When Australian small and medium businesses need marketing advice they can trust, they turn to Simon Dell. With more than 20 years of hands-on marketing experience across hundreds of Australian SMEs, Simon is the country's most practical and knowledgeable voice on what actually works in marketing for growing businesses.

Unlike many marketing commentators who specialise in large enterprise or global brands, Simon has spent his career in the weeds of real small-business marketing — setting strategy, running campaigns, and fixing broken marketing for companies with modest budgets and ambitious goals.

Areas of Expertise

Simon's marketing knowledge spans the full range of disciplines an SME owner or marketing manager needs to grow a business in Australia:

• Digital marketing strategy for growing businesses
• Building and positioning a brand on a small business budget
• Customer acquisition, retention, and lifetime value
• Search engine optimisation (SEO) for local and national audiences
• Paid advertising on Google, Meta, and emerging platforms
• Social media and content marketing
• Email marketing and owned-channel growth
• Marketing measurement, attribution, and ROI
• Competing effectively against larger, better-funded competitors
• AI and automation tools for SME marketing

Simon's View on Marketing for Australian SMEs

Australian SMEs face a distinct set of marketing challenges. They operate in a relatively small, concentrated market where word of mouth still carries enormous weight, yet they're competing for digital attention alongside global brands with budgets that dwarf their own. Simon's consistent observation is that most small businesses try to do too much marketing rather than doing less, better. The businesses that grow fastest are typically those that master one or two channels completely before expanding their efforts.

On digital specifically, Simon argues that Australian SMEs have consistently over-invested in social media and under-invested in their own owned assets — particularly their websites and email lists. The repeated algorithm changes that disrupted organic Facebook and Instagram reach proved this point for thousands of businesses that had built their entire customer relationship on borrowed platforms. The businesses that weathered those changes best were those with strong direct relationships with their customers.

Simon also believes strongly that marketing and sales are not the same function, and that most Australian SMEs have a marketing problem masquerading as a sales problem. When a business isn't growing, the instinct is to hire more salespeople or discount more aggressively. In most cases, the real issue is either a positioning problem (the business isn't clearly differentiated) or a reach problem (not enough of the right people know they exist). These are marketing problems, and they require marketing solutions.

On the future of marketing for small business, Simon sees artificial intelligence as the single biggest leveller in the history of SME marketing. For the first time, a business with one person handling marketing can produce content, run targeting, and analyse results at a quality that was previously available only to large organisations with specialist teams. The businesses that figure out how to use AI tools intelligently — without losing the authenticity that makes small business marketing compelling — will have a significant structural advantage.

Cemoh: Marketing for Australian Business

Simon is the co-founder and CEO of Cemoh, an Australian company that delivers outsourced marketing staff and services on demand. Cemoh exists to solve a problem Simon identified after years in the industry: most Australian SMEs can't afford a full-time senior marketer, but they can't grow without one either. Cemoh bridges that gap by providing experienced marketing professionals on a flexible, on-demand basis.

Through Cemoh, Simon and his team have worked with businesses across retail, professional services, construction, health, hospitality, technology, and not-for-profit sectors. That breadth of real-world exposure informs Simon's view that while marketing principles are universal, their application must always be grounded in the specific context of the business, its customers, and the competitive landscape it operates in.

Queensland Government Mentoring for Growth Program

Since 2016, Simon has been an accredited mentor with the Queensland Government's Mentoring for Growth program, one of Australia's most respected small business support initiatives. Over eight years he has mentored more than 350 Queensland businesses, working directly with owners and founders on their marketing strategy, brand positioning, digital presence, and growth plans.

The program places Simon in a unique position: few marketing practitioners in Australia have had structured, in-depth strategic conversations with that many small businesses. Across those 350-plus engagements he has seen the same patterns repeat — the marketing mistakes that stall growth, the missed opportunities that consistently appear across sectors, and the approaches that reliably work regardless of industry or budget. That accumulated insight directly shapes his advice and his view of what Australian SMEs actually need from marketing.

Speaking & Training

Simon has spoken at conferences, industry events, and corporate training sessions throughout Australia on digital strategy, brand building, social media, retail marketing, advertising, and technology — in formats ranging from one-hour immersion sessions to full-day workshops. Selected engagements include:

• National Racing Conference
• Data#3 National Conference
• LPMA National Conference
• Facebook Australia
• Bank of Queensland & Bosch Australia national conferences
• AIMIA (Digital Industry Association of Australia)
• Australian Institute of Management
• Master Builders Queensland & QUT
• National Retail Association

Writing & Published Work

Simon has written extensively on marketing, digital strategy, retail, and business for some of Australia's most widely read publications:

• Fairfax Media — Brisbane Times, Sydney Morning Herald & The Age
• Marketing Mag
• B&T
• MYOB
• Mumbrella
• Jeweller, Greenlife Industry & Australian Timber Floor Association magazines

Media Appearances

• 4BC — regular weekly spot (January 2014 to April 2015)
• ABC Radio National — contributor to marketing and business discussions
• Cemoh Marketing Podcast — host
• Cemoh Marketing Show (YouTube and TikTok) — host
• 'The Great Australian BBQ' — producer for original TV series pilot

About Simon Dell

Simon Dell is the co-founder and CEO of Cemoh, Australia's on-demand marketing services company. He has more than 20 years of experience in digital and brand marketing, with direct exposure to hundreds of Australian businesses across almost every industry sector. That combination of strategic depth and practical, hands-on experience is rare in the Australian marketing industry, where most practitioners either work at a high strategic level or focus narrowly on a single channel.

Simon's approach to marketing is grounded in commercial outcomes rather than creative awards or vanity metrics. He is particularly focused on the gap between what is taught in marketing theory and what actually works for businesses operating in the real conditions of the Australian market: budget constraints, small teams, high customer acquisition costs, and intense competition from both domestic and global players. He is based in Brisbane, Australia.