Digital marketing. It’s not easy and it’s getting harder, especially for small businesses and startups with limited marketing funds.

But the Pareto Principle is here to the rescue. Plan 20% of efforts that result in 80% of your outcomes. Then rinse and repeat.

And here is a framework to help you prioritize your marketing efforts.

It’s called the RACE framework, which stands for:

• Reach
• Act
• Convert
• Engage

Stop waiting for the next marketing bubble

As technology advances causing marketing channels to evolve and new ones emerge, it is too easy for small businesses and startups with limited marketing funds to skip the planning and just focus on implementation.

But this leads to a Feast-and-Famine cycle, where as soon as the marketing channels start to saturate, businesses are left waiting for the next marketing bubble, something that is not under their control and is highly speculative.

I think it’s OK to take advantage of marketing bubbles, but not to completely rely on them to promote your business.

Start planning your digital marketing RACE

A popular quote circulating on the internet attributed to Albert Einstein says “if I had one hour to solve a problem my life depended on, I would spend 55 minutes understanding the problem, and 5 minutes solving it.”

And here is my interpretation: **Even a really smart person would probably end up spending most of the time defining a critical problem rather than solving it.**

Don’t half-ass defining the problem. I often hear, things like “we need more traffic” or “we need more sales” or “we need more calls.”

The real problem is:

• How are we going to get more traffic, sales, and calls?
• What is the ideal website visitor or call?
• How many? What if we don’t get many?
• What have you tried? Why didn’t it work?
• What are your competitors doing to get more traffic, sales, calls? Do you have the resources to do the same?
• What do your competitors have that you don’t? Do we need to overcome that to reach our objectives?

Digital marketing problems are critical business problems because if you cannot reach your audience, make them take action, convert them into customers, and keep them engaged with your business, your competitors will make it hard to keep your business afloat.

Overwhelmed? The journey of a thousand miles…

You can skip the planning and hope for success on a weak foundation, or you can start planning one step at a time while building a strong foundation.

How to prioritize your digital marketing efforts to make progress one step at a time

The first step is planning your RACE.

Start by taking a good look at your business through the SOSTAC marketing model

• Situation – where are we now?
• Strategy – how do we get there?
• Tactics – how exactly do we get there?
• Action – what’s the plan?
• Control – how do we keep track of progress?

Once you have a clear understanding of the problem, you are ready to RACE.

Start from the top:

• Reach – How will you attract the right audience?
• Action – What action must they complete to become an audience member?
• Convert – How do they become a customer, client, patient, etc?
• Engage – How will they continue to interact with your business and advocate

Go back to the first step and optimize.

Summary

Start by planning your RACE one step at a time.

Then focus on reaching the right audience.

When you notice the right audience is not taking action to become an audience member, start to focus on fixing this.

Then when you are confident you can build an audience, figure out how to convert them into a customer, client, patient, etc.

Then when your client base starts to grow, figure out ways to keep them engaged with your business

Go back to the first step and optimize.