What Is Online Marketing? 12 Things Every Small Business Needs
You know you need to be "doing online marketing". Everyone tells you so. But when you sit down to work out what that actually means for your business, you get a hundred different answers, most of them from people trying to sell you one tool.
So you post on Facebook when you remember, you pay someone to "do the SEO", and you hope the phone rings. Sometimes it does. Mostly it does not, and you have no idea which bit is working.
I have spent 18 years in marketing and the last five running Optimise Your Marketing from Cromford Mills here in Derbyshire. In that time I have worked with small businesses right across the East Midlands, from farm shops to solicitors. The pattern is always the same. The businesses that win online are not doing more. They are doing the right 12 things, in the right order.
This guide explains what online marketing is in plain English, breaks it into the 12 areas every small business needs, and shows you where to start. By the end you will know exactly where your gaps are.
Not sure how your marketing measures up right now?
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Get my BIG12 scoreWhat is online marketing? A plain-English definition
Online marketing is everything you do on the internet to get found by the right people, turn them into enquiries, and keep them coming back. That is it. Your website, your Google listing, your social posts, your emails and your reviews are all part of the same job.
The mistake most owners make is treating each one as a separate project. A new website here. A social media freelancer there. A Google Ads account someone set up in 2019 and nobody has looked at since.
The numbers show why this matters. Over 90% of UK adults are online, and the vast majority search for a local business before they buy. If they cannot find you, or what they find looks tired, they move on to the next result. Usually that is your competitor in the next town.
Online marketing vs digital marketing
You will see both terms used. In practice they mean the same thing for a small business. Digital marketing is the slightly broader term and can include things like digital screens and offline tech, but for an SMB owner in Derby, Chesterfield or Nottingham the difference is irrelevant. What matters is whether it brings in customers.
Why most small business online marketing does not work
Donald Miller makes the point in Building a StoryBrand that confused customers do not buy. The same is true of confused marketing. When every channel is doing its own thing, nothing builds on anything else.
I see three problems again and again in Derbyshire businesses:
- Random acts of marketing. Activity happens when someone has time, not because it is part of a plan.
- One channel doing all the work. Usually word of mouth or a single platform. When that dries up, so does the pipeline.
- No measurement. Nobody knows which channel brought in last month's best customer, so nobody knows what to do more of.
"Small businesses rarely fail at marketing because they lack effort. They fail because the effort is scattered across a dozen things that never connect."
Stuart Baddiley, founder of Optimise Your Marketing
That is why we built the BIG12. It takes the whole of online marketing and organises it into 12 pillars, grouped into three simple goals: Get Found, Get Leads and Get Loyal.
The 12 things every small business needs for online marketing
Here is the full picture at a glance. You can read about each pillar in more depth on our 12 pillars page.
Get Found
- Website
- SEO
- Local
Get Leads
- Lead Generation
- Social Media
- AI
- Algorithms
Get Loyal
- Brand
- Influencers
- CRM
- Test and Measure
Get Found: the online marketing foundations
If people cannot find you, nothing else matters. These four pillars are the foundations, and they are where I start with almost every new client in the East Midlands.
1. Website
Your website is the only online space you fully own. It needs to load fast, work perfectly on a phone and make it obvious what you do and how to get in touch. Most visitors decide whether to stay within a few seconds.
2. SEO
Search engine optimisation is how you show up when someone types what you sell into Google. It is slow to build but it compounds. One legal sector client grew monthly website sessions by 891% once we fixed their SEO foundations.
3. Google
Your Google Business Profile is often the first thing a local customer sees, before they ever reach your website. Photos, reviews, opening hours and regular posts all affect whether you appear in the map results.
4. Local
Local marketing is about owning your patch. Location pages, local directories, local press and community links all tell Google you are the obvious choice in Matlock, Belper or wherever your customers are.
Get Leads: turning attention into enquiries
Being found is only half the job. These four pillars turn visitors and followers into people who actually pick up the phone.
5. Lead Generation
Lead generation is the system that captures interest and turns it into a conversation. Clear offers, forms that work, lead magnets and fast follow-up. Balance and Beam went from 3 to 32 enquiries a week once the system was in place.
