What is digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan for establishing an internet presence through online channels such as organic search, social media, paid ads, and other web-based mediums such as your website. The goal of digital marketing strategies is to increase awareness about your business and attract new customers to your brand.

A strong digital marketing strategy helps your business achieve specific digital goals through carefully selected mediums.

What is a digital marketing campaign?

Digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks and actions within your digital marketing strategy that move you toward a specific end goal.

For instance, if the overarching goal of your digital marketing strategy is to generate more leads through social media, you might run a digital marketing campaign on Twitter. You may share some of your business’s best-performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through the channel.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

1. 1. Build your buyer personas.
   2. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need.
   3. Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets.
   4. Audit and plan your owned media campaigns.
   5. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need.
   6. Monitor and report.

1. Build your buyer personas.

For any marketing strategy – digital or not – you need to know who you’re marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them.

Buyer personas represent your ideal customer(s) and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business’s target audience. It’s important to note that this information should be based upon real data whenever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to move in the wrong direction.

To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who align with your target audience. But what kind of information should you gather for your own buyer persona(s) to inform your digital marketing strategy?

That depends on your business — it’s likely to vary depending on whether you’re B2B or B2C, or whether you sell a high-cost or low-cost product.

2. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools

Your marketing goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of your business. For example, if your business’s goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your marketing team’s goal might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than the previous year to contribute to that success. Whatever your overarching digital marketing goal is, you must be able to measure the success of your strategy along the way with the right digital marketing tools.

3. Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets.

To do this effectively, use the owned, earned, and paid media framework to categorize the digital “vehicles,” assets, or channels you’re already using and decide what’s a good fit for your strategy.

1. 1. Owned Media
   2. Earned Media
   3. Paid Media

4. Audit and plan your owned media campaigns.

At the heart of digital marketing is owned media — and it almost always comes in the form of content. That’s because nearly every message your brand broadcasts can be classified as content, whether it’s an About Us site page, product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, or social media posts.

Content helps convert your website visitors into leads and customers while improving your brand’s online presence. And when this content is search engine optimized (SEO), it can boost your search and organic traffic.

Whatever your digital marketing strategy goal is, you’ll want to incorporate owned content. To start, decide what content will help you reach your goals.

If your goal is to generate 50% more leads via the website than last year, your About Us page is most likely not going to be included in your strategy, unless that page has somehow been a lead-generation machine in the past.

5. Bring your digital marketing campaign together.

This process involves much of the same process: You need to evaluate your existing paid media across each platform (e.g. Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to figure out what’s most likely to help you meet your current goals.

If you’ve spent a lot of money on AdWords and haven’t seen the results you’d hoped for, maybe it’s time to refine your approach, or scrap it altogether and focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results.

By the end of the process, you should have a clear idea of which paid media platforms you want to continue using, and which (if any) you’d like to remove from your strategy.

6. Bring your digital marketing campaign together.

You’ve done the planning and the research, and you now have a solid vision of the elements that will make up your digital marketing strategy.

To review, here’s what you should have solidified so far:

1. 1. 1. • Clear profile(s) of your buyer persona(s)
         • One or more digital marketing-specific goals
         • An inventory of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
         • An audit of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
         • An owned content creation plan or wish list

To provide a better understanding of what digital strategies entail, check out the following list of basic marketing strategies commonly utilized by teams across a range of industries.