Lesson 1: How Your Marketing Strategy Can Really Work (2026 Update)

Adapted from Squirrly’s Expectation Marketing course. Updated November 10, 2026.

Expectation Marketing is a customer-focused strategy for providing the information people expect when they research a brand, compare options, and decide whether to buy. It connects useful content, a clear website, active communication channels, and dependable follow-through. This first lesson explains the framework and how to apply it without relying on passing platform trends.

In the digital world, there have been several trends that have come and gone. That’s why the winning companies have found a Marketing Strategy that works well regardless of the dynamic nature of the world wide web.

We see that all these changes, as well as the whole experience of the internet, have changed our customer’s behaviors. Not just online, but offline as well.

I’m talking about the immediate urge to check your phone when searching in a shop. Or browsing for a coupon online before buying a new product.

This is what the audience expects to find. The companies that monetize on this aspect use Expectation Marketing, the strategy that actually works.

This is what we’ve learned by researching brands, perfecting the strategy and applying this to our own clients. Now we’ve created this 5 lesson series, where we’ll give you the basics of identifying and applying this strategy.

What Do People Search For and What Do They Expect to Find?

Imagine this scenario. You need a new phone. So you start searching for it. And you have multiple options. Buying it from a shop online, or even from the manufacturer. You can even go to a shop, at the mall. Regardless of what option you choose, you’ll end up searching for details about the possible model you’d like to buy.

And of course the company. Especially if it’s a brand you’ve never used before, you’ll start to search for information online. This will help you make the decision on your own after you know more about the company. You’ll end up on the brand’s site to find one or more of these details:

• Details on the product
• Process information (repair, refund, support)
• Brand description
• Pricing
• Contact details in case you’ll need them in the future
• See if the brand is still around. See how active they still are on the web. (if they’re not, then that’s a very bad sign).

Here’s where good and updated content will help the phone manufacturer to get you to buy their product by offering you the right information… The key information you need to make your decision.

The truth is, if you can not find all the right details on their website, you will most certainly drop the current research you are doing and start looking at the alternatives.

In this example, we see how the expectation marketing strategy actually works. Its main principle is offering your audience the content they expect to find. They need to find it in order to reach the right decision: the decision of getting in touch with you (becoming a customer or starting a business relationship).

The research needed before a purchase varies by product, price, urgency, and risk. A quick everyday purchase and a major business investment will not follow the same timetable.

Rather than rely on the original lesson’s older retail percentages and 79-day purchase figure, investigate your own buyers’ questions. Product details, pricing, warranties, payment, support, and returns remain useful areas to check.

Expectation Marketing helps you provide those answers during the research process, however long it takes for your audience.

What Is Expectation Marketing?

Expectation Marketing is a consumer-based digital marketing strategy that focuses on the type of content and information the consumer expects to find in connection to a brand they want to buy from.

Now that we got the definition out of the way let’s focus on how it works.

Expectation Marketing is based on some premises that you can see presented in the example above as well.

The Premise:

1. Customers may search for information during a purchase decision, especially when cost, unfamiliarity, or risk makes the choice more consequential.
2. That the customer, in his journey of finding a product or service, will search for information. This is a simple assumption, that is backed up by customer behavior studies. Most customers want to know they are making an informed decision. Impulse buyers are very rare compared to buyers who plan and research.
3. That the customer has some expectation regarding the information they will want to find on the brand’s site. Some customers search for those details consciously, while others do it involuntarily. Finding the information they expect to find works well for the brand. It offers buyers a feeling of trust. They see that the brand is active on the web, it knows what it is talking about and it is interested in the evolution of the industry. Now that’s a brand you could trust.

The most important of these premises and the one that Expectation Marketing answers best is the third one. In order for the possible clients to choose your product or service, they need to find the information they are searching for.

Therefore, the expectation marketing strategy focused on creating the right content and the amount that the customers expect to see.

But enough theory, let’s see how you can put this into action.

How Does The Strategy Work?

Expectation Marketing means that you’ll focus on creating the content that answers the most frequent questions customers have. This is most of the time evergreen content. You’ll offer the information people actually need and that you can keep on reusing throughout time.

That’s why this strategy is productive and efficient. You and your marketing team will focus on creating very useful content that you can promote continuously.

Let’s take one popular product. Let’s say Coca-Cola. Now think how many times you’ve seen the same content (ad, image, video) reused in their marketing strategy? The answer is simple: several times.

Many of their Christmas campaigns revolve around the same video material.

