What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan for using channels to grow your visibility online. It should look at factors such as your target audience, strengths and weaknesses, and competitors.
To create an effective strategy that benefits your business, you should use data across channels and touchpoints to inform and predict. This will help you establish which marketing channels to use or test, your target buyer personas or audience, and how to communicate your message or brand.
It’s worth noting that a digital marketing strategy is different from tactics as these are the actions you take to implement your strategy.
4 tips for creating an effective digital strategy
There are a few key elements to consider in creating an effective digital marketing strategy. Let’s look at each one in turn.
1. Understand your customer
No digital marketing strategy will be effective if you don’t have a clear understanding of who buys your product, why they buy it, and where they buy it.
Use data and demographics to create a robust profile of your audience and inform your tactics by following these steps:
- Define the channels that fit your key demographics
- Speak your customer’s language
- Understand their pain points and how to switch on emotions
- Create defined buyer personas to customize content and predict buying patterns
- Be culturally aware
- Consider partnerships by leveraging influencer marketing
- Focus on action-oriented experiences and results rather than the product
- Use automation tools for segmentation and targeting
2. Audit and assess
To create an effective strategy, it’s important to know the digital marketing channels and assets you currently use and have.
Therefore you should conduct a full channel and content audit and include everything on a spreadsheet to get a full picture of your marketing activities (across owned, paid, and earned media).
You should then link each piece to your organizational goals. So if your key goal is to drive revenue, look at each channel and asset (you may just want to look at the top performers if you have a lot of content) and map it to revenue.
Doing this will help you understand what is currently driving revenue and what isn’t. You can then double down on what’s successful and look to explore new content pieces or channels for any further impact.
3. Focus on the end result
In marketing and product development, there can be so much emphasis on the product and the ‘numbers’ around it (i.e. revenue) that sometimes people lose sight of the need that the product fulfills.
What truly matters is who you are marketing to, and why. You need to understand their pain points to get what people are doing with your product or service. In other words, when you demonstrate the post-buying moments, they will remember why they need it in the first place.
4. Review and refine
When you develop your strategy, it’s essential to include key performance indicators (KPIs) that fit with crucial business goals.
You need to have a plan in place to understand your goals and objectives and then monitor the metrics to get insights about the KPIs that matter. To do this you’ll need to:
- Step away from vanity metrics – don’t pay attention to the numbers that aren’t crucial to long-term success, e.g. Facebook likes
- Use KPIs to measure success, but don’t have them set in stone – use our targets and KPIs toolkit to help you do this
- Set up continuous intervals for analyzing, understanding, measuring, and reporting
- Understand how to isolate critical metrics if it looks like something isn’t working
What are the most effective digital marketing strategies?
The digital marketing strategies you use will depend on the needs and goals of your business: for example, to grow leads or build brand awareness.
Keep in mind that any strategy you use should align with your brand and message. Let’s look at a few of the most effective strategies that are proven to get results and help you build online visibility and generate leads.
Content marketing
There are many ways of generating leads, but one tried and tested method is by creating and distributing great (and valuable) content and using digital channels to promote it. This is what’s known as content marketing.
For example, you can tie an Instagram post to a specific offer using a landing page, thereby boosting your conversion potential. This could be as simple as promoting an ebook that is relevant to your audience but making it gated so you gather a visitor’s details.
There are a lot of content types that you can use so don’t just stick to one. Along with blogs, create videos, put some energy into creating a valuable ebook, or look at hosting a webinar with in-house staff or experts to drive leads and engagement.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is an effective way to reach and influence 5 billion people across the globe. Plus depending on the network, social media has such reach you can target specific age groups and locations.
While you can simply use social media to promote your brand, product or service, it can also be instrumental in developing a community. This allows you to have meaningful engagement with prospects or customers and create brand advocates that will promote your brand without being asked.
Social media marketing covers a highly varied landscape that is constantly changing, and each channel requires its own strategy and metrics. Make sure you keep social listening as part of your overall strategy to help you understand and engage with your audience.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important digital marketing strategy as it can make your brand, product or service more visible online.
The goal of SEO is to optimize your content – whether that’s a homepage, landing page or blog – so it gets found easily by existing and prospective customers. It not only helps to drive traffic but improves user experience and can help to boost your authority.
There are a few key elements of SEO to tap into user intent that you should consider:
- Keywords
- Backlinks
- Links
- Meta descriptions
- Images
The key is to use SEO to target the people searching online that are most likely to be interested in your brand.
Paid advertising
While organic marketing can go a long way to helping drive traffic and generate leads, using a paid channel can help you to be targeted and reach new audiences.
