What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Today, there are lots of opportunities for companies, advertisers, and marketing experts to reach their audience and generate sales online. All it takes is a good digital marketing strategy to make these things a reality.

But there’s one problem: implementing a good marketing strategy - whether online or offline - can be complicated. There are a lot of elements involved and multiple approaches, which take you to the best outcome.

To learn the more complex side of this topic, you should first learn the basics. So, in this article, we’re going to give you the ultimate guide to creating a digital marketing strategy. We'll cover various types, goals, and processes, and provide successful cases to inspire your strategy.

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy outlines the plan of action designed to achieve specific objectives. For businesses with an online audience, it is often essential for ensuring the company's success.

Regardless of context, a strategy has a specific goal. This means each action taken as part of your digital marketing strategy must have a measurable impact on the goal that you have assigned.

Key Elements of a Digital Marketing Strategy

Implementing a marketing strategy usually consists of a combination of these key elements:

Content Marketing

As the name implies, this type of digital marketing strategy focuses on creating some form of content for the audience. This is usually in the form of blogs and informational articles, but can also be in videos or images, depending on the marketing platform used.

Content marketing is very useful for:

• Building brand awareness
• Establishing the brand as an expert in the industry
• Driving traffic to the site

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Many people use social media nowadays, so SMM is practically a necessity. This is useful for many things, including:

• Engaging with your potential clients
• Reaching a wider audience
• Letting them know about a new product or service
• Running ads to achieve certain marketing goals

If you’re not yet using social media to its full potential, it’s about time you added it to your repertoire.

SEO

Search engine optimisation increases the ranking of pages on your website. If you do it well enough, it will also affect those that you didn’t necessarily optimise.

If you don’t have any technical know-how, a good place to start is on-page optimisation, where you optimise the content for easy readability. However, if the competition is tough in your niche, this alone may not do the trick. As part of your SEO strategy, consider these factors as well:

• Quality user-experience
• Backlinks from authoritative sources
• Technical SEO concerns, like site speed, website structure, and mobile-friendliness.

Remember, SEO requires constant monitoring and maintenance to continue to enjoy and even exceed the gains achieved through the initial efforts.

Paid Advertising

If you want to see immediate and measurable results in your digital marketing strategy, paid advertising is the way to go. It usually goes something like this:

1. You show an ad to your targeted audience.
2. Clicking the ad leads users to a different page.
3. The customer performs the action that you want them to take.

This is pretty much the format, whether you’re gathering leads or converting them to sales. The only exception is with sponsored content. This is where you covertly advertise to an audience by having a normal-looking content piece promote a brand in some way.

Influencer Marketing

Influencers can help promote your product or even outright sell it. This allows you to reach an already engaged audience that is a good fit for your offer. The details of this type of engagement can vary a lot, but everything should be written in a contract to manage expectations on both sides.

The good news here is you don’t need to go for the biggest influencers to get results. Micro-influencers normally have a more niche and engaged audience and are seen as more authentic. Plus, they’re cheaper!

Email Marketing

Email marketing provides direct access to your customers, allowing you to:

• Send educational content
• Market products to them
• Tell them about the latest promotions
• Upsell or cross-sell existing customers
• Ask for feedback

Some may unsubscribe, but this actually works in your favour. By delivering to a list that is actually interested in your brand, your open rates will be higher. This will prevent you from ending up in the spam folder.

Digital Marketing Strategy Goals

Having a goal sets the direction for your strategy. It is very important in creating your plan so that every action that you include will contribute to attaining the goals that you’ve set. In the following subsections, we’ll discuss these potential goals.

You’ll notice how your strategy can address the top, middle, and bottom of the marketing funnel. So, as a reminder, don’t try to solve all marketing problems at once. In selecting which goal to focus on, consider what your most pressing need is.

