Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
Our Digital Marketing Checklist
Here’s All the GOOD Bits:
- Understand your audience and build deeper connections through smart segmentation.
- Craft a clear, purpose-led value proposition that grabs your audience’s attention.
- Choose the right marketing channels. Then, test, learn, and adapt to see what really performs.
- Optimise your site with next-gen SEO strategies like structured data and answer engine optimisation.
- Become a pro at social media marketing with interactive content and authentic community engagement.
- Deliver winning email campaigns with hyper-personalisation.
- Always track your performance with real-time data and KPIs.
In digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve is a key part of a business’s survival. And at The Good Marketer, we know how overwhelming the nuanced and dense digital landscape can feel, especially if you’re just starting out. That’s why we’ve put together a practical digital marketing checklist to help you cut through that noise and focus on what really moves the needle for your brand.
This is your go-to guide for this year.
1. Know Your Audience
Your target audience is at the heart of everything you do in marketing and the answer to how to create a digital marketing strategy. And while segmenting it down to their demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioural aspects will help you understand who the customer is and how you can better market your product, there’s a little more you can do. You need to be able to tap into their behaviours, intent, and preferences as they evolve. And they do so very fast.
You can use AI-driven customer profiling to build detailed, actionable audience personas. And then, take it even further by implementing a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to unify data across your channels and deliver that incomparable personalised experience.
Top tips on how to go about doing this are to use live-intent data platforms for social listening, which will help you uncover what your audience is talking about, what they care about, and where the gaps in your competitors’ targeting are. Spot those untapped niches, and you’re bound to connect with your ideal customer on a way more meaningful level. Just meet them where they are, in mindset and channel.
2. How to Create a Strong Value Proposition
A value proposition is nothing more than a clear summary explaining to your customers how your product or service will benefit them. In other words, it lets them know what your product/service does. So, it should be able to immediately grab the attention of your customer, communicating what you do and why it matters. This will help you increase your product awareness and percentage of sales. Knowing your value proposition will differentiate you from rival competitors, improve your market share, and improve not just the quantity but the quality of potential leads as well.
When creating your value proposition, start off by identifying your customer’s main pain points and then linking them to your product/service’s key benefits. But don’t stop there. Consumers want more. Use purpose-led messaging that reflects your brand’s values and do so by maintaining a consistent tone of voice across platforms. Weaving in honest, emotional storytelling will be the cherry on top: creating a deeper, lasting connection and impression.
3. Know Which Channels to Use
Nowadays, there are so many different marketing channels available to use, including Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Social Media, Email, and more. And while it is indeed important to choose the right mix for your business, success usually comes from adopting a test-and-learn mindset.
Winners diversify their platform mix way beyond the usual suspects. Meta, TikTok, Google, Pinterest, and even Reddit. Each offers you opportunities depending on your audience and product/service. Once you launch your campaign, run A/B tests across formats, placements, and tones to see what truly resonates with your audience.
And don’t overlook the joint power email and SMS have working together. A pinch of strategy and this hybrid funnel will drive impressive engagement and retention rates.
4. SEO Strategies to Increase Website Traffic
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is all about improving the page or site visibility and traffic through organic search results. Why? Because you do need good search results ranking to get more customers and potential leads.
But in today’s digital age, successful SEO means staying ahead of evolving technologies and user behaviour. You also have to focus on structured data and schema markup to boost rankings and attract the right traffic. And you have to prepare for the new Search Generative Experience (SGE) by creating rich, helpful content that answers users’ queries clearly and concisely.
Oh, and don’t forget that Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) for voice search and AI-powered platforms is now also a thing you’ll have to consider.
5. Know Social Media Best Practices
As of April 2025, there are 5.31 billion social media users globally, which equates to roughly 65% of the population (DataReportal, 2025). Therefore, social media marketing is an absolute must-use marketing tool for raising awareness of your brand and business.
Whichever platform suits your business, do prioritise short-form, vertical-first video. Reels, TikToks, and Shorts as these formats consistently drive reach and engagement. Conversational content should become your mantra, so use polls, AMAs, and even voice notes to spark interaction and build trust with your audience.
Social media is a dialogue. You need to respond to comments, repost user-generated content, and build genuine relationships, not just followers. HubSpot and Brandwatch are platform-native analytics that can help you track what’s working, so you refine your approach accordingly.
6. Know Email Marketing Tips
Email still remains one of the best tools there is for engaging potential and existing customers. Of course, if done right. Today, the best strategy is hyper-personalised lifecycle emails that speak directly to where your customer is in their journey.
Key email marketing best practices recommend using email monitoring and tracking tools such as Mailchimp and Klaviyo to analyse the effectiveness of your email campaigns and see which areas of the email you can improve. You can also use the platforms to set up trigger-based automation that sends the right message at the right time.
Design-wise, one of the best digital marketing tips right now is to always keep the layout mobile-first and minimal. Clean layouts, strong CTAs, and short copy perform best in the crowded inboxes.
7. Campaign Tracking Tools and Marketing Data
Although this point has been briefly mentioned earlier, being able to track your campaigns and analyse your marketing data is really important. Without knowing how many people you’ve reached and how many people have bought your goods or services, there will be no way to know how effective your marketing efforts have been. Therefore, adopting good marketing metrics and KPIs to measure your marketing performance is absolutely non-negotiable to build a data-driven strategy that aligns with business goals.
Google Analytics is your best friend in this endeavour. Set up custom events and funnels for better insights. Use real-time dashboards to keep stakeholders in the loop. And most importantly, keep track of KPIs that reflect your progress, like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and conversion rates, not just impressions and clicks.
Digital marketing is fast-moving and more personalised than it has ever been. Success comes from being agile, adaptive and knowing how to leverage smarter tools, yet never forgetting who’s at the centre of it all: your audience.
Are you ready to dive into the ocean of marketing and cut through the noise? Use this checklist to build campaigns and deliver results. And if you feel like you need a bit of extra support, don’t hesitate to contact our team. We’re your behind-the-scenes heroes.