Unscripted Small Business Podcast

Strategy First: Why Small Business Marketing Fails Without Foundation

Sara Nay of Duct Tape Marketing on Customer Journeys, AI Content, and the Death of Annual Marketing Plans

Recap from the Unscripted Small Business Podcast with Jeremy Rivera

Sara Nay has spent 15 years at Duct Tape Marketing—starting as an intern and rising to CEO. In that time, she’s watched countless small businesses waste money on marketing that looks good but doesn’t convert. The problem? They skip the foundational work.

“A lot of people I interact with in the small business space have had challenges when it comes to working with other marketing solutions, whether it be agencies or contractors,” Sara explains. “We do things differently: we lead with strategy, we educate our clients along the way, we’re transparent in our reporting, and we think of them as true partnerships—not outsourced solutions.”

That strategy-first approach is what sets successful marketing apart from expensive guesswork.

The Reporting Problem Nobody Talks About

Reporting is one of the most complicated areas of small business marketing. Some businesses over-report, some under-report, and many have no idea what to track or why.

The real breakdown happens when agencies deliver impressive-sounding numbers without context. “A lot of small businesses struggle when an agency says ‘Look at all this traffic we’re getting you’ but the traffic isn’t actually relevant—those visitors aren’t ideal clients because they’re not taking action,” Sara notes.

The solution? Map metrics to every stage of the customer journey: know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, refer. At each stage, you need specific indicators showing whether people are moving forward—not just vanity metrics that feel good but don’t drive revenue.

Why Beautiful Websites Fail

One of the most common mistakes Sara sees: businesses investing thousands in gorgeous website builds that don’t convert.

“People will invest thousands of dollars on a website build. An agency or company comes in and builds something beautiful, but they don’t build something that actually speaks to an ideal target market with a specific message that identifies pain points and guides the customer journey effectively.”

Her perspective cuts through the noise: “A website should help people get to know, like, trust, and even be able to try your services and buy your services. Yes, it should look nice—that builds trust. But the content and the journey you’re guiding people on is what I would argue is the most important piece of the puzzle.”

Pretty doesn’t equal profitable.

SEO in the Age of AI: From Keywords to Questions

The SEO landscape has fundamentally shifted. Before LLMs became mainstream, optimization focused on specific keywords. Now, with AI-generated responses appearing at the top of Google searches, the game has changed.

“The priority moving forward is yes, focus on keywords, but you also need content that will help you show up in AI platforms,” Sara explains. Her team uses tools like Answer the Public to understand what questions people are actually asking—not just what keywords they’re typing.

This shift from keywords to questions requires rethinking content structure entirely. As Michael McDougald of Right Thing SEO puts it: “ChatGPT is your least trained but most popular customer support representative.”

The practical application? Structure content with FAQs, clear summaries, and direct answers to questions. Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs remain valuable for keyword research and forecasting, but they’re now just one piece of a larger puzzle that includes AI visibility.

Showing Up in AI Search Results

Getting cited by LLMs requires a multi-channel approach. Sara emphasizes thinking about both your own site and the broader ecosystem that AI tools pull from.

“LLMs are pulling from websites, but they’re also pulling from Reddit and all different sources. Really consider what sources are being pulled in from an LLM standpoint, then make it a priority to show up on as many as makes sense for you.”

But there’s a crucial caveat for small businesses with limited resources: “Sometimes people in the small business space feel they have to be on every platform, and it’s really hard to do with a small team successfully. They end up being on every platform kind of versus doing it well.”

The advice? Prioritize where you can actually make an impact rather than spreading thin across every channel.

One proven tactic: incorporating subject matter expertise through interviews. A campaign with a precast concrete wall company demonstrated this—by interviewing the founder and adding his quotes to product pages answering common questions about data center firewalls, the pages started getting cited in tools like Perplexity because they contained genuine expert insights unavailable elsewhere.

Local SEO: A Different Playbook

For local service businesses—like a regional law office—the strategy shifts significantly from national brands.

“For local service-based businesses, we go all in on local keywords, building out their Google Business Profile, optimizing it, consistently posting, and getting as many reviews as we can because all of that is really important,” Sara explains.

This stands in contrast to national B2B brands, where the focus shifts to webinars, podcast interviews, and backlinks. According to Backlinko’s local SEO research, Google Business Profile optimization remains one of the highest-impact activities for businesses serving specific geographic areas.

