How to market your business in 2025: 7 steps that actually work

Running your first campaigns can feel daunting. You’re trying to find the right people across the right channels—and measure fast enough to turn interest into sales. Not to mention, consumer tastes shifting by the week, which can add another layer of confusion. This guide makes it manageable. We’ll share best practices any brand can use, no matter the size — from clarifying your audience and value proposition to setting goals, building an online ad plan, shaping your channel mix, measuring what matters, and stacking quick wins. Use these clear steps to launch with confidence and keep improving week after week.

Identify your target audience

Before you start spending money you have to start with your people. The first job of any campaign is knowing exactly who you want to reach. Batch-and-blast had its moment, but digital’s granular targeting makes that approach noisy and expensive. Instead, you’ll want to sketch your likely buyers now so your message, offer, and positioning start pointed in the right direction—and your optimization has somewhere smart to begin.

To start, you’ll want to build some lean buying personas. It’s likely that you’ll have multiple audience types interested in your products, so build multiple personas. Give each of these key audience a name, one-line backstory, and a buying habit. Here’s an example of two different personas:

Young, urban professional

This person is mobile-first, follows creators, responds to social proof and free shipping, and will absolutely bounce if they see surprise fees.

Suburban, discount-driven parent

This audience member always researches on products before buying on a desktop. They scan comparison charts they love guarantees, and will timely promos tied to household needs.

Now that you have your personas you can pair this with data-backed audience trends. Work with a digital vendor that can surface high-intent audiences on and off your site using behavioral and purchasing signals. When you see patterns, map them into five or six audience types with attributes that matter: pages they visit, content they consume, devices they use, and triggers that make them act. You can use this to compare who you currently think your audience is and who’s actually converting on your site.

It’s common to have little overlap between audiences. The mobile crowd might react to creator content and short vertical video. Discount-sensitive parents may gravitate to email, search, and ads featuring other parents’ reviews. That’s your blueprint for creating ads that speak to each interested buyer, not a problem to fix.

Expert Tip: Let AI do the heavy lifting. Yesterday, you hand-built ads for every segment and tweaked them daily. Today, smart platforms can rotate creative, match products to people, and optimize in near real time. Now, you can focus on feeding clean inputs into AI—audiences, goals, and guardrails—and then review results with a clear head.

Build your unique value proposition

Your value proposition is a promise, not a poem. Think of these like informative, but easy to remember taglines for what you offer.

Template to follow:
For [target customer] who need [job to be done], our [product/service] delivers [primary benefit] because [proof or differentiator].

Draft three versions. Pressure-test them with real buyers. Do they nod? Can they repeat it back to you? If so, you’re golden. If not, trim until it sounds like the answer to a question they’d actually ask for a problem they’re trying to solve.

When crafting your value statement, it’s important to keep the message consistent but tuned slightly for each channel. For example, search and casual browsing show intent. On these channels, you can lead briefly with the problem plus payoff. Social and short video need the result in the first three seconds. Display and retargeting work best when creative mirrors a consumer’s actual behavior on your site, with price, inventory, or discounts when relevant. And finally, email and SMS handle education and FAQs with the common goal of nudging fence-sitters over the line. Craft your value to the specific goals of each of these channels.

Set SMART, individualized marketing goals

Hope is a beautiful thing, but it’s not a beautiful marketing KPI. You’ll need to identify your decisive KPIs before running your first ads. These are marketing goals that tell you if a campaign is successful or not. Without these clear goals, you’ll burn budget and have no data to build off for the future. Match KPIs to both channel and ad type so you can understand what you need to update or optimize to improve performance. Here are a few of the most common KPI categories for new campaigns:

Brand awareness

Ads aimed at increasing brand awareness are usually measured by how much they improve the total reach, number of impressions, video views, branded search velocity, and the amount of new site visitors.

Conversion

If brand recognition is less important, the number of sales might be your goal. In this category you should focus on the conversion rate, cost per conversion, return on ad spend (ROAS), customer lifetime value—basically anything that tells you if your ads convince people to take action.

ROI and efficiency

Finally, marketers should also be focused on how effective their marketing is. To understand this, look at the time to break even, revenue attribution by period, cost per lead, cost per click, and cost per thousand impressions (or CPM).

To begin building goals, a simple technique to follow is the SMART system: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound. For example, “300 first-time purchases at a $20 cost per conversion by month-end” gives your campaigns a job and a deadline.

Invest in easy-to-run, online advertising

Most marketers understand the importance of digital ads to driving conversions and retaining customers. But for many brands it was too much work. Online ads used to be manual and slow—essentially a necessary evil but one that was too hard or too much work to optimize on the fly. Now AI sets up, finds audiences, and rotates creative—so you launch fast and learn faster. If you aren’t investing in digital, now’s the time to start.

What’s different now

Unlike before, when each individual campaign required rigorous setup, many platforms can create campaigns in minutes. All you need are product images and prices from your catalog and AI will tailor messages automatically based on what people browse or cart. But not every vendor is equal in this. Choose vendors whose AI is trained on commerce signals—real intent from active shoppers—so the system knows where to bid, what to show, and how often to show it.

The importance of a commerce DSP

The best way to run online ads is to invest in a commerce-data focused DSP. A demand-side platform (DSP) lets you buy across many sites, apps, and streaming environments from one interface. For smaller teams, self-serve options are the best bet. This is because they allow you to move quickly with goal-based setup and automated optimization—no middleman required. You keep control of targeting, creative, and reporting without wait times or interference.

Unsure where to start?