Increase Brand Awareness

If you have a relatively new business or are trying to enter a new market, this is a good place to start. Brand awareness serves as the foundation of any marketing strategy because:

• It will serve as your constant source of marketing leads. Brand awareness is at the bottom of the marketing funnel, where the customer starts their journey towards a sale.
• It improves the visibility of your brand. In a sea of competition, you need to stand out. A brand can’t be a top-of-mind option for anything if no one is aware of its existence.
• It fosters trust. In the world of digital marketing, every brand is personified through various marketing channels. The more the brand is out there, the easier it will be for people to deem the brand reliable.

These are just some benefits that heightened brand awareness can bring to all marketing campaigns. Good brand awareness makes it easier for you to expand later on or even charge higher prices for your products or services.

Increase Traffic to the Website

If a lot of your revenue comes from your website, then it only makes sense to focus your marketing strategy on increasing web traffic. So, how do marketing professionals normally implement this? There are two ways:

• Improve your search engine ranking. The higher your ranking is, the easier it will be for people to get to your site. Google is the most popular search engine in the world, so most people focus here.
• Paid ads. Here, you create an ad that leads to your website.

Lead Generation and Conversion

Marketing to your audience is basically composed of two parts:

• Lead generation, where you’re trying to attract and capture the interest of your audience. This allows you to draw them to your digital assets, like a blog post or even a product page.
• Conversion, where you convert the leads to a sale by selling to them.

These are considered one goal because they may be done consecutively. For example, once you get a customer’s email address, you can immediately send them messages to get them to buy something from your site.

Customer Retention and Loyalty

Now that you have surpassed the digital marketing hurdle of convincing them to buy, your next goal can be to get them to buy again. This goal is directly related to lifetime customer value. The more that a customer buys from your business, the higher the lifetime customer value becomes.

Why focus on existing customers if you have an efficient way of converting leads? Past buyers are easier to convince to buy again, assuming that the product is good. Plus, it’s much cheaper than starting from lead generation.

A Brief Process for Developing a Digital Marketing Strategy

Creating a systematic process for the development of your digital marketing strategy is important for many things, like tracking progress and identifying shortcomings. If you’re a part of a team, it also makes it easier for new members to just jump in and contribute.

Are you ready to run online marketing campaigns? It starts with a solid digital marketing strategy template, which you can formulate through the following steps:

Audience Research and Analysis

All successful marketing campaigns are based on solid audience research. This allows you to create relevant content that will resonate better with your target audience.

And who is the audience that we are talking about? This is reflected in buyer personas. Before you move forward with your marketing strategy, gather information to use for building a good profile of your ideal market. This includes:

• Exploring website analytics to see the demographic makeup of the audience you already have
• Using social media analytics to get a deeper understanding of the ideal market for your digital strategy.
• Performing surveys and interviews to receive first-hand information about your audience.
• Segmenting your audience based on a common factor, usually behaviour, demographics, or psychographics.

From there, analyse your data. Look into key similarities and differences across various segments of your digital marketing strategy. What are the most significant motivations and pain points? Once you get a complete picture of your target market for your online marketing strategy, you can move on.

Defining Goals and KPIs

In the previous section, you learned about the various goals that you can have for a digital marketing strategy. You can use those as a starting point to define the goals for your marketing campaign.

You can also be more specific. For example, instead of setting your goal to just increase brand awareness, you can define what age group or demographics you’re targeting.

Let’s say that you want to increase your brand awareness in the US market. A few KPIs for your digital marketing strategy can include:

• Number of brand name searches in the US
• Number of mentions on social media platforms
• Number of likes, shares, and comments from US social media users
• Number of site visitors from the US

If your strategy is part of a bigger marketing plan, it’s possible that there are overlaps in KPIs across different goals. For example, the last KPI may also be useful if your goal is to increase site traffic.

Select Marketing Channels

The marketing channel that you choose is largely governed by your target audience. If your ideal customers prefer to consume video content, you’ll probably want to use channels that support video marketing.