Many channels offer paid advertising such as social media networks, search engines like Google through Google Ads along with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.
The beauty of most platforms is that you can fix a budget and see the results easily. This means that any size business can reap the benefits and you can test imagery, content and CTAs to see what resonates with your audience.
You can also gather data from your paid marketing campaigns to inform your marketing activities. For example, let’s say you created a Facebook ad promoting a podcast that drives tons of traffic. Consider repurposing the content to create a blog or downloadable checklist as the topic obviously has an interest to your audience.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing can help you gain reach in a targeted audience or niche and drive campaign performance. The key is to partner with an influencer that aligns with your brand and has an audience that will be interested in your product or service.
Bear in mind it’s not just about the number of followers when choosing an influencer, it’s about how they engage with their audience and the topics they promote and are passionate about. Once you’ve established that, an influencer marketing brief is essentail to ensure that you are both on the same page in terms of goals, target audience and messaging.
You can collaborate with an influencer in several ways:
- Promote an event
- Gifting or sending a sample for them to try
- A challenge or giveaway
- Social channel takeover
- Use them as a host
- Challenge them
- Commission unique content
Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing and that’s because it works!
With the demise of third-party cookies and privacy becoming a bigger concern for customers, email marketing provides businesses with a way to inform and engage people that have shown an interest in their product or service.
Not only that but it enables personalization as marketers can segment groups by their activity. This is where AI marketing tools have made things so much more effective, For example, if you have a cohort of prospects that have downloaded an ebook, follow up with something on a similar topic to drive click-through.
There are many methods you can engage to encourage people to provide their personal information so you can add them to your list:
- Use enticing CTAs
- Promote your social media channels
- Use pop-ups or forms
- Run a competition
- Offer free downloads
- Promote an offer
- Start a blog or email newsletter subscription
- Ask for a review or feedback
- Run a webinar or podcast
Check out some email tips and examples for inspiration or to see what other companies are doing.
B2B digital marketing strategies
For B2B marketing professionals many of these tactics will also work but it’s worth looking at other ways specific to business to business that can see results. After all, B2B marketing sucess relies on precision, relationship-building, and strategic alignment, plus it doesn’t have to be boring!
Here are some effective tactics to consider in a B2B marketing environment:
- Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Tailor campaigns to high-value accounts with personalized content and messaging to focus resources, shorten sales cycles, and elevate ROI.
- Thought Leadership: In B2B, prospects often seek in-depth content that provides solutions which requires long form content such as whitepapers, reports, case studies, webinars, and blogs to demonstrate expertise, build trust, and guide audiences through long buying cycles.
- Demand Generation: Combine SEO, paid search, content syndication, webinars, and free trials to ensure that when prospects are looking for information or a solution, your company and content is front and center
- Social Selling and Networking: Use platforms like LinkedIn to make connections and build relationships through thoughtful engagement, content sharing, and passing on insights to generate warm leads and establish credibility
- Marketing Automation & Lead Nurturing: Use marketing automation to segment, score, and nurture leads through drip campaigns, guiding them from awareness to conversion at scale
By combining these tactics and the ones above, a B2B business can form a cohesive strategy that will attract, engage and influence B2B targets.
Digital marketing strategies for SMEs
Small and medium enterprises or SMEs can benefit from the flexibility and low cost of digital marketing, but effectiveness depends on choosing the right tools and tactics. While the stragies above can be very useful to SMEs, it’s also worth looking at some that are specific to this cohort to get the most out any efforts such as:
- Local SEO: Be visible where your customers are by using local SEO tactics such as setting up a Google Business Profile, and focusing on local keyword SEO to drive discovery and traffic
- Leverage paid channels: Be strategic with your paid advertising by using ads on the social media channels that your customers are active on while PPC can deliver strong ROI even on tight budgets
- Email marketing: Encourage people to provide their personal information for the purpose of emails through incentives like discounts, VIP events or product launches as the importance of first-party data grows.
- User-generated content (UGC): For a small or meiumd sized business, reviews and testimonials are crucial so user-generated content can help to boost a brand or get people taking. Use email, social media and forums like Reddit or WhatsApp to encourage customers to share reviews or stories to build credibility and spread reach organically
- Invest in tools and monitor performance: Regularly analyze campaign performance and refine strategies. Even simple tools (e.g., email platforms, scheduling software) can help boost productivity, reach and impact
Become a Strategic Digital Marketer
Being able to research, plan and implement a digital strategy is a sought-after skill across industries. With our certified Digital Marketing Strategy & Leadership course you will know how to manage marketing activities and explore customer experience, analytics, communication, budgeting and how to drive business performance. Enroll today!
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