6. Social Media
Social media builds familiarity and trust before someone is ready to buy. You do not need every platform. You need the one or two where your customers already spend time, used consistently.
7. AI
AI marketing now covers two things. Using AI tools to save time, and making sure your business shows up when customers ask ChatGPT or Google's AI for a recommendation. We recently won a new client who found us exactly that way, through a ChatGPT recommendation.
8. Algorithms
Every platform decides who sees your content. Understanding how algorithms work stops you wasting hours on posts nobody will ever see.
3 million impressions for a Derbyshire farm shop
Croots Farm Shop in Duffield reached 3 million social media impressions in a single year by working the Get Found and Get Leads pillars together, not in isolation. See how a joined-up approach to lead generation works.
Explore lead generationGet Loyal: keeping the customers you worked hard to win
Most small businesses spend nearly all their marketing effort chasing new customers. Yet keeping an existing one is far cheaper, and loyal customers spend more and refer more. These four pillars protect that value.
9. Brand
Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room. Simon Sinek's advice to start with why still holds. People buy from businesses they understand and believe in.
10. Influencers
For a local business, influencers rarely mean celebrities. They mean the respected local voices, community groups and micro creators your customers already trust. Influencer marketing borrows that trust.
11. CRM
A CRM is simply a proper record of every customer and enquiry, so nobody falls through the cracks. Follow-up is where most SMBs lose money without realising it.
12. Test and Measure
If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. Test and measure means knowing where every enquiry came from, what it cost and what to do more of next month.
Where should a small business start with online marketing?
Not with all 12 at once. Alex Hormozi talks about focusing on the one constraint that is holding the whole business back. Marketing works the same way. Fix your weakest pillar first, and the others get easier.
Here is the rough order I use with clients across Derbyshire:
| If this sounds like you | Start with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| "People cannot find us on Google" | Google and Local | Fastest route to local visibility, often within weeks |
| "We get traffic but no enquiries" | Website and Lead Generation | The leak is on the page, not in the traffic |
| "We post all the time and nothing happens" | Algorithms and Social Media | Effort without strategy is invisible |
| "Enquiries come in but do not convert" | CRM | Speed and quality of follow-up wins the sale |
| "We have no idea what is working" | Test and Measure | You cannot fix what you cannot see |
Do this today
Search for what you sell plus your town, on your phone, as if you were a customer. Note where you appear, what your Google listing looks like and how many reviews your top three competitors have. That ten-minute exercise tells you more than most marketing reports.
How online marketing fits the BIG12 framework
Everything in this guide sits inside the BIG12, the framework we use for every client. The insight behind it is simple. The 12 pillars are connected. A better website lifts your SEO. Better SEO feeds your lead generation. A proper CRM turns those leads into loyal customers, and test and measure tells you where to invest next.
That is why fixing several pillars together produces compounding results that a single fix never will. Inn Farm Dairy saw a 366% increase in daily revenue, and AEGIS Engineering grew yearly sales by 51%, because we worked across the pillars rather than on one channel.
If you want to learn the framework and apply it yourself, our BIG12 online marketing training walks you through every pillar step by step.
Find your weakest pillar in five minutes
The BIG12 Scorecard scores your business across all 12 areas and shows you exactly where to focus first.
Take the BIG12 ScorecardThe challenge is never learning. It is doing.
You now know what online marketing is and the 12 things it is made of. That puts you ahead of most of your competitors. But knowing and doing are different things, and the gap between them is where most small businesses stall.
Daniel Priestley says the businesses that grow are the ones that build systems, not the ones with the most ideas. That is what we do at Optimise Your Marketing. We take the BIG12, find your weakest pillars and fix them in focused sprints, so the work actually gets done.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on where your business stands today, book a free audit with me. It is the fastest way to turn this guide into a plan.
Book a free 90-minute audit with Stuart
We will look at your current marketing, benchmark it against the BIG12, and give you a practical set of actions to take. No sales pitch. No fluff. Just 18 years of honest advice applied to your business.
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