The key insight: everyone needs a marketing strategy, but what you recommend after that foundation is customized based on industry, location, and business goals.

The Strategy-First Process: Why Interviews Matter

At Duct Tape Marketing, every client engagement starts with a 30-45 day strategy phase: online presence review, competitive research, leadership interviews, customer interviews, and ideal client profile development.

Why the emphasis on interviews? Because that’s where the real insights live.

“We’re not just creating marketing strategy for people anymore. We’re creating marketing strategy for people AND AI,” Sara explains. “That’s where a lot of people miss with trying to create content on ChatGPT—they go to it and start producing generic stuff because they haven’t taken the time to train it properly.”

Leadership interviews capture how the business talks about itself—the stories, the passion, the differentiation. Customer interviews reveal the transformation journey: what they struggled with before, how they made their buying decision, what success looks like after.

“When people skip over those two components, that’s where they waste time, energy, and money on marketing in the long run.”

The output from these interviews becomes the foundation for training AI tools to produce content that sounds like the actual business—not generic content that anyone could create.

E-commerce vs. Service: Same Foundation, Different Execution

Whether you’re a local service provider installing stair handrails or selling those handrails via e-commerce, the foundational strategy work remains the same: online audit, competitive research, interviews, ideal client personas, core messaging.

Where things diverge is in the execution. “What we recommend for an e-commerce business versus a local service business is different even from the first stage of how people can get to know both businesses,” Sara notes.

Content strategy differs. Growth priorities differ. The execution calendar puts it all together differently based on the specific business model, industry, and scale.

The Three-Month Rule

Here’s a perspective that challenges conventional marketing wisdom: “I believe you can’t really plan for marketing further than three months at this time because it’s changing, shifting, and evolving so much.”

The Duct Tape Marketing approach works in quarterly sprints:

  • Deep dive into metrics
  • Assess what was accomplished and what results emerged
  • Evaluate whether goals were hit
  • Identify the next 4-6 growth priorities
  • Execute for the next quarter

This customer success track allows businesses to adapt as the landscape shifts rather than rigidly following an annual plan that becomes outdated within months.

Content Structure for AI Visibility

With AI tools increasingly mediating how people discover information, content structure matters as much as content substance.

“Gone are the days where you can just publish content and hope it shows up,” Sara emphasizes. “You have to be very focused on what you’re putting in the content, but also how you’re structuring it.”

That means FAQs, summaries at the beginning, clear headings, and direct answers to questions—formatting that helps both human readers and AI systems understand and surface your content.

The best advice for navigating this rapidly changing landscape? “Keep learning and keep reading and keep understanding—because what’s working today from an SEO standpoint, maybe if we have this interview in three months, we’d be saying completely different things.”

Authority Building and Co-Marketing

The question of whether backlinks still matter doesn’t have a simple answer. “I think it’s hard to know right now,” Sara admits. “Backlinks are still important. Authority building is still important.”

But the value extends beyond links. Appearing on podcasts, for example, provides exposure to new audiences regardless of the SEO impact. The relationship-building aspect of authority development often matters more than the technical link equity.

For custom home builders and other local businesses, co-marketing with complementary businesses creates a multiplier effect. Email swaps, cross-promotion, and shared audiences expand marketing reach without expanding budgets.

“If you’re a remodeling contractor, who else serves your target market? How can you co-market together? How can you do email swaps? How can you get listed on each other’s websites?” Sara asks. “It’s a great play to get exposure to an audience with little effort.”

The added benefit: providing more value to your existing audience by connecting them with trusted solutions for problems you don’t solve directly.

The Bottom Line

Small business marketing success comes down to a simple but often-ignored principle: strategy before tactics. Understanding who you’re targeting, what message resonates, and how to guide them through the customer journey matters more than any individual channel or technique.

In an era where AI is reshaping how content gets discovered and consumed, the businesses that win will be those that combine authentic expertise with smart structure—creating content that serves both human readers and the AI systems that increasingly mediate discovery.

The shortcuts don’t work anymore. The foundational work—the interviews, the journey mapping, the strategic planning—is what separates effective marketing from expensive noise.

Connect with Sara Nay

Listen to the full conversation on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast. For more interviews with marketing and SEO professionals, visit UnscriptedSEO.com.