Digital Marketing Checklist for Small Businesses (updated for 2024)
Digital marketing is the best way for a small business to grow. Digital marketing can help you meet with possible customers in a number of different ways online.
To run successful online marketing efforts, you need to keep track of a lot of different platforms and jobs. It's easy to get turned off from what's important.
That's why we made the full digital marketing check list. Our marketing plan has all the important things you need to do to make sure you use digital marketing to its fullest to grow your business.
Thanks for reading! This list will help you learn how to use digital marketing to make your online business better.
How do I use the list for online marketing?
When you look at each item on this list by itself, you can decide which ones you need to add to your digital marketing plan.
Like any other business, yours may not need everything that is written here. Make sure you know everything on your list so you can figure out how to use it to your advantage.
Each thing on the list has a "resources to learn more" section at the end to help you do this.
Digital Marketing Basics Checklist
The first thing you should do if you are new to digital marketing is learn the basics. It is important that you know what digital marketing is and how its different parts all work together.
1. Learn what internet marketing is.
It's easy to explain what internet marketing is. If you want to sell something on the Internet, you do digital marketing. Using one or more online avenues for marketing is what this term means in a broad sense.
Website marketing, search engine marketing, pay-per-click ads, content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing are the most important ways to market online.
2. Pick the ways you want to market online
There are many ways to use digital marketing to get the word out about a product or service. There are two major groups of channels: channels for online marketing and channels for local marketing.
Choose the platforms you want to use when you plan your digital marketing effort. You don't have to use all outlets; just the ones that work for your area.
Social media marketing, search engine marketing (including SEO and PPC), and content marketing are the most popular platforms that all companies can use.
3. Get a certificate in digital marketing
This step is not required, but it is strongly suggested.
Of course, you don't need to become an expert in digital marketing to do digital marketing. But getting a digital marketing license will help you learn the right way.
Great digital marketing classes are available, both for free and for a fee. These courses can teach you the basics of online marketing and show you all the different ways you can market your brand and goods or services online.
If you own a small business, you can use what you've learned to run your own projects or better handle the digital marketing firms you hire (if you do it yourself).
If you work as an independent, the qualification can help your digital marketing case.
No matter what, getting the right training can only help your business and your own growth.
Website Marketing Checklist
Your website is the center of a digital marketing plan, so that's where you should start. Your website marketing needs to be looked at again to make sure it fits with your digital marketing goals.
4. Look over the style of your website
The first thing you should do is look over the style of your website to make sure that:
It does a good job of representing your brand – Building and supporting online brands is at the heart of digital marketing. To do this, you need a website that shows off your brand, company culture, and goal.
It loads quickly and is easy to use. Websites today should be quick and simple to use on all devices. Websites that are clean and don't have a lot of extraneous stuff on them always work best.
It clearly describes your products, services, or other offers. Remember that the main reason you have a website is to teach people about your products or services, so make sure this information is easy to find on your site.
5. Make your website's layout better
How a small business website should be set up
Optimizing and going over your website layout is one way to make sure that your website design is "right."
An optimized site layout will make sure that information is organized correctly for both users and search engines. This will lead to more organic traffic and sales, among other benefits.
6. Make your site SEO-friendly
It is necessary for any digital marketing strategy to have a website that is designed for search engines (SEO).
Search engine optimization is more than just making your website better for search engines. It's also about making it better for people who visit it.
7. Make your website more likely to lead to sales
Getting people to buy something is the main goal of any marketing effort. For each business, sales mean different things, but one thing that all of them have in common is that you need to make your website work better for them.
For instance, let's say your goal is to make more sales. So, you should work on making your product pages and checkout process better, giving people more ways to pay, keeping your website safe, and so on.
If you want to get more people to sign up for your email list, make it easy for them to do so and offer them something in return.
There are a lot of possible outcomes. It is your job to set your conversion goals and work on improving them.
8. Look at how well your website works
Everything can be tracked from start to finish, which is one of the best things about digital marketing efforts.
You can use a number of measures to figure out how well your ads and website are doing. When it comes to the website, you need to make sure:
Search Engine Optimization Checklist
SEO the best way to sell online, and it can (almost) ensure that an online business will stay open for a long time. It is hard to stay in business for a long time without SEO.
You can make more money with paid ads, but search engine traffic is what will help you grow and build your brand online.
9. Get the basics of SEO
SEO stands for "search engine optimization." This means making your website search engine friendly so that search engines can read and list your content.
