Marketing Mixer Chesterfield: Lessons for small business marketing
Marketing Mixer Chesterfield
I attended the Marketing Mixer by Hello Social in Chesterfield on 6 November 2026, and came away feeling inspired, with plenty of notes to unpack for a very beneficial morning.
David Coslett’s marketing framework, Jo Bird’s talk on brand personality and the on-stage conversation between David and Adel Raslan about LinkedIn all gave me something useful to consider.
The ideas that stayed with me were about consistency, character and connection: keeping marketing going when business gets busy, giving your company a recognisable personality and helping people get to know the expertise behind it.
For the small businesses I support through Crafty Penguin, these are useful starting points for making marketing feel more focused and manageable.
What was the Marketing Mixer by Hello Social?
The Marketing Mixer was a marketing event in Chesterfield hosted by Hello Social and David Coslett. It brought together talks and discussion about marketing strategy, brand positioning, belonging, content and LinkedIn.
I always value opportunities to step away from the day-to-day work and hear other perspectives. As someone who enjoys the creative side of marketing, I found plenty to get my brain working, alongside practical reminders about the systems that support business growth.
David Coslett: Keep marketing going when business gets busy
David described a cycle that I’m sure many small business owners will recognise.
You’re busy serving customers and delivering projects, so marketing slips down the list. Eventually, enquiries slow down and you find yourself trying to generate new work under pressure. Once things pick up, marketing gets pushed aside again.
It’s an easy pattern to fall into.
His Marketing Mix provided a framework for looking at the whole customer journey through five connected stages.
Stage | Marketing focus |
The Line-up | Establish goals, understand ideal customers, organise data and define business and personal brands. |
Kick Off | Clarify the message, reach relevant people and capture leads. |
Open Play | Test activity, measure results, develop processes and nurture leads. |
End Game | Strengthen the sales process and turn conversations into customers. |
Results | Deliver a positive experience, retain customers and encourage referrals and advocacy. |
For me, this was a valuable reminder to think beyond the next piece of content.
A social post might attract someone’s attention, but what happens afterwards?
Is there a clear next step?
How is an enquiry followed up?
How do you keep in touch with someone who is interested but isn’t ready to buy?
What small businesses can take from this
Start by reviewing what happens between someone discovering your business and becoming a customer. You may already be creating useful content, but need a clearer enquiry process or more consistent follow-up. Understanding that journey can help you decide where to focus your time.
This is the kind of thinking I bring into my marketing strategy support for small businesses: understanding the goals first, then developing an achievable plan around them.
I also took away the importance of choosing a level of marketing activity that can continue during busy periods.
Jo Bird: give your business a recognisable personality
Jo Bird’s discussion about brand personality particularly resonated with me.
If your company wasa person...
How would you describe it?
What would it believe?
How would it speak?
How would people feel after spending time with it?
They sound like simple questions, but they can reveal quite a lot about how you want your business to be experienced.
Jo presented four elements of brand positioning:
Category: what do you sell?
Client: who are your people?
Core belief: why does the business exist beyond making a profit?
Character: what is the brand’s human personality?
Category and client help people understand the offering and its relevance. Core belief and character give them a story to connect with.
I found this a useful way to bring together the strategic and creative sides of branding.
How brand personality helps small business marketing
A clear personality gives you something to refer back to when writing a website page, creating a social post or responding to a customer.
Would your business say that?
Does the image feel right?
Does the experience reflect the character you want people to recognise?
For a small business, this can make content decisions easier and help communication feel more consistent. It also gives direction to the visual side of the brand, something I consider through my branding and graphic design services.
A useful exercise is to choose three words that describe your business’s personality, then review whether those characteristics come through in your content and customer experience.
That’s something I’ll be exploring further in my own work.
Building belonging through people and shared beliefs
Another part of Jo’s talk that stayed with me was the idea of belonging. One of her slides invited people to become part of something the brand believed in. It made me think about why people connect with particular businesses and continue supporting them.
