Online Marketing in 3 Easy Steps: A Roadmap to Nailing Your Digital Marketing Campaign

As a small business owner, setting up your online marketing campaign can feel daunting. After all, where do you start? How do you know what platforms to create posts for? What metrics do you need to evaluate?

In this digital marketing guide, we’ll cover these questions and more, setting you up for success in your digital marketing campaign.

Step 1: Know your audience

Knowing who to address and how may seem silly, but you’d be surprised to learn that many businesses dive in headfirst (creating content and posting online) without conducting preliminary research about their audience. These are very poor digital marketing strategies.

An annual analysis of over a thousand digital marketers found that only 42% understood the demographics of their desired audience.

And that’s highly problematic.

Because this means that most small businesses will find it challenging to tailor the content to suit the reader or viewer.

Moreover, you can’t reach everyone: making this your goal will set you up for failure.

So to start your digital marketing strategy, we highly recommend that you:

1. Analyze your pre-existing client basis to determine their average age, culture, profession, and other pertinent information.
2. Look to competitors to evaluate their clientele and the audience you hope to reach.
3. Create a persona of your target audience (write about their general demographic, personality, needs, interests, etc.).
4. Conduct what is known as a DILO (day in the life of) for your target audience. This means writing a full day’s schedule of the activities your reader or customers will likely do on a typical day.

Doing the above will set you up for success as you’ll have a clearer comprehension of who you’re writing to and how to target your posts for them. This is the foundation of an excellent digital marketing plan.

You’ll also better understand when to post and how they might resonate with content based on (1) the time of day and (2) what they’re likely busy with.

Step 2: Choose the right digital channels

Social media marketing is pertinent. But choosing the right platforms is just as crucial to having successful digital marketing campaigns. In this digital age, the wrong choice can drain you financially and consume valuable time. And reaching the correct demographics will be an elusive goal.

For example, let’s say you own a video game store, and you’ve come to understand that your primary market is those aged 18-34.

Knowing this, what platform(s) should you choose for content marketing?

Well, you’d want to base your digital marketing strategy and Google ads on three things:

1. The age/gender demographics of the platform for the social media posts.
2. How often the platform is used.
3. How much time do you have for digital marketing.

In this case, you’d want to advertise on Instagram. 2023 research shows that most Instagram users are within this age group. And over a billion Instagram users currently use the platform daily.

Now, if you feel you’ve got time for additional content marketing on another platform, in this situation, we’d highly recommend Facebook.

Facebook is overwhelmingly used by those between 25-34 and close seconded by those 18-24. And it has over 2 billion daily users going into 2023.

Repeat this thought process for any platform you’re considering. If you want to do video content, you may even want to consider TikTok.

Step 3: Assess metrics

Most social media platforms allow you to assess your digital marketing efforts to determine what works and what doesn’t. We suggest that you track these metrics for your digital campaigns (including digital ad campaigns):

1. Number of impressions: this is how many people saw content on your page. It’s possible that an exciting/humorous post could be shared among friends and family of your audience, thus increasing impressions.
2. General engagement rate: this includes things like comments, likes, shares, and others. Assessing this after posting will give you an idea of its success.
3. Click-through rate: this is how often a user sees a link within your content and clicks on it. High-quality content will have higher click-through rates.

Of course, there are other metrics you can look at, and how you can do so will vary from platform to platform.

But keeping track of these three key metrics will put you in good stead with your social media marketing efforts.

There’s more to it than digital marketing strategy

While improving your digital marketing game is essential, it’s not an “end-all.” There are many other things to consider, such as traditional marketing, search engine optimization (search engines are complex and may require the assistance of a specialist), email marketing, and so much more.

However, I hope that I’ve set you on course to developing a successful digital marketing strategy.