With SEO, you can make your site more visible on Google and get more visitors from search engines.
Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO are the three major parts of SEO. Make sure that your website is designed for all three of these things for the best results.
10. Make sure your site is technical SEO-friendly
Technical SEO is the process of making your site work better during the search and indexing step.
This step is very important because technical SEO mistakes can hurt your efforts without you being able to figure out why
Things to check and optimize include:
11. Make sure your website is On-Page SEO-friendly
On-Page SEO Techniques
On-Page SEO is the process of making your text search engine friendly. On-page SEO methods help search engines understand what your content means and how it fits into the bigger picture. This can help your results.
Things to optimize as part of on-page SEO include:
12. Make your website SEO-friendly off-page
You can promote your website and its content on the Internet in ways that aren't on your website itself. This is called off-page SEO.
The most important off-page SEO tasks are:
Link Building –This is the process of getting links from other websites that can help your search engine ranks.
Social Media Marketing – Using social media to spread the word about your website and information.
Brand Mentions – Making your business known on the web so that it gets talked about, with or without links.
Off-page SEO is a great way to show that you are an expert, an authority, and trustworthy.
13. Do an audit of your SEO
An SEO check is something you should do to make sure your SEO is in good shape. Your website's SEO will be checked out to find out what's wrong and how to fix it.
An SEO audit can be done in a number of ways and with a number of tools, but the best way is to do it by hand.
An audit that is done by hand works better because an experienced SEO professional can give you tips based on best SEO practices and real-life experience that a tool can't.
Paid Advertising Checklist
One of the fastest ways to make sales online is to pay for ads. If your business needs to see results quickly, this is the best route for you. Until SEO and other digital marketing methods are ready to help businesses grow, optimized paid ads can bring in money and make them money.
14. Look into all of the paid advertising options
A big part of internet marketing is paid advertising. You can get your ads in front of the right people on a lot of different platforms. To get the best results, you should try out as many as you can.
The most commonly used paid advertising channels are:
Make it a point to run test ads in these networks and look at the results. Some platforms might work much better than others for your goods and services. You can only be sure if you try them all.
15. Let AI and machine learning do the work
Machine learning and AI are now used by all big ad networks to show the right ads to the people who are most likely to click on them.
It's now possible for Google Ads to automatically bid on ads and make ads that change based on keywords and other factors. To get the most out of your campaigns, you should use all of these features.
16. Run A/B tests to improve your pay-per-click ads
Continuous A/B testing is one of the most important things you can do to make your PPC ads profitable.
To keep your PPC campaigns new and useful for your users, you need to keep trying different ad messages and types, price choices, audience targeting, device targeting, and many other features. This is true for any platform.
Content Marketing Checklist
You need to be able to regularly produce high-quality content if you want SEO, paid advertising,email marketing,or social media marketing to work.That's what content marketing is all about.
17. Figure out what content marketing is.
The most important part of ANY internet marketing strategy is the content. Content is very important for the success or failure of your efforts, whether it's ads, posts, blogs, or videos.
Content marketing means making content that gets more people to your website, brings you new users, helps you make more sales, or just makes more people aware of your brand.
18. Figure out what your community wants to read.
It's not good content marketing to just put information out there for no reason. The first thing you should do is do some study to find out what kind of material and what style your audience needs.
Does it have text or video? Do they need to be told how to do something step by step? Would they like an answer to a question? Something to buy?
You can move on to the next step once you have the answers.
19. Make sure your content fits each stage of the customer journey
There are many steps in a normal marketing funnel that look like the trip of a customer, from when they search for something online to when they are ready to buy.
In order to be great at digital marketing, you need the right kind of content for each stage. A good keyword study analysis will help you do that.
20. Make an honest plan for content marketing
You need to make a plan to make this happen once you know what kind of content you need to write and for what keywords or topics.
Your content marketing plan should be based on the tools, time, and money you have access to.
One of the most expensive parts of a digital marketing strategy is good content. Instead of making a hopeful plan that you can't follow, it's better to make a plan that you can carry out.
Every piece of content you post on any form of internet marketing should be seen as useful for your business and projects.
21. Make content that is good for SEO
Writing an SEO blog is an art that you can get better at with practice and understanding. Once you've written something for organic search, you should make sure it works well for both people and search engines before you share it.
People want to read content that fits what they're looking for, and search engines want to index content that makes it easy for people to understand what it means.
Putting these two ideas together is what makes material SEO-friendly.