But that’s not the only consideration when selecting marketing channels. Help yourself implement an effective digital strategy by taking these into account as well:

• How spread out your audience is. Let’s say the audience that you want to reach for your marketing strategy is highly segmented by platform. You may need to use all those channels.
• Marketing budget. If you have a fairly limited budget, you’ll either have to spread it out thinner or just choose one or two channels.
• Marketing campaign goals and KPIs. Some channels will be more compatible with your goals than others. For increasing site visitors, focusing on paid and organic search as well as may be a good tactic.

Content Creation and Distribution Plans

Your content creation process is where your marketing tactics will come in. You will build on the marketing strategy foundations that you’ve set so far. The kind of content that you’ll make will be largely influenced by the platform you’re using as well as your goals.

For example, with paid search, your ad will mainly be a landing page and a meta title and description. However, if you’re focusing on organic search, a solid SEO strategy instead of ads will be more appropriate.

For distribution, you’ll need a timeline. Recurring efforts like SEO will be best organised in a content calendar. However, for time-bound campaigns, some level of marketing automation should be involved. All the content products must be ready before the official launch so that everything goes smoothly.

Managing and Monitoring the Strategy

Were you able to implement an effective digital marketing strategy? That’s the main question that you want to answer here. And in search of this answer, go back to your KPIs.

However, this is just to get started. As part of managing and monitoring, reflect on these questions as well:

• Is every part of the marketing strategy working?
• Is there a metric associated with every KPI that we can measure?
• Are we seeing the latest data?

Depending on the goals that you’ve set, it may also take a while to see relevant results. For example, page rankings on search engines may not change overnight.

For this part of the process, your business should have trusty tools so you can have your eyes everywhere. Good digital marketing software can help with any information check so that you can get a better sense of your marketing campaign progress.

Analysing Results and Optimising Strategy

The data that you obtain in the last step is crucial for the continued relevance and effectiveness of your strategy. As mentioned, data monitoring is something that you should continuously do as you run a marketing campaign, as it allows you to respond to changes right away.

How Do You Analyse Results?

The success of your digital marketing strategy lies in its performance as measured through the KPIs. So, this should be the first thing that you look at.

However, just because your digital strategy did well based on the numbers doesn’t mean that the task is done. Look into trends and patterns as well as areas for improvement. There may also be tools that can give you smart insights, which will make this part of the process much quicker.

How Do You Optimise Your Strategy?

Your analysis will be the foundation of your optimisation efforts, so go back to your insights. Depending on what you have learned, you can implement any or all of these efforts for your digital marketing strategy:

• Start where the marketing campaign isn’t doing so well
• Do split testing
• Re-segment your market
• Change how you allocate your advertising budget

Examples of Successful Digital Marketing Strategies

What does it take for your digital marketing strategy to be successful? This will depend on many factors. Hubspot has compiled the best examples to give you an idea about what can work:

Barbie Movie Selfie Generator

Before Barbie was released last year, Warner Bros tried to create a lot of buzz. One of the things that they did was release a Barbie Movie Selfie Generator.

Using this generator, you can take a picture of yourself and become a Barbie. The idea that anyone could be a Barbie was well-received and earned media attention online.

The result? Increased brand awareness that translated into movie ticket sales. It was the highest-grossing movie of 2023.

Spotify Wrapped Playlist

Spotify Wrapped is one of the best digital marketing tactics because it’s so simple. It just shows an overview of everything that you listened to during the year.

What made this digital marketing strategy example so successful was the people who shared their wrapped playlists. People who didn’t use Spotify would likely have an idea of the range of musical options that the platform offers.

Digital Olympus Expert Round-Up

If you plan to create the ultimate content marketing piece, you can’t go wrong with rounding up expert opinion. This is exactly what Digital Olympus did.

Having a lot of big names agreeing to an interview definitely helped make this a content marketing success. However, the relevance of the question they chose also contributed to its effectiveness because it got more people interested.

Achieve Big Goals Through a Solid Digital Marketing Strategy

A good digital strategy is as effective today as it was ten years ago. The channels, tools, and resources that are available may change, but the keys to success will always be the same: good research and planning.

If you’re planning to create a campaign, you’ll find everything here to get started. We look forward to your success.