What is Digital Marketing Strategy: Beginner’s Guide 2022

It’s probably fair to say that a big part of your marketing campaign is digital today. Consumers and companies alike are often online and on-the-go, and where they spend their time, you want to be able to meet them and track their behaviour. But it can seem as though this ever-changing digital world can quickly become a daunting one when you are growing a company. How do you still effectively develop, and manage an adaptive digital marketing plan with a variety of other roles and activities that need to be done? You may also be wondering “what is digital marketing strategy that you can rely on for your brand to flourish?

To help you strengthen your digital presence and emerge bigger, we have put together this guide about ideal digital marketing strategy.

What is Marketing Strategy?

Before adopting one or both for your business, it’s crucial to understand how a marketing strategy varies from a digital marketing strategy. A marketing strategy is a plan to accomplish a particular aim (or objectives) relevant to marketing in a centred and achievable manner. It takes into account what your organization is doing well at present and what you’re missing with respect to the target you set. So, you’re more likely to achieve it. But what’s the difference between a marketing strategy and marketing tactics?

Marketing Tactics vs. Strategy

A strategy is, as we described above, an achievable and concentrated series of steps. It is used to help you achieve a particular objective. Marketing or not, any approach has three components:

1)  A diagnosis of your problem.

2)  A guiding policy to resolve the problem.

3)  A series of targeted measures that are required for the strategy to be accomplished.

Your marketing plan can involve many moving parts, each with different objectives, depending on the size of your organization. With that said, it can become overwhelming at times to work on your strategy. So, if your marketing campaign ever makes you feel stressed, refer to these three steps to keep you focused on achieving your goals. The particular actions you want to take in your campaign to help you achieve your end goal are marketing tactics. In other words, your destination is a strategy. It’s achievable, oriented plan for getting you to your aim. Within your plan, tactics are concrete and definable measures that ensure you achieve your target.

Consider the following list of simple marketing strategies widely used by teams across a variety of industries to provide a clearer understanding of what they may entail.

• Blog Posting.
• Publicity on a particular social media site (Face book, Instagram).
• Optimize your digital content by search engines.
• Creating a giveaway and/or competition.
• To decide what works best for your audience, test distinct campaign models.
• Arrange a webinar.
• Creating a podcast.
• Start a campaign with an email.

Digital Marketing Strategy vs. Digital Marketing Campaign

A couple of related words that are frequently, wrongly, used interchangeably are a digital marketing strategy and digital marketing campaign. This is similar to marketing tactics and marketing strategies. The set of actions you prepare and take to achieve your overall digital marketing target is a digital strategy. Digital marketing campaigns, on the other hand, are the foundations and activities that drive you toward a clear, digital end goal within your plan. For example, if your digital marketing strategy’s overarching objective is to generate more leads via social media, you could run a Twitter digital marketing campaign. To generate more leads via the channel, you can share some of the best performing gated content on Twitter.

How to Create the Best Digital Marketing Strategy?

In order to accomplish different objectives, a digital marketing strategy defines a set of acts that use online marketing platforms. Managed, paid, and received media can include sources. A digital marketing action plan enables you to effectively develop and launch your online presence. Let’s look at the steps involved in developing your business with an effective digital marketing strategy.

1. Develop Your Customer Personas

You need to know who you’re selling to with every marketing strategy, interactive or not. Detailed buyer personas are based on the latest digital marketing strategies, and the first step is to develop them. With models to create your customer personas, organize your audience segments and make your marketing stronger. Buyer personas reflect the ideal client(s). It can be developed by investigating, mapping, and analyzing the target audience of your company. Whenever possible, it is important to remember that this data should be based on actual data, as making projections about your audience will cause your marketing strategy to shift in a different path.

Your research pool should include a mix of clients, prospects, and individuals outside your contacts database that fit with your target audience in order to get a rounded image of your persona. But what sort of data do you gather to notify your digital marketing plan for your own buyer persona(s)? It is likely to differ depending on whether you are B2B or B2C, or whether you offer a high-cost or low-cost service.

Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Here are some starting points for your unique company that you can fine-tune and tailor.

• Location: To quickly determine what location your website traffic comes from, use web analytics software.
• Age: This may or may not be relevant information, depending on your business. But, it is better to collect this information by recognizing patterns in the current database of prospects and contacts.
• Goals: You might already have a clear idea of the goals of your customer persona, depending on what problem your product or service solves. By speaking to actual consumers and internal sales and customer service representatives, cement your conclusions.
• Challenges: To get an understanding of the common challenges facing your audience, talk to consumers, sales and customer service staff.
• Interests: Ask about their interests with clients and others that resonate with your target audience. For example, if you’re a fashion brand, it’s helpful to know if your audience is also interested in health and well-being in order to build potential content.
• Priorities: To find out what is most important to them in relation to your business, speak to clients and target audience members.

