Most Canadian small business owners I talk to have already tried something online. A Facebook page, a Google ad campaign a nephew set up, maybe a website redesign. They spent money. They are not sure what came back. So they either kept spending out of habit or stopped entirely and went back to word of mouth. Neither is a strategy.
A proper digital marketing strategy is not a list of channels. It is a decision about where your next customers will come from, how much finding them should cost, and how you will know if it is working. For a small or mid-sized business (10 to 50 people, no dedicated marketing director), that clarity is worth more than any individual tactic.
Step 1: Audit your situation before you spend a dollar
This is the step most business owners skip. They jump straight to "we need to be on Instagram" or "let's run Google Ads." The problem is that without knowing where your revenue actually comes from today, you are guessing.
Map your best customers
Pull your last 12 months of invoices. Who are your top 10 clients by revenue? What do they have in common? Geography, industry, size, how they found you? This is not a marketing exercise. It is a business one. The answer tells you who you are actually good at serving, which is the only group worth spending money to reach more of.
If you have never done this, it usually takes two hours and produces more useful information than six months of social media posts.
Measure what your marketing currently costs and returns
Add up every dollar you spent on marketing last year: ads, your website, any agency or freelancer, directories, trade shows. Then ask: how many new customers did you get, and what were they worth? If you cannot answer that, you do not have a marketing problem yet. You have a tracking problem, and it needs to be fixed before you spend anything new.
A growth & operations audit is exactly this: a structured look at what you are spending, what it is returning, and where the gaps are. It is the starting point for any serious work we do with a client.
Step 2: Define your positioning before you pick a channel
This is where most digital marketing strategies fail. Not because the ads were badly written or the website was slow. Because nobody had a clear answer to: why should someone choose you over the other three options they will Google this afternoon?
Answer the three positioning questions
Who are you for, specifically? What do you do that your competitors either cannot or choose not to do? And what does a customer lose if they go with someone else instead of you? These three questions sound simple. In my experience, most business owners need 45 minutes and a few uncomfortable pauses to answer them honestly.
The answers become the foundation of every message you put online: your website headline, your ad copy, your Google Business profile description. Without them, everything you write will sound like everyone else in your industry.
Translate your positioning into plain language
"We deliver quality service with a customer-first approach" means nothing. "We pick up and deliver your vehicle the same day, within the GTA" means something. The test is simple: could your best customer read your positioning statement and immediately think of a situation where they would call you? If not, rewrite it.
Our strategy services spend a significant amount of time here, because a clear positioning statement multiplies the effectiveness of every channel you activate after. It is not a branding exercise. It is a revenue exercise.
Step 3: Set a budget that reflects your growth ambition
There is no universal right answer, but there is a useful framework. The BDC recommends that small businesses in growth mode spend between 7% and 10% of revenue on marketing. A business that is stable and mainly wants to maintain its customer base can sit closer to 2% to 5%.
Apply the 70-20-10 rule
Once you have a total number, split it intentionally. Put 70% behind the channel or channels that already produce results for you. Put 20% behind something you are actively testing and refining. Keep 10% for genuine experiments, things you are not sure about but want to try properly.
For most SMBs I work with, the 70% bucket is either Google search ads (for businesses where people actively search for what they sell) or organic search (for businesses with a longer sales cycle). The 20% bucket is often a second channel like email or a local directory. The 10% is where you try something new without betting the quarter on it.
Separate the budget from the execution cost
Your media budget (what you pay Google or Meta to show your ads) is not the same as your total marketing cost. Add the cost of whoever manages the campaigns, writes the content, or maintains the website. Both numbers need to be in the picture before you decide what you can afford.
Step 4: Choose one or two channels and go deep
This is the step where the 70-20-10 rule becomes concrete. The mistake is not choosing the wrong channel. It is choosing five channels and funding all of them at half-effort. A $3,000/month budget spread across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, email and a blog produces mediocre results everywhere. The same budget focused on one channel produces something you can actually measure and improve.
