Most businesses start their marketing efforts off incorrectly. They begin spending money, posting on social media, maybe even building an email list – before they have the foundations in place. Then six months down the line, they’re frustrated that their efforts aren’t consistently generating revenue and don’t know why.

It’s not that they aren’t working hard enough. It’s that these efforts are as effective as building a house without a foundation: no matter how beautiful the campaigns are from the outside, it makes no sense to continue pouring money into something that has no structure underneath.

Here’s what needs to be in place before you scale any marketing efforts.

Know Who You’re Talking To

This sounds simple enough, but for so many businesses, this is a challenge. Your target audience can’t be described as “small business owners” or “people who care about quality.”

Instead, you need to know the person who purchases from you. What keeps them up at night? What did they try prior to finding you? What words do they use to describe their problem? The businesses that have a lock on this project can create copy that reads like it’s looking into someone’s mind – because it is.

There’s a palpable difference everywhere. When you understand your customer inside out, your messaging gets sharpened, your targeting gets refined, and there’s no more budget wasted on people who were never going to purchase anyway. There’s also no more second-guessing every marketing decision because there’s one filter through which to pass everything: will this resonate with the person we’re talking to?

Most companies need to talk to their customers more. They’re not surveys – real conversations. The information you gain from ten thoughtful interviews with customers will be more valuable to your marketing than checking off demographic data.

Position Yourself in The Market

Positioning is when you own a specific piece of mind. It’s not your tagline; it’s not your mission statement. It’s what people automatically think of when they think of your company.

But if you’re everything to everyone, you’re nothing to anyone. The businesses who have the strongest marketing are usually the ones who have the strongest positioning. They’ve made the decision about what they want to be known for – even if that means forgoing some business.

This feels limiting – and it is. But that limitation is what makes your marketing work. When someone has a specific problem, they don’t want someone who’s a jack of all trades; they want someone who’s a master at one thing.

Good positioning also makes marketing more comfortable for creation. You know what to emphasize, what can slide and what stories are yours to tell. Everything becomes more consistent because there’s a through line.

Many businesses fall into a rut where they find their marketing isn’t penetrating the noise. A  digital marketing agency can help with positioning because business owners are too close to see where they stand themselves – they have an outsider’s perspective that helps pinpoint what differentiates you in ways that matter to customers.

Build Messaging That Bridges The Gap

Once you know your audience and position, your messaging has to help bridge the gap. This is where corporate jargon comes into play for countless businesses, sounding professional but without any substance.

People buy transformation, not features. Nobody purchases project management software; they purchase fewer missed deadlines and less chaos. Nobody purchases financial planning; they purchase peace of mind about their future.

Your main message should be able to be conveyed in one sentence but should hold enough depth to support all your marketing efforts. Everything should ladder back to that central tenet. When people receive one thing on your website, another from your ads and something entirely different from your sales team, confusion arises. Confused people do not buy.

The best way to know if your messaging works is to put it out there to real prospects and see how they respond. Do they lean in or glaze over? Do they need more than one sentence or do they get it right away? The market will tell you if your messaging works – you just have to pay attention.

Choose Your Channels

Not every channel makes sense for every business. The companies who spread themselves too thin have mediocre results everywhere instead of excellent results somewhere particular.

You want to be where your customers hang out but also where they’re open to hearing from businesses. B2B services do great on LinkedIn but likely won’t get most benefits for their local restaurant branch there. Instagram is valuable for visual products but likely won’t appeal to industrial equipment.

Identify two or three channels that make sense first for your business and go deep before expanding. A good company presence on one channel is better than a weak presence on six.

Furthermore, you want a channel in which you can maintain regular content share. A channel you only update once in a while is worse than no presence at all because it sends the message that you’re not actually paying attention or engaging.

Create Systems for Measuring What Matters

Most businesses measure the wrong things. They brag about followers and traffic to their website but fails to track whether any of it translates into revenue.

The foundations of proper measurement are basic: you need to know how much it costs to acquire a customer, how much that customer is worth and which channels ultimately get you there. Everything else is secondary.

This doesn’t require complex analytics creations. Start simple – track where leads come from, which ones convert and how much you spent getting them there. You can get advanced later – you need the fundamentals first.

The businesses that grow with predictable success over time due to marketing are those that treat marketing like it’s an investment with measurable returns – instead of an expense or creative outlet – and make decisions based on this data instead of hunches or what’s enjoyable.

Put Infrastructure in Place

Without basic infrastructure, scaling marketing will be hard to do effectively. This means having a website that converts prospects, being able to capture leads and follow up with opportunities and assessing what comes in proactively every single time.

Too many businesses create campaigns that get good traffic without any follow-through via decent websites or create leads that sit in inboxes for four days after an email marketing effort goes out. Marketing may be good – but the infrastructure isn’t there to capitalize on it.

This doesn’t need to be expensive or perfect; it just needs reliability. A basic website that articulates what you do and how someone can buy is better than too much complexity that confuses people. A basic CRM will ensure nobody falls through the cracks better than expensive automation of which you’ve set up none of the pieces correctly.

The idea is to be equipped for growth. Once marketing works, things happen quickly and those who weren’t prepared miss out while those who were capitalize.

The Bottom Line

These foundations might not be sexy – but they’re the part of marketing that nobody wants to talk about that’s the difference between businesses whose marketing efforts work and those who constantly wonder why it’s not worth it.

The good news is that once these pieces are in place, everything else becomes easier. Your campaigns work better, your messaging sticks more, your budget stretches further with less second-guessing about why nothing’s working – as plenty should be working already on their own merits.

Businesses fail at marketing because they have failures of foundations – not tactical problems. Get the foundations right, and the tactics work like they’re supposed to.