6 Digital Marketing Foundations Guarantee Success

Do you find yourself struggling as a small business owner? Is success elusive, despite the money, time, and effort you’re pouring into the business? Maybe the answer to why you aren’t reaching your goals lies in your planning. Have you built your business on the right digital marketing foundations that guarantee success? Do you even know how critical these foundations are to your success? This post is an introduction to the topics covered in my Coaching Program. See how you can benefit from this program tailored to small business owners.

Even if you think you’ve built your business on strong digital marketing foundations, you might find you need to revisit that planning as the world is very different now. Consumers find products differently; they find their lifestyles and pain points shifting, and the way they communicate is vastly different today than even a few years ago. Maybe it’s time to revisit your digital marketing foundations this year as part of your yearly planning process. We’re here to help with the information you need, so read on.

A guide to building your digital marketing foundations

This image shows the top three elements in building strong digital marketing foundations. The other three, while important, rely heavily on the first three. However, the next three are similarly important, so we think strong digital marketing foundations require all six. Let’s start with a list of those foundations that are critical for achieving success:

• Know your ideal customer
• Develop a unique value proposition (USP)
• Set SMART goals
• Assess your owned digital assets
• Know which metrics are essential to monitor performance
• Shift toward “search-first” discovery with AI and GEO

Are you doing everything you can with each of these six elements?

Could you do more to align your marketing strategy with these foundations?

Let’s get into each element of your digital marketing foundations more deeply to help you assess and improve performance across these six crucial elements.

1. Know your ideal customer

Having started my journey working for the US Small Business Administration as a consultant to new and struggling small business owners, I can tell you this is one of the most misunderstood aspects of owning a small business. Yet, building your ideal customer profile is essential as it helps you:

• Focus your efforts on consumers who are most likely to become customers
• Reduce waste in your efforts and finances by targeting your ideal customer
• Match products with your ideal customer, whether you’re developing them or buying them from suppliers. This reduces waste on inventory that doesn’t move and spending on building products your target market doesn’t want.

In the pre-digital days, identifying your ideal customer wasn’t easy, resulting in customer profiles (or target markets) based on relatively superficial traits, such as age, gender, and geography. Today, for better or worse, businesses have access to a wealth of deep customer knowledge. The trick now is finding useful and accurate data without too much privacy threat and separating the noise from useful information. Here are some sources of information that might prove valuable in building a profile of your ideal customer (often termed a buyer persona).

Note in the image above, the types of data we’re interested in when building a profile:

• Demographics like age, income, lifestyle, and education
• Geography, such as population density (ie, rural versus urban), climate
• Where they get information, as well as who influences their decisions
• Pain points
• Values and beliefs
• Interests

Now we come to the thorny issue of where to get the information needed to build a customer profile, since it’s impossible to build one without data. Intuition is fine, but you really need hard data to build an accurate one.

Internal data sources are the best, most accurate source. For instance, you can use customer purchase data, which is useful for understanding your existing customers’ behaviors (including calculating customer lifetime value). By identifying who already buys from you, you’re in a better position to identify consumers more likely to buy. For instance, if your current customers are young, urban, and educated, who find themselves struggling for balance, you have insights for targeting other consumers who share these characteristics.

You can also survey your customers to get data not readily available through their buying habits. Your website is another good source of information about the folks interested enough to visit your website. Google Analytics provides a wealth of this type of data. Similarly, monitoring comments on your social media or even sponsoring small-budget advertising experiments aimed at different types of consumers provides actionable information to build a customer profile if monitored carefully.

New companies are at a disadvantage in this because they don’t have a sufficient customer base. In this case, a good substitute is to identify characteristics of the folks who buy from your competition. While this requires some assumptions (since you can’t ignore another of the digital marketing foundations – USP), by viewing the social media interactions on your competition’s pages, you can build something as an initial step.

Continuing with our discussion of secondary data sources, industry reports and independent publications, such as American Demographics, provide rich profiles of customers within certain markets.

This should be your first step in proping your business with strong digital marketing foundations. Ensure you have a complete profile before moving to the next step. Also, recognize that this profile changes over time, so always be open to reassessing your profile, paying special attention as you build your yearly marketing strategy.

2. Craft a USP

The next step in building strong digital marketing foundations is to craft a unique selling proposition. Because you know what your ideal customer looks like, you can determine how to address their pain points better than existing products. The first step in crafting a USP is understanding how competitive products fit in a matrix, called a product positioning or a perceptual map, based on criteria that factor significantly in consumer decisions, such as the one below.

Today, we can go beyond two-dimensional maps using computer technology to build multi-dimensional ones covering a variety of decision-making factors. Include the most influential decision-making factors. Don’t forget that some are related to your brand and its reputation, rather than a product attribute. For instance, shared values is a key decision-making variable for many consumers.

Similarly, we often depict competing brands with some form of graphic reflecting the relative market share owned by each one. The key to a strong USP is finding a space where you won’t compete with another brand or only compete with one with a small market share.

Some areas of this map represent impossibilities, such as creating a low-cost, high-quality product, while others represent a mixture of characteristics that don’t exist because consumers wouldn’t want them.

Once you identify a positioning that fits your capabilities and pain points identified in your ideal customer profile, you must communicate your USP effectively. That requires you to translate your product features into benefits. Thus, instead of focusing on features like available colors, focus on the benefits your product provides, such as offering a color for every home decor. Avoid generic terms that mean nothing to your ideal customer, such as “best value”.

