2025 has begun and is bringing with it a wave of new opportunities for small businesses. Those looking to take advantage of the new opportunities will need to understand digital marketing and how to run a successful marketing campaign.
In South Africa, digital penetration continues to grow steadily. This means there are more people using the Internet every year. As this trend continues, businesses have adapted to using e-commerce solutions to create convenience for their customers.
It’s estimated that the local e-commerce market will reach $7,52 billion in revenue in 2025. This emphasises the importance of marketing your business right especially in the digital world.
In this article, we look at the concept of digital marketing and how you can create your own marketing campaign.
What is Digital Marketing for Small Businesses?
Digital marketing for small businesses comes in many different forms depending on the resources the business has. Typically, small businesses will use cost-effective marketing strategies such as social media marketing, email marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) as the basics for digital marketing.
For many small businesses, their digital marketing strategies will mostly focus on helping them establish a strong online presence, engage with their target audience and drive conversions and sales.
The 7Cs of Digital Marketing
To understand digital marketing, let’s look at the 7 Cs of digital marketing which provide a framework for those looking to build successful marketing strategies.
C1 – Customer
In the digital world, the customer is king. No matter what plans you have for your company, always keep your customer in mind. Digital marketing lets you personalise campaigns, messaging and services to meet the needs of your audience.
C2 – Content
Successful digital marketing strategies involve more than just high-quality content. You need to be innovative with your content structure, update old content and stay up to date with new search algorithm changes. Additionally, you need to become knowledgeable with creating outstanding SEO content.
C3 – Context
Understanding your target audience’s broader context is important to conveying your brand message. You need to consider various factors such as buyer intent, aligning with current events and crafting and promoting content that aligns with your audience’s needs.
C4 – Community
Your customers are your community. They hold a lot of purchasing power, so you need to prioritise personal engagement. Building your community will help you establish customer connections, facilitate brand trust and loyalty and attract high-quality leads.
C5 – Convenience
Digital transformation has brought with it a lot of convenience for customers. Making things easier for your customers gives you a competitive advantage and pushes you to be constantly innovative.
With e-commerce becoming more popular, businesses are looking to use the convenience of the technology to minimise friction, improve customer service, enhance accessibility and align with your company’s value proposition.
C6 – Cohesion
Being cohesive in your digital marketing strategy is vital when promoting any business effectively. Cohesive marketing delivers services consistently, maintaining content quality and upholding brand values across all channels.
C7 – Conversion
Conversions regarding your digital marketing campaign need to be reported on and evaluated. The most important indicator for your campaign is the conversion rate. Conversions can be made up of various user actions depending on the campaign.
Now, let’s look at how you can run your own successful digital marketing campaigns.
How to Run a Digital Marketing Campaign in 2025
Here’s a little breakdown of steps you can follow to create your own digital marketing campaign.
Step 1: Define Your Campaign Goals
Outlining your campaign goals is vital to its success. The campaign goals provide you with direction and a way to measure the success of the campaign. When outlining your goals, consider the following metrics:
- Increasing website traffic
- Enhancing brand awareness
- Generating leads
- Improving customer engagement
Step 2: Identify Your Targets
Digital marketing services have made it so much easier to target audience members you want to advertise to. However, you need to know what your target audience is before you can use tools to create targeted ads.
Three tools you can leverage to research your audience are: analytics tools, surveys and social media analytics reports. The insights you get from these tools will help you find out more about your audience such as demographic, location, age and pain points.
Step 3: Market Research
When it’s time to conduct market research, you need to focus on market trends and consumer buying behaviour. Studying market trends helps you stay ahead competitively and quickly identify opportunities for innovation.
Additionally, understanding how your customers interact with your brand will allow you to optimise their experience at various touch points.
Step 4: Content Strategy
Typically, digital marketing campaigns rely on content, so you will need to develop a content strategy and calendar. Your content strategy will ensure you are consistent, produce unique content and ensure content is customised for audience engagement.
Step 5: Set Your Marketing Budget and Allocate Resources
Having a detailed budget ensures you manage your campaign costs and allocate resources effectively. Budgets also ensure there is no overspending which is important for small businesses.
Additionally, allocating your resources effectively will ensure that your campaign’s impact is maximised for better reach and engagement.
Step 6: Measure Your Campaign Outcomes
The success of your campaign depends on the measurable outcomes you laid out. Understanding and doing a deep dive into your campaign outcomes allows you to make more informed business decisions.
Also, a nice thing about measuring digital marketing campaigns is that the data is continuous, and you can track campaign performance over time.
Using these steps will ensure you can develop a comprehensive and successful digital marketing campaign.
For more information about various marketing operations, visit SME South Africa’s article that explains BTL, ABT and TTL marketing.