You know you need to promote your business, but you don’t even know where to start.

You don’t know how much money to allocate to ads.

You don’t know which social media platform to use.

Your website doesn’t exist yet or is out-of-date.

And you don’t have the time or energy to put into all the marketing efforts that your business needs.

I completely understand the sense of confusion and overwhelm that can accompany looking at all the tools and options. It’s easy to feel stuck, like your business has the potential to grow, but you aren’t getting the traction you need online.

Here are some basic strategies to plan your digital marketing:

1. Define your product or service and have a sensible business model.

This may sound obvious, but if you don’t have an actual product or service to offer the world, there won’t be anything to promote. Build a solid offering to spoon-feed your audience. Throwing marketing dollars at the problem will not change the fact that you don’t have a product or a business model. While it may be true that you need to spend money to make money, you are tossing it away if you spend on marketing before your business is set up. Determining a means of recurring revenue through a high-quality product or service is the first step in any business venture.

2. Know your target market.

Understanding to whom you are marketing is the next step. Often marketers will use personas to define our audiences, which helps us envision our potential client’s worldview. What is their demographic information, what are their struggles, what are their hopes and dreams? What problem will your product solve for them? Persona work is an entire art and science in the marketing world, but to start, you can ask yourself basic questions about your ideal customer. This will help you get a sense of what your audience is looking for and how to find them.

3. Determine the right platforms to post based on where your target market “lives.”

You should be where your potential customers are. Who are they and where do they hang out online? It doesn’t help to be on all the social media platforms if your audience isn’t there. Also consider: what kind of product or service are you selling? Take advantage of the best format for your type offering. For example, B2C physical products sell on visual platforms like Instagram, while B2B services fare best on LinkedIn. If you find your audience spending significant time on a platform, it may be worth investing money in ads. Do not put all your eggs in one basket, though. Test different versions of your ads for small periods of time before spending your full budget.

4. Create the experience you’d like to give your target market.

How does your brand look and feel? Which emotions do you want to give your audience when they interact with your marketing and your product? This is the essence of branding, and it goes beyond creating a logo. While a logo may be an important image of your brand, it does not define how you interact with your clients. Augment your customer satisfaction in the long run by maintaining a unified experience for your audience.

5. Create relevant content that matches your desired experience.

At this point, you’ve already decided your brand should make people feel excited, inspired, tickled pink, or some other emotion. It’s time to put your content where your mouth is. Whether “content” is your website, blog, YouTube channel, Facebook ads, or Instagram posts, consistency of look and feel is key to gaining trust with your audience. Use the experience you want to give your audience as your north star when creating any new content.

6. Optimize content for SEO.

Take a look at the script you’re writing for your YouTube video or that blog post you’ve put together. Did you include the keywords that your persona will be searching for? If yes, great. If not, go back and include them where you can, particularly in titles, headings, and page descriptions. You don’t need to be a white hat SEO expert to make the small tweaks that improve your rankings.

7. Post consistently.

Posting multiple times per day will always drive more traffic to a site, but not all of us have the bandwidth to do so. Even consistent posts, once a week, will help your brand’s legitimacy and increase your followers, comments, and shares. The more sparse and sporadic the posts, the less likely your brand will be “legitimate” to the average visitor.

8. Follow up

The follow-up is what will make or break a brand, particularly when there are complaints about service. Savvy business owners know to face the conflict head-on with a smile—and the same principle goes for online complaints. When people are interacting positively with your brand, the follow-up is as important. Like their post and engage! The “social” in social media means you are having a conversation with someone, so do not disregard their effort to reach out.

Bonus half-step:

“Following up” also means finding the people who have interfaced with your brand in a significant way by reaching out to them directly. You should message them privately, not in the comments of your content. If they express hesitation about purchasing your product, ask them questions about why they are reluctant; this is market research gold. This is an easy outbound sales strategy for the cash-strapped business owner. This is a bonus step because it is part of the top of the sales funnel, not the marketing funnel. The difference is that these people are qualified leads, not general prospects.

Here is a quick cheat sheet I've created for you as a reference point for your digital marketing strategy: