You need your business to grow and meet its goals over the next 12 months. You may have tried different marketing and sales tactics and met with different consultants, agencies, and potential hires. Still, there's still no clear answer.

How can you maximize your return and meet your business goals, all while on a limited budget? If we had a corporate level, multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, this might be easy. But we aren't in that position.

It takes just two things for powerful marketing. First of all you need to know how to turn your digital presence into something useful, like leads or customers. To do this you need a digital sales funnel in place from top to bottom.

These are the six stages of the digital sales funnel: Stage one: generate demand Stage two: capture quality leads Stage three: nurture leads Stage four: convert leads into customers Stage five: close, deliver, and satisfy Stage six: referrals and follow-up

But that alone doesn't mean much unless there's a clear purpose. To have a purpose, we need a strategy.

Learn to Develop a Strategy with Five Steps: 1. Where are you today? 2. Finding your ideal 3. Mapping out your plan 4. Getting your hands dirty 5. Recap and review

Have you noticed we didn't say you have to know how to do popular digital-marketing tactics? Search-engine optimization has backlinks to build and keywords to optimize for. Email lists have to be set up, connected to your website, and segmented based on the audience. Your website...well, that might need to be coded from the ground up again.

But we aren't going to worry about that. It isn't our job to know how to build a website or do SEO or any of that. It's our job to set a strategy to decide what we need or don't need and have others deliver the technical work.