22. Update the information you already have
It's important for your digital marketing to keep adding new content with new themes and buzzwords, but it's not enough.
You should go back to your most important content often and make sure it's always up-to-date and useful.
By doing so, you increase your chances of:
This goes for both viewers and search engines: no one wants to read information that is out of date.
Email Marketing Checklist
Digital marketing strategies that work best build a community around their brand and a band of loyal fans. Email marketing is a great way to do this.
23. Know what email marketing is
Using email to market is still alive. Email marketing is still one of the best ways to make sales, even though social networks have become more popular.
New numbers show that there are more than 5.6 billion active email accounts, and this number keeps going up every year.
If you work in marketing, you need to know what email marketing is and how it does its job. It's not enough to just have a magazine and send out emails once a week.
To make email marketing work for your business, you need to learn how to use email channels, list segmentation, how to get people to sign up for your email list, and a lot more.
24. Make a plan for email marketing
When you do email marketing, the best thing to do is have a plan. These things should be in your strategy:
25. Make your emails work better
For every email you send, email optimization is a must. What do we mean by "email optimization"?
You can make your email marketing efforts more successful by keeping an eye on, measuring, and improving the numbers above.
Social Media Marketing Checklist
Running social media marketing efforts is a must for businesses that want to be present and future in the online world.
It's estimated that thousands of businesses make and lose money through social media marketing alone. If you want to avoid loss, you need to make sure you do it right.
It's estimated that thousands of businesses make and lose money through social media marketing alone. If you want to avoid loss, you need to make sure you do it right.
26. Make business pages on all social media sites that are available.
For your business, it's important to be on all the networks that your customers use. You can make a business account on all of the big social networks, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You should make sure that your brand name is protected and shown correctly.
You may get started with these links:
27. Make your social media pages work better
Make sure that every social page you make for your business has the information people need to learn more about you and what you have to offer.
When businesses make a Facebook page, they often forget to fill it with anything, which is a mistake. This could hurt the image of your business more than help it.
28. Get more people to follow you on social media
Proof from other people is a very useful tool for online marketers. You can build trust and get new people to follow your business this way.
People are more likely to buy names they know and trust than brands they don't know much about.
29. Regularly post new content on your social media pages
A lot of people look at the date that a page was last changed before they decide to buy something.
People will likely look for your company on Facebook and check your business page before they buy something.
If your posts are out of date or your page looks "abandoned," people may not trust you as much, which could affect their choice.
For best results, make sure you post new things on your social media pages on a regular basis.
This could be blog posts, news about your goods or services, news about your industry, studies about your industry, and so on.
30. Make a plan and approach for social media marketing
Small businesses that don't have a lot of resources may find it hard to keep their social media pages up to date while also working on other digital marketing jobs.
It's best to deal with this by making a good plan for social media marketing. You should put the following in your plan:
Because every business is different, it's important to make sure that your digital marketing fits your industry, customers, and goals. To stay ahead of the game, look over your plan often and make changes as needed.
By following this updated checklist for 2024, you'll be better equipped to navigate the dynamic world of digital marketing and position your small business for success in the years to come.
Clickbox Creative Marketing Agency is your partner in achieving unparalleled success in the digital landscape. Our comprehensive 360-degree digital marketing services are designed to propel your business to new heights. With a team of skilled experts and a deep understanding of the ever-evolving online landscape, we craft tailored strategies to optimize your online presence, engage your target audience, and drive tangible results.
From strategic planning and market research to creative content creation, search engine optimization, social media management, pay-per-click advertising, and robust analytics, we leave no stone unturned in ensuring your brand stands out in the digital sphere. With a keen eye on industry trends and a passion for innovation, we help you stay ahead of the curve, adapting and evolving your online strategy as needed.
At Clickbox Creative Marketing Agency, we believe in the power of collaboration and transparency. We work closely with you to understand your unique business goals, challenges, and aspirations. Together, we forge a path towards sustained growth and success. Trust us to be your dedicated partner in navigating the dynamic world of digital marketing, and let's embark on a journey towards a thriving online presence and a flourishing business.
John Click
Digital Marketer | SEO Copywriter | Content Strategist
Experienced digital marketer with a proven track record in creating compelling content that not only engages audiences but also drives conversions and enhances SEO visibility. My expertise extends beyond marketing strategy to crafting persuasive narratives that resonate with your target audience. I combine data-driven strategies with captivating writing to deliver measurable results, ensuring your brand shines in the digital landscape.
