Most people start a business to follow a passion or to turn something they’re good at into their primary income. You don’t do it to spend every evening agonising over when to post on social media so that the algorithm loves you, or learning about what search engine optimisation (SEO) actually means.
The only way to stop throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, and ultimately wasting money, is to build a solid foundation that you can move upwards from. That is exactly why crafting a digital marketing plan for small business owners is your most profitable next step.
In this guide, we’ll cover the four main pillars: setting achievable digital marketing goals for your business; identifying your target audience and creating customer personas; crafting channel-specific strategies; and measuring and adjusting the plan once you’re underway. A good plan saves you time; a great digital marketing specialist partner executes it for you.
Understanding your business goals
Making more money isn’t a strategy; it’s a wish. But to make your wish come true, you should deploy a simple and well-thought-through plan. That is strategy. Real digital marketing goals need to be specific and measurable. For example, if your overall business goal is to increase local footfall to your store, your digital goal should be to boost local search visibility or capture more email addresses to create a locally targeted promotional mailing list.
To track these goals, we set something called a key performance indicator (KPI). The important thing with these, however, is to ensure you actually understand the basics of effective KPIs so you track relevant metrics that matter to your bottom line, rather than just vanity metrics such as page views and social media reach. So, if we apply that to our earlier example, you would want to track your local search ranking for your main SEO keywords and the volume of new email subscribers that you attain each month.
It is one thing to set a goal, and another thing entirely to execute it. You do need to dedicate some resources to ensuring that you can follow through on achieving your KPIs. Take an honest look at your time. Are you able to hit these targets on your own, or would exploring full suite digital marketing services with a digital marketing specialist like me help you to supercharge your growth and let you get back to focusing on actually running your business?
Identifying your target audience
One important factor to understand early on in building a strategy is that not everybody is your customer. Shouting into the void without any specific targeting restrictions is both extremely expensive and very inefficient. As I covered in my ultimate guide to digital marketing for small businesses, laying the groundwork means narrowing your focus.
A customer persona isn’t just the ideal age or location of your buyer, but also their behaviours, fears and daily challenges. How they interact with the world is how you help them solve the problem with your product or service. Understanding these deeper behaviours allows you to truly connect with your ideal target audience. If you can rethink your customer measurement from the ground up, it means that you can build highly accurate buyer personas that speak directly to their pain points.
It boils down to the fact that if you know your audience’s challenges, it dictates how you speak to them to sell your product or service. Catering directly to these specific needs and behaviours is exactly how an organic social media strategy increases your brand authority. It makes your audience finally feel understood by a brand, and in turn develops not just trust in your products and services, but also creates advocacy, which leads to word-of-mouth marketing that money simply cannot buy.
Crafting your digital marketing strategies
Once you know who you are talking to, it leads you to find where you should be talking to them. It is a fallacy to believe you need to be on every platform, as this can chronically overstretch your already limited resources. If your customer persona is a busy professional, then LinkedIn and targeted email marketing are far better platforms to find them than TikTok. It’s about selecting the channels that align with your newly discovered audience personas and your realistic time resources.
A foundational strategy for most small businesses is to get your SEO right. This gives you a basis from which to grow organic traffic. People make tens of Google searches every day, and without a search engine optimisation strategy, you are missing out on a crucial shop window that costs little money to maintain but can prove valuable in the long run. Once you understand why SEO truly matters for small businesses, you can prioritise capturing people who are already actively searching for your services.
Creating content for SEO, like blogs and long-form website copy, takes a significant amount of specialised time. If writing isn’t your strong suit, and you often find yourself staring at a blank screen, it is probably right to ask yourself whether an SEO content writer is the fix you need. Prioritising search traffic is completely worth the effort, and the small cost to work with a dedicated writer like me, with recent Forbes data showing the vast ROI of having a strong search engine optimisation strategy for businesses that stick with it.
Measuring and adjusting your plan
One final important element to consider is that a digital marketing plan is a living document; it never remains set in stone. The worst thing you can do is to spend hours building a strategy, launch your relevant channels, and then never look at your data again. A strong strategy requires refinement.
Regularly refer to your data in Google Analytics (GA4) and your social media platform’s native insights to see where you’re making progress. Tools such as Google’s data measurement tools allow you to continuously adapt to user behaviour. Social media platforms will always shout about your post reach, clicks, and engagement. Whilst these are vanity metrics, it becomes clear very quickly which posts are more effective than others.
We track this data because it allows us to pivot when things start to go wrong and to double down on the channels that are working. For instance, regularly checking your analytics might reveal why your paid social ad campaign isn’t delivering strong results. This then allows you to tweak the audience or the creative before you waste more budget on ineffective results.
Follow the roadmap or hire a digital marketing specialist
Now, you have a clear roadmap for digital marketing success. A digital marketing plan for small business owners is about setting achievable and measurable goals, finding your target audience on its preferred channels, and tracking the data to ensure you react promptly to successes and failures.
It is hard work. Although these steps have been made clear, the execution takes both time and a steady hand. Be thorough at the outset, and you are more likely to find success. If you want to ensure your strategy is executed perfectly while you focus on running your business, partnering with a freelance digital marketing specialist like me is the best investment you can make.
