Building a Small Business Marketing Habit: The Small Engine Warehouse Story

**Small Engine Warehouse is a great example of how building your own marketing habit, with the help of Lantern's support and advisory services, generates consistently strong results. **

The Background

Small Engine Warehouse is the largest retailer of replacement engines for lawn and outdoor power equipment. And while it's not exactly a glamorous industry, it's an essential one! The Small Engine Warehouse team knows buying a whole new lawn mower every time the engine fails is expensive and wasteful. That's why they provide their customers with the right replacement engine (and even build a custom engine if their model is discontinued) and guide them through the repair process, saving every customer time, money, and frustration.

The Problem

When Small Engine Warehouse came to us, they were frustrated with their marketing. The agencies they worked with in the past spread their marketing budget over too many tactics, with no focus or consistency. Small Engine Warehouse never knew where their budget was going, how these tactics could help them reach their goals, or what was really happening behind the scenes.

For years the team had tried to find a marketing partner who wouldn't just take their budget and run, but would include them in the process. They were looking for more than a done-for-you service with unclear tactics and fuzzy results. They wanted a done-with-you partnership where their internal marketing team had the resources, guidance, and implementation support needed to generate real results.

Refreshed catalog

Our Method

Our method for Small Engine Warehouse was a simple one:

"We're going to focus on one thing until it works."

And their team agreed. Instead of mapping out a complex plan with multiple channels, overlapping campaigns, and dozens of moving parts, we planned one simple 90-day Marketing Sprint.

** Marketing Sprint: **A 90-day plan that focuses all your energy and efforts on one strategy, for one goal. At the end of 90 days, we review the results, tweak the plan, and sprint again, getting better, faster, and more streamlined with every sprint. Goodbye confusion, hello consistency!

Our Solution

For Small Engine Warehouse, our first sprint plan aimed to retarget one segment of their customer base, inviting them to join an exclusive discount program and increase their annual ordering amount. And we used clear, compelling, consistent communications to do just that.

• We defined this customer segment using target market research, ensuring we knew exactly how to deliver our focused message

• Together with the Small Engine Warehouse team, we refreshed their quarterly catalog with high-impact copy and an ultra-clear layout

• To bolster our snail-mail efforts, we drafted a text and email campaign to follow up with this customer segment, increasing our number of valuable touch points

Throughout this 90-day sprint, we tracked every effort on an at-a-glance timeline, so every member of both teams stayed clear on the process and next steps. And throughout the sprint, we met frequently for progress updates.

New program landing page

The Results

At the end of 90 days, we stepped back to review the data and plan our next 90 days. And here's what happened after just one sprint:

• Small Engine Warehouse more than doubled the membership in their exclusive discount program

• From this campaign alone, 35 different customers placed 56 orders

• The business generated $360,000 in additional revenue from those above-and-beyond orders

• Those 35 customers benefited by saving an additional 13% off purchases by joining the program

And get this, because the program encourages and incentivizes customers to pay early and receive an additional discount, every single customer switched to a pre-pay program. **That completely eliminated Small Engine Warehouse's accounts receivable. **No more chasing payments and no more running after invoices. They now receive all funds on time or early, lowering their business risk and improving cash flow overall.

That's what happened after just *90 days of focused marketing. *Can you see why we believe this kind of marketing is truly habit-worthy??

What's next?

As that sprint wrapped up, we worked with the Small Engine Warehouse team to adjust the plan and prepare for a relaunch. Now that we've proven this marketing plan generates trackable, profitable results, it's time to tweak and sprint again! Because that's how you develop marketing as a habit, improve your business' efficiency, and generate ROI you can count on.

Our sprint-based marketing method is simple and consistent

At Lantern, we offer done-with-you marketing for service-based B2Bs. And together, we can create a clear marketing plan that saves your business time, money, and frustration.

To learn more about our marketing roadmap process and talk to our team, start here.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a marketing sprint and how does it work? A marketing sprint is a 90-day focused push on one strategy toward one goal. Instead of spreading your budget and energy across five different channels at once, you pick one approach, execute it well, measure the results, and then adjust for the next sprint. Small Engine Warehouse generated $360,000 in additional revenue from a single 90-day sprint, which shows what focused execution can do compared to scattered effort.

How do small businesses build a consistent marketing habit? Consistency comes from simplicity. When a marketing plan has too many moving parts, it's easy to let things slip. The businesses that actually develop a marketing habit pick one or two activities, commit to tracking them, and repeat the process each quarter. Over time, each sprint gets better because you're building on real data instead of guessing.

What's the difference between done-for-you and done-with-you marketing? Done-for-you means an agency handles everything and you mostly stay out of it. Done-with-you means the agency works alongside your internal team, teaching and guiding while you stay actively involved. For businesses that want to own their marketing long-term rather than stay dependent on outside help, done-with-you tends to produce more durable results.

How long does it take to see results from a focused marketing campaign? The Small Engine Warehouse results came in 90 days, but that's with a warm existing customer list and a clear, specific offer. For businesses starting from scratch, 90 days might just be the learning phase. The honest answer is that most businesses see meaningful movement within one to three focused sprints, meaning three to nine months of consistent effort.

What should a small business focus on first when building a marketing plan? Start with your best existing customers. They already trust you, which means the cost to sell to them again is a fraction of what it costs to find someone new. Small Engine Warehouse's first sprint targeted a specific segment of their existing customer base, and it worked because that group already had a reason to say yes. New leads can come later. Past customers are the fastest path to measurable results.