2. Identify Your Targets and Tools for Digital Marketing

Your marketing objectives should always be tied back to your company’s fundamental goals. For example, if the aim of your company is to raise online sales by 20 per cent, the goal of your marketing team might be to generate 50 per cent more leads from the website to contribute to that success than the previous year. To detail the annual marketing strategy, define top priorities and more, use a high-level marketing plan template. Whatever the ultimate digital marketing purpose is, with the right digital marketing tools, you must be able to assess the effectiveness of your strategy along the way.

3. Assess the Existing Digital Platforms and Resources

It’s helpful to first consider the big picture when analyzing your current digital marketing platforms and resources to decide what to integrate into your plan, which will prevent you from becoming frustrated or confused. Collect what you have, and categorize in a spreadsheet each resource or asset, so you have a clear picture of your current paid media, owned, or earned frameworks. Use the owned, obtained, and paid media system to categorize the digital content or platforms you are currently using. Moreover, decide what a good match for your approach is in order to do this effectively.

• Owned Media

Whether that’s your website, social media accounts, blog content, or imagery, this applies to the digital assets your brand or business owns. The networks you own are what your organization has full control of. This could also include any of your own off-site material that is not hosted on your website. For instance, a blog you are writing on Medium.

• Earned Media

Earned media refers to the word-of-mouth marketing exposure you receive. If that’s material you’ve circulated to other websites (e.g. guest posts), you’ve been doing PR work, or you’ve delivered the customer experience. As a result of these efforts, Earned Media is the recognition you get. By gaining press referrals and favourable feedback, as well as by sharing your content across their networks, you can earn media (e.g. social media channels).

• Paid Media

Paid media refers to any medium or platform on which you expend cash to draw the attention of your customer. This involves items such as Google Ad Words, paid social media posts, native ads (e.g. supported posts on other websites), or any other means by which you pay for improved exposure in return. Since you have a better understanding of what this structure implies, let’s look at an example.

Suppose that you have a patented piece of content developed to help you generate leads on a landing page on your website. Instead of only dealing with owned, earned, or paid media alone, you know you want to integrate distinct parts of the system. You make an effort to ensure that it is shareable so that your audience can spread it through their social media accounts to amplify the number of leads created by the material. This will raise traffic to your landing page in return. This is how the paid media aspect works.

4. Audit and Schedule Media Strategies

Proper media is at the heart of digital marketing, and it almost always takes the form of content. This is because it is possible to identify almost any message your brand broadcasts as content, whether it is an About Us website page, category pages, articles, eBooks, blog posts, videos, or posts on social media. Content helps turn visitors to your website into leads and clients while enhancing the online presence of your company. And it will improve your search and organic traffic when this content is search engine optimized (SEO).

Whatever the purpose of your digital marketing strategy, you may want to add proprietary content. To begin, decide what content is going to help you achieve your goals. If your target is to generate 50 per cent more leads from the website than last year, unless that page has been a lead-generation mechanism in the past, your About Us page is most likely not going to be included in your plan. Here’s a quick process that you can follow to decide what owned content you need to achieve your goals for your digital marketing plan.

• Audit Your Existing Content.
• Identify Shortcomings in Your Current Content.
• Build a Roadmap for Content Development.

5. Audit and Schedule Your Earned Media Strategies

You will get an idea of where to spend your time by comparing your previously earned media against your current goals. Look at where your traffic and leads come from (if that’s your goal) and rate each source of media obtained from most efficient to least efficient. You may notice that a specific article that you contributed to the industry press drove a lot of excellent traffic to your website, which boosted conversions. Or, you may find that LinkedIn is where you see most individuals sharing information, which has increased traffic. Based on statistics, the aim is to construct an image of what types of earned media can help you achieve your goals (and what will not). However, if you want to experiment with something different, don’t rule that out just because it has not been done before.

The Final Analysis

You’ve done the research and preparation, and now you have a clear view of the components that will make up your digital marketing strategy. Now, to shape a coherent strategy document, it’s time to pull it all together. Based on your research up to this stage, your strategic plan should map out the sequence of steps you are going to take to achieve your goals. You will also need to prepare your plan for the long term. Usually, depending on the business, about 6-12 months is a reasonable starting point. This will allow you to overlay each action while you and your team are executing it. You will build a standardized timeline for your operation by taking this method.