What is Digital Marketing Strategy?
Digital marketing strategy defines how organizations can achieve their business objectives using digital channels, platforms, and thinking. It reveals clear targets, prioritizes audiences, recognizes consumer needs and behaviors, and details channel use and platform requirements. Put simply, it sets out how you plan and use digital marketing to remain relentlessly relevant.
How to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
In our work with clients across industries and markets, we have identified the six important steps needed to form a modern digital marketing strategy.
1) Define your objectives
The first step in any effective good strategy report is to decide exactly what you want to achieve. This is the case with digital marketing, and you can be very specific because digital marketing is so easy to analyze and track. Good objectives should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and timed) and will be backed by data, so note that you have analytics in place and at the start of your plan you set up a benchmark and a timeframe for achieving those goals.
2) Understand Your Audience Personas
In an established business, you will already know who your consumer base is and if you are starting a new business, you need to figure out who will want your product.
Your purchaser persona will be a detailed description of your ideal consumer based on demographics, brands they like, where you can connect with them, and so on.
Knowing who your target market is for your digital marketing can help you understand who you are trying to reach, where to find out about them and the emotions you need to connect with.
3) Define the Role of Digital Marketing
How does digital marketing or online marketing contribute to the business? This should not be a laundry list of marketing goals or objectives, but instead a deliberate vision and series of intentional choices that indicate what digital marketing can and should do for the companies.
Ensure that you recognize the relationship digital marketing has with related elements in your ecosystem, which often include: brand, marketing, data, content, UX, CX, CRM, support/customer care, product innovation, and media. By simply writing out what’s at stake and which opportunities are available, you can instantly clarify your focus. Based on this assessment, you can then develop key performance indicators (KPIs) that communicate to your executive team how digital marketing is impacting the business.
4) Create a timed plan
A digital marketing strategy is a good way to think and make sure that your approach is the correct one to achieve your objective. However, if you are not careful it can become theoretical, or languish on your desktop and not make anything happen.
To get around this, your strategy should include a practical timed plan, wherever you list what you will do and when and who is chargeable or responsible for doing it. You need to have a calendar of actions over a decided period, with a named person who is held accountable for delivering what you have decided you will be done. For example, maybe you have recognized that you need to reach a younger demographic and this involves setting up a TikTok account, creating video content, and increasing your Instagram followers, reach, and interaction level. You need to define which person will set up the account, who will make a video, how much and how often, and who will upload it. If a process needs to be set up, or an outer supplier or provider is brought in, define in your list who will find that person and when should they be in place and making content.
This plan will be important for confirming that you make progress.
5) Identify the Resources Needed
Use all of the information charted above to decide what you would like to execute against this strategy – including a budget, headcount, and your marketing technology system (APIs, platforms, services, and data integration points). As Mayur Gupta of Spotify said, “Technology is the interface of marketing” and “the pipes connecting the different pieces together.”
Governance is crucial – build guidelines and playbooks for people (roles, responsibilities, and skills), processes, and tools. Many companies do not pay enough attention to governance, yet it is needed so people know their role and how they contribute to the success of the program. Additionally, if you are a global or complex organization, you will need to establish “market types” to help local leaders see where they are and understand what is needed to grow in a new direction.
6)Find Ways to Amplify Your Content
This can be through a process of content marketing, which includes building backlinks or asking organizations in adjacent industries to refer to your business in their content or share your relevant blog post on their social channels.
You can also use paid ads to boost or increase the reach of your content, for example, you could promote your latest reel about a cool product feature.
Working with influencers to highlight your recent campaign could help you gain additional attention from their followers or audience and drive the action that you are searching for from your marketing campaign.
