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Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Business: A 3-Step Guide This guide will show you how to develop a digital marketing strategy for small business, step-by-step. Learn how to create a digital marketing strategy for small business, what it involves, and how a simple 3-step process can help you achieve better results. Ensure you have objectives and goals established prior to starting.Identify your objectives and goals prior to the beginning. If you’re a small business owner, then you’ve experienced this before: you’re posting on social media, running the occasional ad, writing a blog post now and then – and it doesn’t seem to be having an impact. The feeling of being ‘scattered’ is typically indicative of one thing. You don’t have a real digital marketing strategy. A pile of tactics is on your table. My particular areas of interest are at the intersection of digital marketing and technology, with a focus on how to maximize the use of AI and cloud-based solutions to help businesses create smarter online strategies. Throughout the years, I’ve helped small business owners make that random activity organized, quantifiable and most important, repeatable. This post will show you that step-by-step, on a legit project. A Real Example of a digital marketing strategy for small business. The only thing that I can recall from a memorable project, was a small service business in my local area. It was primarily “rumor” and it really was a rather familiar location on the ground. In real life, however, it had little to no visibility, but on the internet it had little to almost no visibility! They had a website that was very basic and had a social media presence, but they did not know who to target, how to measure the success of their campaigns or what they should have. Marketing was going on, it was just not making any headway. It was not a lack of effort that was the real challenge. There was no plan to link up that effort with a result. 3 Steps to Create a digital marketing strategy for small business The only thing that I can recall from a memorable project, was a small service business in my local area. It was primarily “rumor” and it really was a rather familiar location on the ground. In real life, however, it had little to no visibility, but on the internet it had little to almost no visibility! They had a website that was very basic and had a social media presence, but they did not know who to target, how to measure the success of their campaigns or what they should have. digital marketing was going on, it was just not making any headway. It was not a lack of effort that was the real challenge. There was no plan to link up that effort with a result. This is the way I went about that business, and still do to begin with today. 1. Conduct an audit to see what’s already in place. I took a few minutes to see what this site has to offer with regard to content, social interaction and how the site ranks in search engines and made a note of the most significant opportunities. More important than it sounds, you can’t fix something if you don’t check it out thoroughly. Ask yourself: 2. Determine Audience, and tailor Strategy based on real Searches. I then outlined my customer and created a content and SEO plan around what type of services they were looking to avail, not what services I was interested in writing about. Not all small businesses make it to this point. They develop content – not for what the customer wants to see. This is a breeze with a clear definition of the audience, after all, anything after that will have a purpose. 3. implement, optimize, monitor Then I was in charge of website content, aiding in page optimisations, producing useful social media content and began to monitor traffic, ranking and leads. The tracking part of that is too often overlooked by too many businesses, and it’s the essential element to make marketing a game of guesswork a game of better-over-time digital marketing. Progress in the business was slow over the next couple of months, with more organic traffic and search visibility, and steadily increasing enquiry numbers. The biggest distinction, wasn’t that it was done in a different way, but it was done in a way and you had a way to measure and track your marketing, instead of just a lot of posts and word of mouth. The most common mistake of small businesses. The one thing that I see people over and over again do wrong is attempt to go too many different directions without any sort of plan. It’s possible for a company to have social media presence, engage in some social media marketing, have a blog and do SEO simultaneously. However, when they aren’t sure exactly what they are looking for, or what they want to achieve their efforts become dashed and difficult to measure. I’m only getting the answer ‘The only answer is…’. Any strategy that you do regularly, and targeting, will be better than a shotgun approach that is targeting a bunch of platforms that you can mobilize. Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Tools: How they fit in.How does AI and Cloud come into it? Here it comes in handy because of my expertise in artificial intelligence and cloud-based solutions. They will be useful in the various stages of this process, but will not be substitutes for the following stages: Researching what your audience wants; Study campaign data; and Draft content quickly. While artificial intelligence may enable you to execute your digital marketing strategy faster, it won’t inform you of the customer you’re targeting or what the results will be that matter to your enterprise. This will still be up to you. AI and cloud tools should not be used in place of (but rather alongside) a well-defined strategy if employed effectively. If