Digital marketing that has to show up on the sales report

Digital marketing covers every place a business can reach people online: search, social, paid ads, email and your own website. That's a lot of places to spend money, and most small businesses spread a budget across all of them before they know which one brings in customers. This section is for the owner who's tired of that pattern.

We look at channels the way a finance person would. What does it cost to get a customer from here? How long does it take? What has to be true about your offer, your website and your follow-up before a channel can work at all? A Conway restaurant, a Myrtle Beach property manager and a software startup in Toronto need very different mixes, and pretending there's one playbook helps nobody.

Expect pieces on choosing channels, setting test budgets, reading platform dashboards without getting fooled by them, and deciding when to cut something that isn't paying back. We'll name the metric every time. If an article says a tactic works, it will say what it moved and how you'd check it on your own numbers.