Match the channel to how your customers actually buy
If your customers search for what you sell ("plumber near me", "employment lawyer Toronto"), Google search is almost always the right starting point. If they do not know they need you yet and you need to build awareness, paid social or content makes more sense. If you sell to businesses and the decision involves multiple people, email and LinkedIn outperform most other options.
The channel choice follows the customer journey, not your personal preference for a platform.
What the 5 main digital marketing strategies actually are
To answer a question that comes up often: the five core approaches are search engine optimization (getting found on Google without paying for each click), paid advertising (Google Ads, Meta Ads), content marketing (articles, videos and tools that attract buyers over time), email marketing (staying in contact with people who already know you), and social media marketing. Most SMBs with a limited budget and no marketing team should start with one, not all five. According to Google's Think with Google research, buyers use an average of 10 sources of information before making a purchase decision, but that does not mean you need to be present on all 10. You need to be present where the decision actually happens.
Step 5: Deploy, track, and resist the urge to change everything at once
Once you have launched, the most common mistake is adjusting too quickly. An ad campaign needs at least 60 to 90 days of data before you can draw conclusions. A blog takes six months to build organic traffic. If you change the channel, the message and the budget all at once after three weeks, you will never know what actually caused the result.
Set up basic tracking before you launch
You need to know, at minimum: how many people visited your website, how many of them did something (called, filled out a form, bought something), and which channel sent them. This does not require a complicated setup. Google's free tools cover the basics. The point is that you need the data before you spend, not after.
Decide in advance what success looks like
Before you launch anything, write down the number you are aiming for. Not "more leads." A specific number: 15 new enquiries per month, a cost per new customer below $200, a 20% increase in website contact form submissions. Without a target, every result feels ambiguous and decisions become emotional rather than factual.
Step 6: Review quarterly and scale what works
A digital marketing strategy is not a document you write once. It is a rhythm. Every quarter, you look at what the numbers say, compare them to your targets, and make one or two decisions: put more behind what is working, cut what is not, and update your test for the next 90 days.
The review meeting most SMBs never have
Most small business owners review their marketing when something goes wrong, not on a schedule. That reactive posture means problems compound for months before anyone addresses them. A 90-minute quarterly review, even just you and a spreadsheet, changes that. You look at revenue by customer source, cost per new customer by channel, and whether your positioning still matches what customers are actually asking for.
One client I worked with, a franchise network that grew from 1 to 14 locations over three years, built this review cadence from the start. It was not glamorous. It was a standing meeting, a shared dashboard, and a rule that no new channel got budget until the current one had 90 days of clean data. The result was a cost per new customer that dropped by 63% over 18 months, alongside revenue at the head office growing 111%. The discipline mattered more than any individual tactic.
FAQ
What are digital marketing strategies?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan that decides which online channels you will use to find customers, how much you will spend, and how you will measure results. Without one, you are spending money on individual tactics with no clear link to your revenue goals. The strategy comes before the tools.
What are the 5 main strategies of digital marketing?
The five core approaches are: search engine optimization (getting found on Google without paying per click), paid advertising (Google Ads, Meta Ads), content marketing (articles and videos that attract buyers), email marketing (staying in contact with existing leads and customers), and social media marketing. Most SMBs should start with one or two, not all five at once.
What is the 70-20-10 rule in digital marketing?
The 70-20-10 rule suggests putting 70% of your marketing budget behind proven channels that already produce results, 20% behind approaches you are testing and refining, and 10% on genuine experiments. For a small business with a limited budget, the most important takeaway is that most of your spending should go where results are already demonstrated, not where you hope they will appear.
How do beginners start digital marketing?
The right starting point is not choosing a channel. It is understanding who your best customers are, what they search for, and what makes you different from the competitors they will also call. Once that is clear, you pick one or two channels, set a realistic budget, and measure results after 90 days before adding anything else.
How much should a Canadian SMB spend on digital marketing?
According to the Business Development Bank of Canada, small businesses typically spend between 2% and 10% of revenue on marketing, depending on their growth stage and industry. A business trying to grow faster sits closer to 10%. The figure matters less than knowing what each dollar returns, which requires tracking from day one.
