There are few guarantees when it comes to starting and growing a successful small business.

From the early phases of getting a foothold in a local market, to assembling the right team to support growth, to maintaining that growth over time — there’s a gauntlet of obstacles one has to face to feeling successful in the small business world.

While the offline world has its own set of challenges, so to does the digital representation of their small business – with digital marketing.

Often having to join a “marathon in progress”, small businesses can face significant odds in the digital world, as well.

With larger players and savvy digital teams backing them, starting and maintaining a digital front can easily overwhelm a lot of small business owners.

That said, I’ve seen numerous small business succeed where others fall by following three simple pillars:

Repetition
Reputation
Relevance

Consistency matters.

Whether it’s with your content, your visual branding, your measurement or improvement – consistency is one of the traits that my best – and growing – small businesses exhibit.

There is a tremendous amount of noise in the world these days, much less online, and the ones that have stayed proactive and consistent are the ones leading the way to this day.

The other thing consistency does is help you build – and maintain – momentum.

Reputation

While consistency can help you cut through the noise and help you stay visible compared with others with the same alignment, reputation helps shape the opinion of your small business, once visible.

Keeping tabs on online reviews, blogs, forums and other niche websites within the digital layers of the online world can help keep that visibility in line with how you want your small business to be perceived online.

Taking care of your customers and people, along with offering the best products and/or services you can lays the foundation for much of your reputation playbook.

Mentioned in a previous post on reviews, you’ll generally hear from two kinds of customers online:

1. Delighted Customers
2. Very Unsatisfied Customers

The more customers you delight with your products and services, the more you’ll likely hear them spread the word on their own in the digital world.

While you can’t always control what folks say about your business online, there’s always something that can be learned from wherever you are mentioned (even if they’re unsatisfied).

Relevance

Relevance – being most important to “the task at hand” is the end result and the goal of much of the work above.

For digital platforms like search and social media, relevance means:

“the ability to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user”

Relevance, in the digital world, means you’ll be present at the right time, in the right place – for the right people – online.

Focus On Things You Can Control

From new competitors entering the fray to macro level/national events that occur, to supply chains being disrupted, to new regulations – and everything in between – external context can often change quickly that you might have to consider when making plans for your small business.

Regardless of these external factors (which we ultimately can’t control), focusing on things you can control: repetition, reputation and relevance can help you maintain an edge in your industry.

There are few guarantees in the small business world.

But, with a little work on the items above, you can control your own destiny – this year and beyond.