You can do the exact same thing digitally with Expectation Marketing. You will create pieces of content in order to make sure people never forget about your brand.

Expectation Marketing is a continuing process. Some clarity improvements can help immediately, while a content library and repeat audience take time to develop. Outcomes depend on demand, distribution, product fit, and execution.

Once the workflow is in place, planning and reuse can reduce repeated effort. Research, fact-checking, updates, distribution, and replies still require ongoing ownership.

The framework is less dependent on a single platform trend, but it still needs investment and review. Customer questions, competitors, products, and discovery channels change.

My favorite part about this strategy: it helps people who are already interested in your business to gain trust regarding your brand and decide to work with you.

Meeting expectations can remove uncertainty and make a decision easier. It cannot guarantee that every interested buyer will choose you.

How Did We Learn So Much About The Expectation Marketing Strategy?

Squirrly developed the framework through its content and agency work. The original lesson described several years of applying it; that historical account explains the approach rather than setting a current company-age claim.

You can find out the details of our journey and how to apply this strategy in detail from our book : Expectation Marketing – the New Marketing System That Redefines Trust for Digital Brands.

To get a short overview of our story you have to understand that at Squirrly, we’ve always believed that good content has the greatest benefits for our community.

We’ve always focused on generating content that would both help and educate our buyers.

We’ve decided early on that in our marketing efforts we’d create content that was written with the needs and focus of the reader in mind. So we’ve always tried to answer our audience’s questions, our customer’s issues and clarify any ambiguous subject in the industry as best we could.

That’s how we soon realized that our Content Marketing strategy was different than what most SaaS companies in our industry were doing.

We created content based on :

• request in comment sections on our blog
• discussions with followers on X (formerly Twitter)
• email discussions with possible clients
• particular support challenges
• industry questions

We then pushed further and searched what others were having a problem with, in our field, and created content that answered those problems and questions as well.

Our benefits were numerous :

• It made people that heard of Squirrly, trust it as a brand. They’ve always seen that we were active. We post constantly on our blog. On all of our social media profiles, we always post and respond to comments.
• It gave us the opportunity to focus on developing and creating better products. With the information we learned from our audience, it helped us focus on creating better software. We responded to our community’s needs with content and updates. They kept writing to us because we were so active and they felt that they could really communicate with us, not just the other way around.
• We had a clear back -line for larger events. With time we’ve started creating larger marketing events, like webinars, giveaway campaigns and video launches of our products. The reason we could focus on creating the best for these events was that we had clear and constant posting schedules for our channels.
• It helped us understand our audience better. As we published content that answered people’s answers, we received a lot of feedback that helped us create content better than before. It also offered us a lot of needed feedback on our software and services.

And this is how we came to establish what Expectation Marketing is and how you can apply it to your own brand and site. Our book explains how you can start creating your own strategy for your site.

But in this series, we’ll focus on the main steps.

Conclusions

Our main focus in this article was to make you see how your marketing strategy can really work out amazingly for you. Regardless of the changes in the digital world, big brands manage to always be in the mind of their audiences. At Squirrly, we’ve learned how they do it and applied it as well. Now we’re here to teach you all about it.

We’ve talked about:

• The changing behavior of audiences online and what you can do to meet their needs.
• What Expectation Marketing is and what its core principles are
• How the strategy works and how big brands apply it
• What we’ve learned about Expectation Marketing over the last 5 years

You can also count on our services to help you create constant and clear content that answers your audience’s needs. In the next article of the series, we’ll focus more on why expectation marketing is important for your business.

Expectation Marketing in search and AI-assisted discovery

Apply the same clarity to every page a buyer might discover: identify the business, answer the question directly, and provide evidence and a useful next step. Google’s guidance for generative AI search emphasizes useful, original content and established SEO foundations. Publishing more often does not guarantee inclusion in an AI answer.

Continue the Expectation Marketing course

1. Lesson 1: How Your Marketing Strategy Can Really Work
2. Lesson 2: Why Is Expectation Marketing Important For Your Business
3. Lesson 3: How to Audit Your Site to See If You’re Doing Expectation Marketing Right
4. Lesson 4: Getting Better at Expectation Marketing, an Actionable Plan
5. Lesson 5: The Benefits and Mistakes of Applying Expectation Marketing
6. Bonus Lesson: How to Meet Customer Expectations with Amazing Content

Original lesson: Lesson 1: How Your Marketing Strategy Can Really Work.