What is a digital marketing strategy

A digital marketing strategy is a type of inbound marketing plan that helps you achieve your goals through specific marketing channels, content, analysis, and much more. 

Your digital marketing strategy needs to be based on facts, analysis, research, and analytics. That’s the only way you’ll be able to achieve measurable goals and have a great basis for improvement. Having a bulletproof strategy will help you with your marketing proposals as well. 

No matter what media channels you decide to use, make sure to plan everything out and have customized strategies and marketing tactics for different platforms for the content to feel native. 

Why You Need a Digital Marketing Plan 

The biggest thing you can achieve from a digital marketing strategy is to generate ROI. However, to maximize your return, it’s important that you are strategic in your approach and don’t resort to using just any digital marketing tactic.

Instead, you want to have a strategy to follow and know exactly what to focus on, when, how, and for how long before trying another approach. Your strategy will include some type of content, and every piece of that content, be it a picture, blog, video, or something else, needs to be planned, prepared, posted at the right time, and be a part of the bigger picture. 

Simply posting content without a clearly defined sales strategy behind it could result in your sales team leaving many sales opportunities untapped. The goal with any digital marketing strategy is to post or send out the right content that draws potential customers out to raise their hand to want to learn more about what you have to offer.

That’s why the most effective digital marketing strategy is crafted only after doing careful market research, looking at all sides of the marketing equation – from search engine optimization to a social media marketing strategy, even to earned media.

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How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy? 

Let’s take it step by step.

You’ll need to: 

• Build your buyer persona or target audience
• Evaluate your online presence
• Set your marketing goals
• Create a sales funnel
• Create a content strategy

But, before you can put your digital marketing strategy into action, it’s important to establish a few key foundational pieces that will help to shape the type of strategy you use and how you measure its success.

Identify Your Goals 

Your long-term goal as a marketing and sales organization is to ultimately increase revenue.

However, you could have a wider variety of short-term goals that you can pursue with a digital marketing strategy. For example, perhaps you want to boost brand awareness and generate more traffic away from your competitors’ websites so you can expand your market share. Or you could be looking to improve your SEO ranking on search engines to get in front of more prospects who are actively searching for what you offer. Or it could even be that you want to differentiate your company as a thought leader in the industry and a targeted digital marketing strategy will help you do this.

The point here is to determine what your short- and long-term goals are for digital marketing and then implement the necessary tracking tools to ensure that you are achieving your goal.

Take for example, if your goal is to increase your search engine ranking by posting keyword-driven content regularly, then using tools like Google Analytics or Semrush could be helpful to monitor if you are improving your ranking position. 

Evaluate Your Current Online Presence

Before you can craft a digital marketing strategy, you must first analyze your current online presence and fully understand where you stand in the market. Determine what digital channel drives the most and right traffic to your website, which channel(s) generate the most revenue for your company, etc.

The goal is to get clear on what you’ve already tried, what isn’t working, and what is so you can design a plan of action that will yield better results before you start wasting money on advertising spend like a Facebook ads.

Create a Sales Funnel

Understanding the journey your leads go through to convert to a client is the base of your sales funnel. 

Awareness stage. At that stage, you must make your potential clients aware of your brand, products, and services. That could be done through a variety of media channels, including investing in Google Ads, launching an SEO strategy to rank high on heavily searched keywords, or to leverage social media to gain traction.

Interest stage. You’ve gotten your prospect’s attention, now it is time to nurture the relationship. This can be achieved through an email campaign, posting blog articles around their pain points, or through engaging and highly relevant social media posts.

This is where you convert your leads to new customers. Although your digital marketing strategy may have leads raise their hand that they’re interested, you’ll need a proven sales process to get them to a sale. With that in mind, you want your digital content to have specific calls to action, so that your lead knows exactly what next step to take.

Perhaps they read a white paper you posted on your website or came across an article posted on a blog – either way it’s important to include what they can do to get more information. Maybe they can click a link to book a demo, or provide their email to get a free trial, or email a request to sales to get on a call. Whatever action you want people to take, be clear and explicit about it on every piece of digital marketing material you post online.

Evaluation stage. At this stage of the sales funnel, your potential customer is interested, you’ve likely provided them with more information via emails and other free resources. However, they still have not made the purchase. They’re trying to determine if what you offer is, in fact, what they need to solve a problem or to achieve a specific goal. At this point, leading with case studies, testimonials, free trials, competitors’ comparisons, and live demonstrations can be very helpful to move the prospect closer to a sale.

Engagement stage. By now, you may have had your initial contact with your prospect. They are aware of what you’re selling, they’re interested, they’ve seen what your product/service has done for other customers in their industry. Yet, they may need more coaxing to get to the finish line.

During this stage, you’ll focus on following up or offering discounts or promotions to entice them to close the deal. You may look to launch digital marketing campaigns on social media, focused on retargeting ads to those prospects who have taken a specific action.

You could initiate a follow up email nurture sequence. It’s important to keep in mind that many of the follow up outreach you do, at this stage, can be streamlined by using a marketing automation tool like HubSpot.

Purchase stage. At this stage of the sales funnel, you have successfully converted a lead into a customer! Congratulations, but your work is far from done. You have the sales opportunity to upsell the customer to a more robust or longer-term solution. You could also ask for referrals at this stage to see who else in their network may be looking for what you provide. 

Build Your Buyer Persona

You need to know and understand your customers to provide them with a great service. That’s why you need to create a buyer persona that is based on facts and data. 

You can have multiple personas for your business, and a good trick is to give them names so that you can easily identify and differentiate them. 

The questions you need to answer are: 

• How old are they?
• Which gender are they?
• Where do they live?
• What kind of a job do they have?
• What is their lifestyle like?
• What are their expectations?
• What problems can your products or services solve?

And any other questions based on the potential buyers’ behavior.

Once you have all those questions answered, you’ll be able to relate to your clients better and provide them with great content. 

Create a Digital Content Strategy

Your digital strategy needs to incorporate not only the type of content you’ll create, the target audience or decision maker you’re trying to attract, but also the marketing goals you’re planning to achieve with those pieces of content.

That’s why the first step is to create a content calendar that describes all the social media posts, blogs, guest blogs, articles, and other pieces of content you’ll make to achieve certain goals, like generating new business. 

You also must conduct a keyword search that will help you structure your content from start to finish, taking into account which sections you want to cover. Make sure to include dates and focus on your short-term goals. 

You can even incorporate a visual guide for your new content, to make sure everything looks similar and according to the branding.