The Marketing Assistant builds a plan for selling what you grow, in four parts, rather than leaving a farmer to work out how to reach a buyer by asking around.
Most agricultural advice stops at harvest. The gap between growing something well and selling it well is where a large part of a smallholder's income is lost — not to a bad price, but to selling into the only channel anybody mentioned.
It works through what is being sold, who would buy it, how to reach them and what to say, producing something written that can be taken to a buyer, an FPO or a cooperative.
It is honest that a plan is not customers. Nothing here contacts anybody on your behalf, and no document creates a buyer. What it removes is the blank page — most people who never approach a new buyer never do so because they do not know how to begin.
It pairs with Market Prices and Mandi Price Outlook, which answer what the crop is worth and where, while this answers who to take it to.
How to use Marketing Assistant
What it is. A complete market strategy from a few inputs: candidate customer segments, positioning, the channels that actually fit your market, budget guidance, a competitive read using buyer power and rivalry, how to enter, what to do if nothing moves, and how often to look back.
When to open it. Before you spend money on marketing, and again when something has stopped working and you cannot say why.
Have ready.
What you sell and to whom.
Your market and country.
Approximate annual revenue.
Whether the business is growing or established.
Step by step.
Describe the business and the market honestly. An optimistic description produces a strategy for a business you do not have.
Enter approximate annual revenue. It is what makes the budget guidance a real number rather than a percentage.
Say whether you are growing or established. The two need opposite strategies.
Press 'Create my complete market strategy'.
Read the candidate segments first and choose one. A strategy addressed to everybody reaches nobody.
Read 'if nothing is moving' before you start, not after three months of it not moving.
Download the PDF and set the review interval it suggests.
What it will not do. It is a strategy from what you described. It does not know your competitors' actual position, your customers' real behaviour, or your market's local conditions, and it cannot execute anything. A plan is a hypothesis to test, not a result.
Every setting in Marketing Assistant, explained
What you sell, and your market
The business, in your own words. How to choose: Concretely. 'Farm equipment' and 'second-hand tractors to smallholders within 200 km' produce very different strategies, and only one of them is usable. If it is wrong: A generic strategy, which is the failure mode of every marketing tool ever built.
Approximate annual revenue
Scale, which decides what advice is realistic. How to choose: Approximate is fine. It is used to size the budget guidance. If it is wrong: Budget guidance for a business ten times your size, which is advice you cannot act on.
Growing / Established
Which stage the business is at. How to choose: Growing means acquiring customers who do not know you. Established means keeping and deepening the ones you have. If it is wrong: These call for opposite spending. Established businesses that market like growing ones spend most of their budget reaching people who already buy from them.
Candidate segments
Which group of customers to address — farmers, food companies, households, and so on. How to choose: One. Deliberately. Everything downstream — the message, the channel, the budget — follows from it. If it is wrong: Trying to address all of them produces a message specific to none, which reads to each of them as being for somebody else.
A worked example
A growing business selling to smallholder farmers.
What goes in:
Business and market described
Approximate revenue entered
Stage: growing
What comes out:
Candidate segments, with the trade-offs between them.
Clear positioning for the one chosen.
The channels that fit that market — which for smallholders is rarely the same list as for food companies.
Budget guidance at your scale.
A competitive read: buyer power, competitive rivalry.
How to enter, clear next actions, and how often to look back.
Buyer power is the part most people skip and the part that explains most stalled businesses. If your buyers are few, large and can easily switch, your margin is theirs to take whatever your marketing says — and no amount of positioning changes that.
How to read what it gives you
Segments are candidates, not a menu to take all of. Choose one and let everything follow from it.
The competitive read is structural. Buyer power and rivalry describe conditions you operate under rather than problems you can market your way out of.
'If nothing is moving' is on the page because most plans stall, and having decided in advance what that means is the difference between adjusting and thrashing.
The review interval matters. A strategy reviewed weekly is never given time to work; one never reviewed is never corrected.
What usually goes wrong
Describing the business aspirationally rather than as it is.
Choosing every segment.
Spending on channels because competitors are on them rather than because your buyers are.
Abandoning the plan before the review interval, or ignoring the review interval entirely.
Questions people ask about Marketing Assistant
How much should a small business spend on marketing?
As a share of revenue rather than as an absolute, and the share depends heavily on whether you are growing or established — growing businesses must reach people who do not know them, which is the expensive half. The budget guidance is sized against the revenue figure you enter, which is why entering it honestly matters more than entering it precisely.
Why should I choose only one customer segment?
Because the message, the channel and the budget all follow from the segment, and a message written for everybody reads to each group as though it were meant for a different one. Choosing one is what makes the rest of the strategy specific enough to act on.
What is buyer power and why does it matter?
It is how much leverage your customers have over your price — which is high when they are few, large, well-informed, and can switch easily. It explains more stalled businesses than any marketing failure does, because it is a structural condition rather than a messaging problem, and no amount of positioning changes it.
What do I do if the plan is not working?
The 'if nothing is moving' section exists for exactly that, and it is worth reading at the start rather than at the point of frustration. Deciding in advance what 'not working' looks like, and when you will judge it, is what separates adjusting the plan from abandoning it in month two.
Want to use Marketing Assistant for real, right now? Open Marketing Assistant in the Laisha app → Ten days free, no card. After that 10 US dollars a month, one price worldwide.