-running research has found that recommendations from people they know are the most trusted form of marketing by a wide margin, and online reviews are the public, scalable version of that same trust. Example: a home cleaner who simply texted every happy customer a direct review link the day of service built a wall of recent five-star reviews in a few months and started winning the comparison against competitors with stale profiles.
This costs almost nothing and you control it. Ask every satisfied customer, make it one tap, and reply to the reviews you get. A thoughtful reply to a critical review reassures the next reader more than the five stars above it.
Tactic 3: build an email list you actually own
Email is the highest-return channel in marketing for a structural reason: you own the list, so there is no platform taking a cut or deciding who sees you. The catch is that it only works once you have a list, and a list takes time to build. Example: a boutique that started collecting emails at checkout and sent one genuinely useful note a month found that, within a year, a single send reliably drove a sales bump at almost no cost.
So email is rarely where you start and almost always where you should end up. Start collecting addresses now, from customers and your website, so that in six months you have an audience you can reach for free, repeatedly.
Your competitors are not winning with better tactics. They are winning because they finished two or three while you started six.
Tactic 4: paid search where the intent is highest
When you are ready to spend, paid search captures people at the exact moment they are looking to buy, which is why it converts so well. Example: a roofer who ran a tight Google Ads campaign on "emergency roof repair" in their city, with a matching landing page and a daily cap, booked jobs within the first week. For service businesses, Local Services Ads, which charge per qualified lead rather than per click, are often friendlier to a small budget still.
The danger is equal to the speed: paid search is the easiest channel to quietly lose money on. Before you spend a dollar, know what a customer is worth to you, set a cap, and watch the cost per customer weekly. It rewards attention and punishes autopilot.
Tactic 5: one social channel, done consistently
Social media works for the right businesses, but only when it is focused. The mistake is trying to be everywhere. Pick the one platform where your customers actually spend time and post consistently for a year, with content that is genuinely useful or genuinely entertaining rather than a stream of promotions. Example: a contractor who posted honest before-and-after photos and short tips on a single platform built a local following that fed referrals, while a competitor spreading thin across four platforms built nothing on any of them.
HubSpot's annual marketing statistics consistently show that consistency and fit matter more than presence on every platform. One channel done well beats five done occasionally.
The tactics to skip while you are starting out
Knowing what to ignore is as valuable as knowing what to do. A few common time-sinks for businesses that have not yet finished the basics:
- A blog you cannot sustain. Content compounds, but only over a year or more of consistency. If you will quit at month four, the time is better spent elsewhere first.
- Paid ads to a weak landing page. Sending traffic to a page that does not convert is paying to confirm what you already suspected.
- A second social channel before the first works. Spreading effort across platforms produces nothing on any of them.
- A logo redesign to fix a sales problem. Customers care whether you answer the phone, not about your kerning.
The honest reality check
None of these tactics guarantees a number, and anyone promising you one is selling something. What they do is put your limited time and money where intent and trust already live, instead of spreading it until it disappears. The businesses that win are not on the most channels. They are the ones that finished a few.
Sequencing these for a specific business, and running the ones that need daily attention, is a fair amount of what we do at Mining Wells across Ads & Leads, SEO, and email. But honestly, if you only do the first three on this list yourself, you will already be ahead of most of your competitors. Start there, finish them, then add the next.
About Mining Wells
We're on a mission to fix bad marketing.
Maybe:
- You are spending thousands on marketing tools, ads, and your website, with zero revenue increase to show for it.
- Every campaign you have tried gets minimal results.
- You have a great product that nobody seems to find.
- You are getting interest, but it never converts to a sale.
- You have a low retention rate.
- You have been paying a marketing agency for over a year and have not seen results.
You are not alone. Many founders and leaders live with the results of bad marketing without ever finding the reason.
And often that is because it can be many reasons. Sometimes it is the wrong ICP, sometimes the wrong messaging, sometimes the wrong targeting chasing impressions.
We are here to take the hard guesswork out and provide that clarity before it is too late.
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