Digital marketing strategy

Start with what a customer is worth

Strategy documents often begin with personas and channel descriptions. We begin with arithmetic. If an average customer brings you 400 euros of margin over two years, you can afford to pay perhaps 100 to 150 euros to win one and still grow. If they bring 40 euros, paid advertising on most platforms will be very hard to make work.

That one number, the affordable cost to acquire a customer, rules channels in and out faster than any amount of brainstorming. It also gives you a test for every campaign afterwards: is this channel producing customers below the line we set? A plan without it cannot tell you whether it is working.

Fewer channels, done properly

The most common mistake in small business marketing is breadth. A thousand euros a month split across search ads, social ads, SEO, email and a trade show buys a little of everything and enough data on nothing. After six months nobody knows what works.

We rank channels by how close their audience is to buying and how well they fit your budget. People searching for your service are closer than people scrolling social media. Existing customers are closer still. The plan usually starts with the two or three channels nearest the sale, proves them, and adds others only when there is budget and evidence to do so.

Each channel in the plan has a test, a budget, a duration and a stop rule. That way, a channel that does not perform is dropped on a set date rather than kept out of habit.