Small businesses don’t fail because they lack tools or resilience…
They also don’t fail because they’re not posting enough, not following enough trends, or not using the latest templates.
They fail because they skip the one step that sits beneath every sustainable marketing strategy: deeply understanding their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Platforms change. Algorithms evolve. Tactics rise and fall. But the fundamentals of marketing, the true foundations, don’t shift.
If you don’t know who you serve, what they value, and how your offer actually improves their life, then everything else, your content, your message, your offers, your channels, becomes noise instead of strategy.
And right now, small business owners are overwhelmed by noise.
Never in history have small business owners been bombarded with so much information.
Every day, the internet throws at you:
It’s as if you need to be:
Now learn everything about AI, just to stay relevant.
And still, despite all this activity, and the amount of free content to support business owners to grow on socials, it seems the more information we have, the worse it gets. Most small business owners feel stuck, of course, not only that but also overwhelmed.
Growth stalls, content flops, ads burn money, and clarity becomes harder, not easier.
And the reason why is activity ≠ strategy.
Most small businesses are drowning in activity and end up blaming digital marketing agencies for overpromising and delivering poor results. However, having an agency run your ads is not necessarily a strategic move for your business.
Strategy starts with marketing and business foundations, with understanding the end-to-end impact your company has on your customers’ lives.
Everything grows from the same root, your foundation.
And what is the foundation?
In simple terms, it’s the reason your business exists, the mission that drives you, the vision you’re building toward, the goals you set, and the impact you create in the lives of all your stakeholders.
Chama’s mission is to empower small business owners to grow and thrive with clarity and a strategic approach that genuinely connects them to their potential clients.
That’s why this blog, Chama Academy, goes deeper than tactics.
It weaves philosophy, behavioural science, marketing classics, and modern strategy to reveal the truth most small business owners overlook:
Marketing isn’t about reaching everyone.
Marketing is about resonating with the right someone.
That someone is your Ideal Customer Profile, your ICP.
And without a clear ICP, nothing else works.
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed, fictitious description of the company that would get the most significant value from your product or service and, in return, would provide the most value (highest revenue, best retention, lowest friction) to your company.
It focuses on company-level attributes (firmographics), not the individual people who work there (which are called Buyer Personas).
The concept of targeting the “best fit” customer has been around in business strategy for decades.
However, the formal framework of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), particularly as a distinct tool for sales and marketing alignment, became widely popularized with the rise of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and sophisticated B2B sales methodologies.
The Shift to Focus: The framework gained traction because early stage companies often waste significant resources chasing prospects who could buy, but won’t be successful customers.
The ICP was invented to provide a strategic filter.
Now that you understand the concept of ICP, let”e keep diving into our strategical content.
Marketing didn’t begin with algorithms, social media, or TikTok. It began with humans trying to understand other humans, telling stories that connect, persuade, and move people to act.
At its core, the deeper we study human behaviour and acknowledge the rapid shifts shaping our society, the clearer it becomes: marketing is also philosophical.
It’s the study of the self in relation to the other, how we see, sense, and respond to one another.
To truly understand your ICP, you must first look inward.
Your ICP becomes a mirror, revealing what your company must improve, express, or deliver in order to attract the right people, not everyone, just the ones who genuinely resonate.
This is where great thinkers become unexpectedly practical for small business owners.
Philosophers, behavioural scientists, and sociologists spent their lives decoding human behaviour, giving us insight into what drives us, what worries us, how we make decisions, and how society is reshaped in the age of Me Media, the era where attention is the new currency.
So let’s dive into a few thinkers who can help us navigate this complex moment, and explore how their ideas can strengthen your marketing strategy today.
Because marketing is connection.
And to connect, we must first earn, and hold, our audience’s attention.
Zygmunt Bauman describes our era as liquid modernity, where:
In this liquid world, small businesses with no strong foundations or strategy can make a dangerous mistake: they try to flow with the current instead of anchoring themselves to a real human.
Trends move faster than you can chase, and all the new releases, new trends, new things to do can become a full time job for a small business owner, who will be filled with activity instead of choosing what to add to their marketing plan.
