Many business owners feel like online marketing is rocket science. They pay money they don’t always have to make the challenge of finding customers someone else’s problem. But what about those businesses that can’t afford to hire a marketing consultant? Don’t they deserve to find ways to reach new customers? You don’t need a consultant to do your marketing for you, if you’ve got time to invest and the inclination to learn. Here are the ways to take your marketing campaign into your own hands.

1. Your website should be the primary target new or existing customers, but you can also measure total visits to any location relevant to your campaigns, such as landing pages or social channels. Measuring your total number of visits will give you a “big picture” idea of how well your campaign is driving traffic.

2. Build your buyer personas.

For any marketing strategy, offline or online, you need to know who you’re marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them. Buyer personas represent your ideal customers and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business’s target audience. It’s important to note that this information should be based upon real data wherever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to take the wrong direction. To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who align with your target audience. But what kind of information should you gather for your own buyer personas to inform your digital marketing strategy? That depends on your businesses, and is likely to vary depending on whether your product is high cost or low cost.

3. Get involved in social media.

Social media isn’t a mystic language; it’s just networking. If you’ve ever attended a networking event, you can handle social media. Don’t let jargon like “retweets” and “likes” scare you off. Treat others the way you want to be treated. Ask questions. Engage. Don’t push your sales agenda. Secret Tip: Use a social media dashboard like HootSuite or SproutSocial to schedule updates to all your social platforms. You’ll save a ton of time and make it look like you’re constantly on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

4. Whether it’s email subscribers, eBook downloads, or a pure lead generation conversion, every campaign has a goal.

Once we understand how many people have visited our page in question we need to determine what percentage of them actually did what we wanted them to do in the first place. If your goal is a white paper download, and you had 1,000 visitors to the page,  and 100 of those did what you wanted them to (download a eBook, fill out a form, etc) then your conversion rate for that goal would be 10%.

Your strategy document will be very individual to your business, which is why it’s almost impossible for us to create a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy template. Remember, the purpose of your strategy document is to map out the actions you’re going to take to achieve your goal over a period of time, as long as it communicates that, then you’ve nailed the basics of creating a digital strategy.