Those connections can develop through the people behind the company, the way customers are treated and the beliefs that show up in everyday decisions. Jo also highlighted how much more invested people become when they can see the difference they are making.
Make employees’ contributions visible
Do people in your business understand how their work helps customers?
Do they hear positive feedback? C
an they see their contribution to the company’s progress?
Sharing customer feedback, recognising contributions and involving people in achievements can help strengthen that connection.
It can also reveal useful stories for your marketing. The people doing the work often have experience and knowledge that customers would find interesting.
For a small business, that might mean explaining how a team member solved a customer’s problem or sharing the care that goes into delivering a service.
LinkedIn video in 2027: What I took from the on-stage discussion
The on-stage conversation between Adel Raslan and David Coslett gave me plenty to consider about the role video could play on LinkedIn in 2027.
David asked the questions, and I enjoyed listening to Adel’s perspective and considering how the ideas could apply to my own content.
I already enjoy photography and video, so this was an area I was particularly interested in. One of my main takeaways was to share useful expertise and experiences more consistently, without waiting for every video to feel perfectly polished. I came away seeing this as an opportunity to make the people and knowledge behind a business more visible.
LinkedIn video ideas for small businesses
Useful starting points could include:
Answering a question customers regularly ask.
Explaining how a product or service works.
Introducing a team member and their expertise.
Showing part of a process.
Sharing a practical lesson from your work.
The discussion also covered portrait video and adding captions for people watching without sound.
Looking ahead to 2027, I came away wanting to explore how video can help people become more familiar with a business and the expertise behind it. For me, that means giving each video a clear purpose and making the process achievable enough to keep going.
These were ideas prompted by the event, rather than a fixed prediction about how LinkedIn will work next year.
Create content for people who haven’t discovered you yet
The shift from social media towards “interest media” was another idea discussed during the event. The point that stayed with me was that your next customer may discover your content without already following your business. That makes clarity important. If someone encounters a single post or video, can they understand what you’re talking about and why it matters to them?
For small businesses, this is a useful prompt to create content around customer questions, common challenges and the knowledge already within the business. It also gives each piece of content a role in introducing your personality and helping people become familiar with what you do.
What I’ll apply at Crafty Penguin
The Marketing Mixer gave me fresh ideas and encouraged me to revisit the foundations of effective marketing.
The actions I want to take forward are to:
Review the full customer journey, including what happens after content generates interest.
Define brand personality clearly, so it can guide language, visuals and behaviour.
Make people and their impact more visible, through useful stories and customer experiences.
Build an achievable video routine, focused on sharing expertise.
Protect time for consistent marketing, including during busy periods.
These are conversations I can bring into my work with small businesses through Crafty Penguin, helping them connect their marketing activity with what they want to achieve.
I found the event valuable because it gave me space to listen, reflect and connect different ideas.
My growth mindset means I’m always looking for opportunities to learn, and hearing other people’s perspectives often gives me a useful question to bring back to my own work.
I also loved hearing David’s plan to run the Marketing Mixer every six months in Chesterfield. Having that opportunity locally to keep learning and exchange ideas with other people interested in marketing would be very welcome.
Thank you to David, Jo, Adel and everyone involved for an inspiring event.
The question I’m still coming back to is: if your business were a person, what three words would describe it?
Bring your business’s personality into its marketing
At Crafty Penguin, I combine creative thinking with practical marketing support to help small businesses communicate who they are and what they offer.
If this has prompted you to think about how your business comes across, or how to make your marketing more consistent, get in touch with Crafty Penguin. I’d love to hear about your business and what you want to achieve.
If you would like to read more about David's marketing strategy he has released his first book called 'Built to Be Seen", go grab yourself a copy from Amazon.
By Louise Cranstone-Spooner ACIM| Crafty Penguin | 8 November 2026
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