Next, translate your USP into a short statement of who you are and what you offer. We often talk about building an elevator pitch, which involves communicating why anyone needs your products in the time it takes an elevator to reach a floor (usually 15 to 30 seconds). Build a hook to grab attention, then move on to how your product solves a particular problem (consumers buy solutions, not products), offer your USP, then ask for action.

3. Set SMART goals

Building strong digital marketing foundations involves translating strategy into action. SMART goals, which is an acronym (as you can see in the graphic above), ensure that the strategy is focused on those actions that help you reach your long and short-term goals.

With these goals in mind, your next step is to build a strategic plan. At each stage of the plan, you should ask yourself if the proposed tactic helps you reach your goals or not, eliminating actions that don’t contribute toward your goals. Every year, you must reassess your strategy, updating your goals to reflect the changing nature of your competition, internal capabilities, and the external environment, such as economic shifts.

Bonus: 3 more key elements of strong digital marketing foundations

While the first three elements of strong digital marketing foundations are keys to success, there are three more elements that should be part of your foundation to truly see your digital marketing strategy bloom. They are essential as you review your foundational strategies, should be part of your yearly market planning process, and ensure your business remains relevant and successful over time. Here some additions to your digital marketing foundations:

4. Review all owned digital assets

Your website, social media pages, email subscriber lists, and any other digital assets are a critical element for your success. Over time, changes in the external environment, your target markets, and technology require you to re-evaluate your strategies beyond the normal yearly marketing plan review. I liken this to reengineering, since it may require a significant change to your owned digital assets (your website and email marketing), to make them relevant. Here are some of the most significant changes you must adapt to:

• Websites need to change significantly as digital users no longer search the internet the way they once did. We’ll discuss this in depth later. Once visitors find your website, your job isn’t done. You must stay up-to-date by asking yourself these questions:
  • Are you keeping up with the most current website design trends?. For instance, if yours still features a homepage slider, you look old, out of touch, and unprofessional. It may be time for a complete makeover. View the homepages of your competitors and popular websites to assess whether you need to update your site.
  • Are there enhancements available from updates to your CMS (content management system) and plugins? Are you getting everything you can from these tools?
  • Assess the current visitors to your website and their customer journey through it. Are you engaging them sufficiently to encourage conversion or are they leaving before making a purchase? Do your landing pages still resonate with the “right” content to induce conversion? Have your visitors changed in a manner that requires different content?

    

  • Have you streamlined your conversion process to ensure it is smooth, with as few clicks as possible? Are you accepting all forms of payment used by today’s online shoppers?
  • Speed matters. Users are willing to wait less time for a page to load. Search engines change the impact of speed in their ranking algorithms. Do you need to reassess your hosting to speed up the delivery of your site? Should you change the way you deliver content by employing caching or using a CDN (content delivery network) to speed up your pages?
• Your social media assets aren’t under your direct control. Social media platforms develop algorithms designed to meet their goals, not yours. Users are fickle and change the way they use the platforms and which platforms they use. Have changes to the algorithms changed your reach? Are your target markets still using the same platforms that you are? Are they looking for the things you post?
• Are your email marketing campaigns still successful?
  • With changes to the way email clients such as Outlook categorize content, are your emails landing in a category rarely checked by your subscribers? How can you fix this?
  • How strong is your subscriber list? When was the last time you culled the list to remove undeliverables and those who rarely open your messages?

5. Are you measuring what matters?

Analytics and data-driven decision-making are digital marketing foundations you need consistently. However, it might be time to reassess the metrics you include in your evaluations to ensure you’re paying attention to KPIs (key performance indicators), which might have changed over time.

Without a strong analysis program, you don’t know if your budget of time and money is spent wisely. You can’t tweak your tactics to achieve better performance or better alignment with your current SMART goals.

Are you getting the most from Google Analytics and the Google Search Console? Do you find the recent updates to GA4 confusing? Have you effectively set up events to track performance on the platform? Can you design meaningful interactive reports using the tool?

6. Shifting to search-first discovery

Are you still focusing your entire search strategy on SEO keywords? If so, you’ve likely seen a 60%+ drop in organic traffic to your site. That’s because users now employ AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini to get answers either by directly querying the platform or through answer snippets included at the beginning of most search queries. These provide the answers without requiring users to visit any website.

How does this change your search strategy? Good question and here are some answers:

• SEO still matters, but it’s not enough. You need to supplement SEO with GEO (generative engine optimization) by structuring your content to make it easier for AI models to consume.
• Fresh content should focus on proving your E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority, and trust), which is the currency used by these models.
  • Add a resume section to your website that lists the accomplishments of your management team.
  • Include reviews and feedback from satisfied customers.
  • Use citations by linking to high authority website content.
  • Include case studies.
  • Use behind-the-scenes images.
  • Earn backlinks and media coverage
  • Use HTTPS protocols to establish trust.
  • Highlight awards.
• Use structured schema, headings, and lists to make your content easier to consume.
• Update your most frequently visited pages, especially landing pages, to reflect GEO tactics that focus on brand mentions in AI snippets and platforms.

Conclusion

If this post has whetted your appetite by demonstrating ways to build stronger digital marketing foundations and change foundational elements of your strategy, consider the value offered by my 12-week coaching program delivered entirely remotely.

The program is tailored for small business owners who need more direction to optimize their digital marketing. The benefits of the program are borne out by the results achieved by those participating. For instance, one client achieved over 1000% improved reach on a social media post after completing training.

If you’re more interested in a full-service consulting program or just content marketing based on these digital marketing foundations, we also offer these programs.

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our affordable coaching programs to help your business thrive into the future.