Start small and then scale from there. Run one always-on campaign around your hero product or offer. Layer simple retargeting to bring window-shoppers back. Add a modest search or shopping component to catch high intent audiences. As you’re doing all this, make sure your plan reaches across the open web, social, and search—staying inside one walled garden limits who you can find and how you can measure.

Mind your budgets

During the learning phase of your ads you need to watch daily caps so you don’t over- or under-spend. This phase typically lasts a few weeks from the start of your campaigns. The right platform will pace spend and push budget away from poor performers, but you still determine what dictates success and how these platforms optimize for it.

Build campaigns that span online and offline channels

Digital marketing is certainly simple and effective, but a balanced marketing mix is key. With balance you can increase demand, capture it, and convert the undecided—managed in one place so budget flows to what works. Here are a few offline and online channels you should explore.

Online Channels

Paid search

Capture the people most likely to be interested in your brand by targeting consumers based on their search engine queries. If you’re looking to get ahead of competitors, this is a good way to make sure your brand appears ahead of them on a search page.

Paid social

Expand your reach to likely buyers based on their unique interests and behaviors. Do your research and choose the social channel that your target audience interacts with most. Then, tailor your ads to mimic the posts that appear on those channels.

Display and retargeting

This is a great way to reengage people who visited your site but left without completing a purchase. You can also run ads across the web to people who may not you’re your brand yet but would likely be interested based on their online behavior.

Connected TV (CTV)

This is one of the fastest growing advertising platforms and allows brands to reach consumers with targeted ads across streaming services and smart TVs.

Retail media

Reach shoppers who are very interested in specific products or industry by advertising your products within specific retailer websites. This is really strong when paired with promotions or launches.

Offline Channels

Local sponsorships

Put your name on community events or local teams to build recognition and earn brand affinity within the community that your stores are located.

Direct mail

Send targeted postcards, catalogs, or letters with a clear offer to drive website visits or in-store redemptions you can track with a code.

Pop-ups and in-store events

Create a limited-time experience that generates foot traffic, email signups, and content within your physical store. You can use these events to drive in-store sales or push people to your website.

Print ads

Place simple, benefit-led ads in local newspapers or magazines to reach buyers in specific locations or with specific interests. While not print, radio ads typically fall into a similar category of traditional advertising.

Out-of-home

This just means things you see outside like ads on billboards, buses, and Times Square. For these, use high-frequency visuals along commuter routes to boost awareness and prime future search and site visits.

Tie offline to digital

Lastly, try to tie your offline and online efforts together. Do this by using a QR code on fliers, postcards, signs, and in-store that leads to an offer page. Measure the lift in site visitors, then retarget to bring them back to purchase.

Measure like your campaigns depend on it
(because they do)

Measurement is one of the hardest things to start from scratch. To help in the beginning, make sure you keep your SMART marketing KPIs in mind. Your goal is to find the simplest way to measure whether you’re meeting these KPIs.

Some search engines offer popular web analytics platforms that help you track your website performance metrics easily. Paid search and native social companies have their own platforms that you can manage natively from there. And your DSP’s have reporting for cross-channel, placement-level results that show which sites, apps, and formats actually earn your budget. Measurement platforms can start to pile up, though. So, try to find a marketing solution that houses cross-channel measurement under one roof.

Once your campaigns are up and running for a while, start looking at how you can optimize. Fund the audiences and placements beating your targets; cap or pause the rest. Refresh creative every two to four weeks to avoid fatigue while keeping winners live. Better yet, look for a vendor that can create new ads for you with the help of AI. If you’re A/B testing, just do one variable at a time so you know what’s making a difference.

Measurement is a place where you can be a bit ruthless in your decision making. A few weeks of data is enough. If something isn’t working, cut it and try something else. Most platforms will sunset poor performers on their own so the risk to try new things is relatively low.

Bonus: Build your business from the ground up

Are you launching from scratch? Start with high-leverage moves and let automation do the heavy lifting. Here are a few quick things should implement:

Claim and optimize listings

Secure your Google Business Profile, Yelp, and key directories; add current photos, hours, categories, and a short benefit-led description.

Ship a simple, fast site

Create one clear product or service page with a strong headline, proof (reviews or guarantees), and a friction-free checkout or lead form.

Begin with one always-on campaign

Point it at your hero product or offer with automatic placements and a conservative daily cap while the system learns. Once this is up and running, scale your efforts from there with new campaigns.

Batch content creation

Film one short demo or founder intro and cut it into multiple clips for social, ads, and your product page.

Set up retargeting campaigns as quickly as possible

Building audiences can be hard but maintaining them is easier. Bring back window shoppers on your site with retargeting campaigns that speak directly to products they viewed or actions they took. These are also easy to automate from day one.

Collect emails everywhere

Use QR codes at events and ins- Build in pop-ups on your site to grab information, and layer in post-purchase email opt-ins that incentivize customers with things like shipping updates.

Turn customers into marketers

Build review requests into your post-purchase marketing efforts. Offer discounts, free delivery, or special products for people who give you new referrals. This is a great way to build loyalty with customers.

Putting it all together

Marketing that works is simple, repeatable, and honest about results. Know your audience, state a clear promise, set SMART goals, and use online ads to find buyers quickly with personalization at scale. Balance the mix across channels, measure what matters, and let AI handle the busywork so you can focus on decisions. When your partner can launch fast, reach across the open web and major platforms, and report down to the placement, you get the clarity to invest with confidence.

Ready to grow? Explore performance campaigns that give you cross-channel reach, transparent reporting, and optimization that keeps your budget focused where it performs.