Here’s what you actually need to sort out before you spend another dollar on digital marketing.
Who you’re actually talking to (and where they actually hang out)
Knowing your audience is the key factor. But what does that even mean?? You’ll hear things like “our target market is women aged 25-45” which tells you basically nothing useful about how to market to them effectively. Thats a huge age gap and different ages need to be marketed differently?
The audience you think you’re targeting isn’t always the audience that’s actually buying from you. I’ve seen businesses spend thousands targeting young professionals when their actual customers were mostly retirees who stumbled across them through completely different channels than they’d been focusing on.
What actually matters is understanding the problems that the audience in your business face. Solving problems for potential customers is the best way to make new ones.
Because someone searching for “best accounting software for small business” on Google is in a very different mindset than someone scrolling Instagram at lunchtime. Make sense?
Choosing the right platforms also makes a huge differnece to yoru success. If your target market is tradesmen then posting your content on linked in probabaly wont help.
If you are targeting older people then tiktok isnt the best route to take. Finding who you are targeting and why is the first step.
Goals that actually mean something
Setting a goal by saying “improve marketing strategy” is so vague. The goals you set need to connect directly to your business goals, not just marketing metrics that look good on a report.
If your business goal is to increase revenue by 20%, your marketing goals should directly support that not just rack up likes and followers that don’t do anything for you.
Yeah, it’s great to have engagement and a viral clip, but if no one actually looks at your page or website, what good does it actually serve you?
Setting unrealistic goals is also a downfall. You can’t expect to rank number one on Google in 30 days for competitive keywords, and any agency that promises that is probably not being honest with you about how SEO actually works. Just saying.
Follower count means nothing if those followers never buy anything. I’d rather have 500 engaged followers who actually purchase than 10,000 followers who just double tap and scroll past without ever visiting your website. Its an old but true sayng – quality over quantity!
Where to put your money so it actually does something
Its far better to invest time and money into two channels rather than spreading thin over many. Make your content real and valuable and then post it where it matters.
The channels that work best for your business depend entirely on your specific situation your industry, your customers, your goals, your budget.
What works brilliantly for a B2B software company might be completely wrong for a local cafe. Obvious when you think about it, but people still copy what they see others doing.
Paid advertising gives you immediate results but it’s expensive and stops working the moment you stop paying.
Organic strategies like SEO and content marketing take longer to show results but they’re more sustainable long term and don’t require constant budget to maintain. Different approaches, different timelines.
Seasonal fluctuations affect different channels in different ways. Google Ads might be more expensive in Q4 for retail businesses, while social media engagement might drop during summer holidays when people are on vacation. Take these things into consideration when deciding what channels to go with.
Factor these patterns into your budget planning or you’ll get caught out.
One mistake I see constantly is businesses cutting marketing budget when things get tight, which is usually when you need marketing the most to generate revenue.
Your competitors aren’t cutting their spending, so you lose ground rapidly if you go dark. Counterintuitive but true.
How it all fits together
Don’t get stuck trying to figure everything out perfectly before you start. Get started and learn as you go. Slow motion is better than no motion.
Some of this you only learn by doing and testing. The key is starting with a solid strategy foundation rather than just randomly trying tactics because you saw them work for someone else.
Digital marketing is an ongoing powerhouse that can grow your business. Treating it as an ongoing stream rather than a one time thing is the way to go. The businesses that succeed with digital marketing long term are the ones that treat it as an ongoing process, not a one-time project.
Continuously test, learn, adjust and improve rather than setting everything up once and expecting it to work forever without changes. That’s just not how it works these days.