Where do independent businesses find marketing advice?

Most independent business owners in the UK will, at some point, feel uncertain about their marketing. Whether the business needs more enquiries, a clearer message, a better website or simply a more consistent approach, the question of where to go for guidance is one most owners face without a ready answer.

The routes available are numerous and varied. Friends with business experience, online searches, professional consultants, AI tools, YouTube, LinkedIn communities and structured support programmes all offer something. What is less clear is how business owners actually navigate these options, and which are most commonly used.

Three studies published between 2024 and 2026 provide useful data on this question: the Government’s Longitudinal Small Business Survey 2024, Worldpay’s 2025 report on how small businesses seek guidance, and the American Express Peer Power Report 2026. Together they describe a landscape in which accessibility has become the primary criterion for selecting a source of advice.

What topics do business owners seek advice about?

The Government’s Longitudinal Small Business Survey for 2024 asked non-employer businesses, those with no employees at all, which topics they had sought external information or advice about in the previous year. Not all had sought any. Among those who had, the most commonly requested topics were as follows.

Business growth led the list, cited by 34% of those who had sought advice. Marketing ranked second, at 22%, ahead of financial and accounting matters (21%), tax and National Insurance (16%) and e-commerce and technology (14%).

Two things are worth noting. First, the proportion of non-employer businesses seeking any external advice at all was limited. The smallest businesses are consistently the least likely to seek formal outside guidance, a pattern that persists across successive surveys. Second, among those who do seek it, marketing ranks second only to broad business growth questions, reflecting how central it is to the challenge of running an independent business without a sales or marketing team.

Where business owners actually turn

If marketing is a priority topic for those who do seek advice, where do business owners go when they want guidance? Worldpay’s 2025 study examined the primary sources UK business owners use for business guidance. The results are instructive.

Trusted personal contacts dominate. Ninety-three per cent of business owners said they turn to friends, family or trusted contacts when seeking guidance. This is the most available source: it requires no cost and no formal engagement, and draws on existing relationships in which the adviser already understands something about the business and its owner. The reliability and relevance of this advice will vary considerably depending on whether those individuals have any relevant experience.

AI tools have established themselves as a significant secondary source. Fifty-three per cent of business owners now use tools such as ChatGPT for business guidance, placing them marginally above YouTube (51%) and conventional search engines (47%). For a category of tool that barely existed in business use five years ago, this represents a rapid and substantial adoption.

LinkedIn (41%), Facebook and Instagram (37%) and TikTok (31%) complete the picture. Together, social and content platforms account for a considerable proportion of the sources business owners turn to. Professional advisers do not appear in the headline data as a primary source at all.

Five routes to marketing guidance

Looking across the sources business owners report using, five broad routes emerge through which independent businesses seek marketing guidance. They differ significantly in how readily available they are, and in how specific their output is to the business consulting them.

What the evidence says about peer learning

The American Express Peer Power Report 2026 found that a substantial majority of entrepreneurs attributed meaningful positive impact to peer learning. Business owners who regularly engage with peers facing similar challenges report improved decision-making, greater confidence and a stronger sense of which marketing approaches are worth pursuing. The value attributed to trusted peer conversation is clearly genuine and should not be dismissed.

The research suggests, however, that peer advice and professional advice serve different purposes rather than competing for the same role. A trusted contact can help a business owner sense-check an idea, stress-test an assumption or understand how something worked for a similar business. They cannot audit the full marketing picture of the business asking, identify the root cause of a specific conversion problem or recommend a course of action calibrated to that business’s customers, proposition and capacity.

The question is not which type of guidance is better in the abstract. It is which type is suited to the problem being addressed. General awareness of what approaches exist, what other businesses are trying and what tends to work in a given sector is well served by peer networks, content platforms and AI tools. Understanding why a particular business is not generating enough enquiries, or why its enquiries are not converting, requires knowledge of that business that those sources simply do not have.

The quality question

Access to marketing guidance has expanded considerably in recent years. A business owner can now find more marketing content, more marketing conversation and more AI-generated marketing advice than at any point in the past. Whether that expansion has improved the quality of marketing decisions being made by independent businesses is less clear.

Research from the Government’s evidence base on business support consistently finds that tailored, sustained advice produces measurably better outcomes than general information. A business receiving guidance calibrated to its actual market, customers and circumstances is more likely to make better decisions and implement them effectively than one consulting generalist sources, however numerous and accessible those sources may be.

This does not make informal sources worthless. An AI tool that generates a structured list of marketing approaches can prompt useful thinking. A YouTube explanation of how email marketing sequences work can inform a decision. A peer contact who has tried a particular advertising platform can save time and money. These sources do real work at the awareness and orientation stage. Their limitation appears when the task becomes diagnosis: understanding what specifically is holding back this business, at this stage, with these customers and this market.

What this means in practice

For most independent businesses, the decision is not between one source and another. Most business owners already use several, and there is no reason to stop. The value of peer networks, content platforms and AI tools is real, and the low cost and high accessibility make them appropriate starting points for many questions.

What the research suggests is worth being deliberate about is where different sources are used. Online content and peer conversation can support awareness, generate options and help an owner understand what other businesses are doing. When the task is understanding what is specifically preventing a particular business from generating more enquiries, converting more opportunities or making better use of its marketing resources, those sources are unlikely to be sufficient on their own.

The most effective combination appears to be accessible guidance for general awareness, supplemented by something more structured for specific problems: a regular conversation with someone who understands the business, its customers and the specific challenge being addressed. That structure might come from a marketing consultant, a business adviser, or a peer learning community in which support is oriented around the individual business rather than general marketing principles.

For owners who are currently relying primarily on informal routes, the most useful question to ask is not "Where can I find more marketing advice?" It is "How well does the advice I am already receiving understand my business?" That is the standard against which any guidance, however accessible and however well-intentioned, should be measured.