Small businesses onwards get lost in vanity metrics like likes, shares and comments, instead of having a plan to make better decisions, a lot of business might have big followers but still struggling to convert.
And despite all the rapid change, our brain still responds in a way, to the same instinct impulse, even when we try to make it very rational, we are still seeking survival and pleasure.
Neuromarketing studies what the brain actually does in response to marketing, often revealing that our decisions are made by our emotional and instinctual “Old Brain” (the limbic and reptilian systems) and only then justified by our rational “New Brain” (the neocortex
Your ICP is a marketing strategy anchor for small business in a liquid marketplace, with responses that are well known. We crave attention, belonging and we are removing the risks of getting attached to something that will not help us get what we want.
1. Social Proof (The “Herd” Impulse)
2. Scarcity & Loss Aversion
3. Emotional Resonance & Brand Association
4. Visual & Sensory Triggers
Han argues that we live in a culture defined by:
People aren’t ignoring your marketing because they don’t care.
They’re ignoring it because they’re exhausted, overwhelmed by the endless stream of content uploaded every day.
Generic marketing doesn’t fail because it’s bad. It fails because it’s invisible.
It lacks connection with your ideal customer. It forgets to place the ICP, at the centre of communication. We must do it because we are serving him, not everyone that is on social media, or have money, or can buy your magnificent product.
Being strategical is being direct to who you are serving.
Only aligned, relevant messaging cuts through modern fatigue.
Some brands will spend more to increase reach, testing endlessly until they see results. But when the algorithm doesn’t cooperate, the truth becomes clear:
Without a clear strategy and the right message, no amount of boosting can guarantee connection.
That’s why small business owners must understand the non-linear funnel (the Messy Middle).
We can’t expect, by the default, conversion after a single post.
I am also not saying that this is not impossible to happen, it all depends on your base.
With so much noise, we first need to build trust, engage, connect, especially for service-based businesses.
Mapping your channels and maintaining message consistency is what helps people learn, recognise, and eventually resonate with your brand.
Simone Weil famously wrote:
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
In business, paying attention to your customer isn’t just generous, it’s strategic. The same way that when they truly connect with your brand, they participate in lives, they answer the phone, they subscribe and read emails… It’s your community.
When defining your ICP, it’s crucial to learn who they follow, what they believe, and what they engage with.
This understanding helps you choose better partners, align with the right affiliates, and make smarter decisions when creating content and designing your social media presence.
When you genuinely pay attention to your ICP:
Your ICP isn’t just a demographic, it’s a commitment to understanding what is important for them, what they read, consume, like, dislike, resonates with, how they spend money, who they admire, etc.
And in order to understand that, we have to agree that listening matters more than speaking, and that’s not just empathy, it’s also a smart sales strategy.
Every decade brings a new wave of tactics, tools, and trends.
But the fundamentals?
They haven’t shifted in a century.
Claude Hopkins, 1923:
“Advertising is salesmanship. Its principles have never changed.”
Seth Godin:
“People like us do things like this.”
Philip Kotler:
“Marketing is understanding and delivering value.”
Ries & Trout:
“Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.”
David Ogilvy:
“The customer is not a moron; she’s your wife.”
Five strategists.
Five eras.
One unshakable message:
“Marketing begins with the customer.”
So why do small business owners still struggle?
Because modern tactics look like progress. All the activities you “must” do to stay relevant:
“I posted today.”
“I boosted an ad.”
“I updated my branding.”
“I launched a new offer.”
But these are activities — not strategy.
And this leads business owners into the same reversed sequence:
Pick a platform
→ start posting
→ copy competitors
→ run ads
→ launch offers
→ then think about the customer
This sequence fails every single time.
Why?
Because strategy starts at the foundation:
understanding your customer, your value, your differentiation, and only then deciding how to communicate it.
Everything else flows from there.
The Strategy That Works Everywhere (and Always Has)
A real marketing strategy for small business always follows this order:
This is why fundamentals never fail and they’re built on human truth, not algorithmic trends.
If you are lacking in strong marketing strategy and you need support to better understand the gaps and improve what you’re already doing to identify your ICP, contact us.
