What Can a Digital Marketing Strategist Actually Do for Your Business?

By Jim Butz, Sales and Marketing expert with over 20 years of real world experience strategizing and executing sales and marketing plans for startups, small business and nonprofit.

Most people picture a digital marketer running your Facebook page, tweaking your website, or buying you some Google Ads. Those are channels. A digital marketing strategist looks at something different: how those channels work together, and whether any of it is driving the result your business needs.

That distinction sounds small. It isn't.

What a Digital Marketing Strategist Actually Does.

Digital marketing is nothing new. Websites, social media, SEO, and paid ads have been around for a while. What's changed is AI. AI tools now pull from all your channels at once to figure out who you are and what you offer, so if those channels don't agree with each other, AI ends up misrepresenting your business instead of representing it. Coordinating digital efforts has never mattered more. That's where a digital strategist comes in: understanding the business's goals and objectives, then measuring to make sure digital efforts are actually supporting those goals.

Think of it like building an addition on your house. You could hire an electrician, then a plumber, then a contractor for the framing, and try to coordinate them yourself. Or you could hire a general contractor who builds the plan first, brings in the right specialists, and makes sure the wiring doesn't run through where the plumbing needs to go. A digital marketing strategist plays that second role for your business: building the plan, then making sure your website, ads, social media, and everything else are working off the same blueprint instead of pulling in different directions.

Where Does a Digital Marketing Strategist Start?

The first place we start is understanding the business: the model, the goals, the short-term and long-term strategy. Both from the overall business, and the current marketing goals. Then we look at current digital methodologies. Finally, the digital marketing strategist evaluates and makes sure appropriate measurements are in place so digital goals match business objectives. Channel evaluation is a key part of this process, starting with the most controllable channel: your website.

A Website Isn't a Brochure. It's a Channel.

Sail Alyosha came to me with a Google Ads campaign that was already working. Over a couple of years, the ads had driven 56% year-over-year growth. By most measures, that's a win, and most agencies would have kept running the same playbook.

But when I dug into the data and talked with the team, the ads weren't the problem. The website was. People were clicking through, landing on the site, and leaving confused about what Sail Alyosha offered. The traffic was there. The conversion wasn't.

We redesigned the website. Same ad spend, same campaigns running underneath it. Revenue went up 138%. Nobody added a new channel. We fixed the one that was quietly costing them money every time someone clicked an ad and bounced.

A Beautiful Website Can Still Fail

Captain Tony's site, at Saltwater Adventures, told a different story. It looked great. It functioned well. It got almost no traffic.

The problem wasn't design. It was clarity. The site never clearly told Google, or visitors, that Captain Tony ran fishing charters. We kept the aesthetic and rebuilt the messaging: new pages, sharper copy, a clear answer to "what does this business do." Captain Tony now ranks on page one for keywords that matter to his business, and the traffic followed.

Two clients, two opposite problems. One had traffic but no conversions. The other had a great site but no audience. Same root cause: a channel operating in isolation, disconnected from the rest of the business strategy.

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Why Digital Marketing Strategy Only Works With One Client Per Industry

Sail Alyosha and Saltwater Adventures are proof that the same patterns show up across very different businesses. Understanding a company's strategy well enough to build a real digital plan around it means I can't turn around and sell that same understanding to a competitor.

A key function of the digital marketing strategist is to position a business so that when their potential clients, prospects, customers start to address a pain point they might solve, the business is top of mind. Understanding how (and where) people search for things is a critical component for the digital marketing strategist. An example of this might be two pizza shops. One being more of a sit down restaurant and one being more of a carry out. From an overall business strategy these two companies can co-exist and probably don't think of themselves as competitors. However, for the digital marketing strategist you would be competing for the attention of the same target market (people wanting to eat out) and target audience (people who want pizza). It is why I cap my client list at one business per industry, sometimes adjusted by geography if two businesses are in the same sector but serve different markets. My clients aren't competing against each other, and I'm not competing against myself.

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Additional Areas Where A Digital Marketing Strategist can help

Handling Gaps Almost Every Business Has

After running enough Digital Strategy Blueprint sessions, one gap shows up almost every time: businesses are afraid to name who they're for, or who they want their customers to be. Businesses tend to cast the widest net possible so they don't lose out on business.

