It’s no secret that digital marketing has become an essential part of doing business in the 21st century. This is something that has become even more important over recent years. Especially with the emergence of AI in marketing. But for many small business owners and junior marketing teams, it can be hard to know where to start when it comes to developing a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. There’s a lot that goes into creating an effective small business digital marketing plan. From setting goals and objectives to understanding how to measure the success of your campaigns, I’ll take you through exactly what you need to do to get started.
Set Goals and Objectives
The first step in creating any successful digital marketing strategy is to set clear goals and objectives. This will help you focus on the areas that are most important for your business. Moreover, it will ensure that all your efforts are geared towards achieving those goals. When setting your goals, ask yourself questions like “what do I want my digital marketing strategy to achieve?” or “what are my main objectives?”. These questions will help you determine what type of content should be created, which channels should be used, and how much money should be invested in the strategy. As you are doing this, keep asking yourself, “So what?”. What impact will this have on your business? Importantly, this will help you reach the primary objectives that will make a positive difference to your business.
Understand Your Audience
Once you have an idea of what you want your digital marketing strategy to accomplish, it’s time to start thinking about who your target audience is. Understanding who they are, what they care about, and how they prefer to consume information will help you create content that resonates with them and leads them further down the sales funnel. To get an accurate picture of your target audience, consider conducting market research or surveys. These will help you to gain insight into their preferences and behaviours. Going back through old customer records will help with this too. You’re trying to establish commonalities with your customers. This information is vital to knowing your customer and developing a targeted marketing strategy.
Measure Performance
Finally, once your digital marketing campaign is up and running, it’s important to track its performance. You need to understand how successful your campaigns are. By measuring key metrics such as website traffic, engagement rates on social media posts, or email open rates, you can gain valuable insights into how well your campaign is performing. Then, you can make adjustments accordingly. Additionally, tracking these metrics over time will allow you identify trends in performance which can give you clues about where changes may need to be made in order for the campaign to reach its maximum potential. Measuring performance can help you avoid unnecessary spend and make certain that you’re maximising your investment in digital marketing. Furthermore, it can help you to avoid Sporadic Marketing Syndrome™, and steer you towards keeping your digital marketing consistent.
Conclusion
Developing an effective small business digital marketing strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or overwhelming; all it takes is some careful planning and preparation beforehand. By setting clear goals and objectives as well as understanding who your target audience is, coupled with measuring performance; you’ll have everything in place needed for success! With a strong digital presence established by utilising these steps above; your small business will be better positioned than ever before! Set your digital marketing strategy first then you can start focusing on AI and how this can become part of your overall marketing strategy too.
About Tracy Heatley
I’m Tracy Heatley, and I’m the author of this How To Develop A Small Business Digital Marketing Strategy blog. I’m a Chartered Marketer, with over 25 years experience in small business marketing. As well as completing strategic marketing projects for small businesses, I’m an international marketing mentor. I help small business owners to develop their marketing
strategy, marketing plans, and guide them through the implementation phase. I have an award winning podcast, which is available on all major podcast platforms, like Apple, Spotify and Amazon Audible, to name but a few. Feel free to contact me to find out more about my Better Strategy, Better Marketing and Better Networking services. There’s a tonne of free including more blogs here on my website too.
