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We don’t mean how much you know about digital marketing, rather how much you know you know.

Get it?

Got it?

Good.

Now onto more pressing tweets about local sandwich crafters, and rifling through all those doggie photos!

OK, done. Let’s explore the digital marketing intelligence quotient of your Carlsbad small business. According to the ubiquitous Wikipedia, Digital marketing is the promoting of brands using all forms of digital advertising channels to reach consumers. This now includes Television, Radio, Internet, mobile, social media marketing and any other form of digital media.

Which Carlsbad digital marketing avenues are you using to promote your local retail business?

For those Carlsbad businesses out there that already use TV or radio as part of their retail marketing plan, they’ve most likely already integrated some forms of digital marketing into the mix. What’s a TV commercial without a Facebook and Twitter mention these days?

For the rest of us, we’ll concentrate on Internet, mobile, and social media as the main pillars of our local retail business digital marketing scheme. And we’ll look to identify value and return on investment as our major indicators of success.

But how do we measure that success?

First we need to understand the environment we will be using to communicate our products and services. Secondly, we need to set attainable goals for our retail digital marketing. Lastly, we must track the results and actively participate in the success of our digital marketing, or suffer the consequences.

Understanding the environment will up your digital intelligence IQ immediately.

  • How do local people use Facebook or Twitter to communicate?
  • Do they share buying experiences of local businesses?
  • If you ask people to share their consumer experience with your business, where could you direct them?
  • Would an increased knowledge of who your customers are, and why they choose your business allow you to better serve the surrounding community…sell more product or services?

Some easily attainable digital marketing goals for the average Carlsbad retail business could be:

  • Build a website. (Kill three birds and get a no cost mobile website app for your small business when you confirm your Bing Local listing here!)
  • Use e-commerce solutions to sell your products and services while you’re sleeping – or working.
  • Initiate a Facebook Business Page and Twitter account for your retail business.
  • Generate 100 (or 1000) Facebook ‘Likes’ and Twitter ‘Followers’ in the span of one year.
  • Connect your Facebook and Twitter profiles with your business website.
  • Start sending customers an email newsletter – you choose the frequency (monthly, bi-monthly, semi-annual…etc.).

When it comes to digital marketing for the average Carlsbad retail business, the research necessary to understand the environment, and the goal-setting needed to gauge success are the easy and fun parts of owning your digital identity. Tracking your results and actually participating in the success of your localized retail digital marketing is a bit more difficult. Don’t make the mistake of playing around on Facebook all day or waiting for Charlie Sheen’s next tweet. Devote time to all three pillars of your Carlsbad digital marketing plan.

Be sure to track your results and participate in your own local digital marketing success.

If we set goals for using social media and local search to acquire more new local customers, we need to know when we’ve achieved those goals. This means using such things as tracking codes, mobile downloads, referral codes, local phone numbers, or even handwritten notes in a marble notebook.

Whatever your DIY method is, make sure you know what you know about your digital marketing efforts.

We’ve also previously mentioned some low to no cost digital marketing tools to help you calculate success in this old blog post.

  • How many Facebook and Twitter connections resulted in actual feet in the door?
  • How often do your social connections interact with your business online?
  • Have you seen an increase in online visibility of your business across multiple online channels?
  • Did that press release result in any check-ins to your business Foursquare profile?
  • What is the value of your ‘Likes’ and ‘Followers’? (What are your goals for building a group of fans and followers?)

Here’s what eMarketer says about that last one:

How would you calculate the value of your local Facebook Fan?