The fear makes sense. Owners worry that calling out a specific audience will turn away everyone else. In practice, it does the opposite. Specificity helps a reader frame up what you do in their head. It does the same thing for Google and AI search tools trying to figure out who to show your business to. Clarity on your target audience is good, and it gives you a way to break through some of the digital noise. It doesn't mean you can't serve or take other business outside of that target audience.

I see this miss over and over, and it's one of the simplest fixes with one of the biggest payoffs.

Focusing Beyond Vanity Metrics That Trip Up Almost Everyone

I came into digital marketing from sales, after years running a retail store and then working with nonprofits and their data systems. Watching the sales process shift, with most buyers researching online long before they ever talk to a person, made the move to digital marketing feel less like a career change and more like staying ahead of where the work was already heading. That sales background shapes how I work today: everything has to tie back to revenue. I still find, in 2026, that most digital marketing efforts don't, or the business can't tell if it's tying back to revenue.

Website traffic is the classic one. It feels good to watch the number climb. I've had clients get excited about rising traffic, right up until we looked at what that traffic was actually doing: how many visitors turned into leads, how many leads turned into customers.

Sometimes the answer was "not many," because the site wasn't structured to convert. We made changes. For one client, total traffic actually dropped afterward. That was fine. The traffic that remained converted, because it was the right people instead of just more people.

Pushing Back When Needed

A few prospective clients have come to me wanting to start with social media. In some cases I've talked them out of it. Why? Because after listening to their business goals, social media was not going to address those needs right away.

Social media works, but only once the foundation underneath it works: a website that converts, and a way to actually measure what's happening. Without that, social media drives people somewhere that doesn't do anything with them. We start with the foundation, confirm it holds, then expand into other channels.

Not Having a Good Digital Strategy Can Make AI Worse

I brought up AI earlier because it's not-so-quietly raising the stakes. Right now, a lot of tools promise that AI will handle SEO and content for you, automatically. Most of them use your existing website as the raw material to build from.

That could be a problem, a major one.. Most small business and nonprofit websites are poorly structured, and most owners haven't nailed down their own value proposition, what makes them different, or who they're trying to reach. AI can't generate useful, specific content from an unclear foundation. It just produces more unclear content, faster. At best, you don't stand out. At worst, this can harm how you appear digitally.

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Can You Afford a Digital Marketing Strategist?

Digital marketing is no longer optional for any business that wants to grow. Buyers and customers start their journey online, and AI is becoming an even bigger part of your customers' day-to-day life. Having a digital marketing strategy is not an option any more. In some cases the business owner can handle it, however digital marketing is evolving fast. Keeping up with it is a full-time job, and most owners can't do that and run their business at the same time. There's often confusion about where to even begin. Our company, Anuncier, can work with you directly to provide digital marketing strategy services. This is typically done on a monthly retainer.

What if you are not sure where to start or a monthly retainer is not realistic now? This is exactly why I built the Digital Strategy Blueprint: a one-time engagement, not a retainer, that gives you a clear set of recommendations. You can hand them to your team, hire someone else to execute them, or work with me directly. Either way, you walk away knowing where you actually stand.

What if you are not sure if you need to talk to someone yet? Here's a simple test you can run yourself: Evaluate any and all digital marketing tactics you're considering or you are using now, and ask whether anyone can explain how it ties to your bottom line. If they can't, or you can't, that's a sign to slow down before spending money on it.

The Game Has Changed, Are You Prepared?

Just saying 'we do digital marketing' is not an option anymore. Understanding your digital footprint, how your digital channels are working together, and being able to fully leverage AI tools are necessary. A digital marketing strategist works with owners or with leaders inside the marketing team to make sure the business is showing where it needs to and providing the appropriate information to prospects along their buying journey. Look at what you're doing online right now and ask whether it's tied to a measurable business goal. If it's not, that's worth fixing before you add anything new.

If you want a second set of eyes on it, that's what the Digital Strategy Blueprint is for.

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Yes, some of this was written with the help of AI, but our content starts and ends with humans. Please visit our AI policy.