What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

In the modern age of business and technology, a strong digital marketing strategy is crucial to organizational success. Companies that thrive in the digital world typically allocate significant resources to the development of digital marketing strategies. In the process, organizations can reach customers across various digital platforms, driving positive revenue gains and improved conversion rates. From a higher-level standpoint, marketing strategy is the process of identifying specific marketing goals. An overall marketing strategy will highlight achievable goals for both traditional (print, radio, broadcast) and digital channels. Using established strategies and goals, compelling marketers will evaluate various marketing tactics necessary to achieve those strategic goals.

What Does a Digital Marketing Strategy Look Like?

Digital marketing strategy involves an assessment of specific goals that are achievable through online channels. In an era when many consumers transact business on their mobile devices, a well-executed digital marketing strategy can be crucial to organizational success. In this context, it is important to audit the current state of an organization’s media assets. Viewed through a macro lens, this means that marketers need to evaluate their organization’s owned, paid, and earned media:

• Owned Media — Owned media represents any communication channels that an organization owns and operates under its complete control. From websites and blogs to podcasts and video channels, organizations can leverage owned media to fit just about any marketing strategy or tactic.
• Paid Media — Paid media refers to content that third parties display in exchange for compensation from the owner. From sponsored content to influencer marketing and digital advertising, paid media is prevalent in many digital marketing strategies.
• Earned Media — Earned media refers to third-party content that is completely separate from the company or brand. In the digital world, this type of exposure often occurs in the form of awards, testimonials, reviews, or user-submitted content.

Ultimately, a digital marketing strategy will seek to maximize the impact of owned, paid, and earned media in the digital world. Consequently, these marketing strategies will encompass multiple channels and approaches — spanning website content and blogs as well as online advertising, testimonials, and reviews. At the end of the day, a digital marketing strategy will change based on the type of business and industry in question.

How Is Marketing Strategy Different from Marketing Tactics or Campaigns?

Whereas marketing strategy involves identifying goals, marketing tactics represent the specific steps or actions needed to achieve those goals. In the process of creating a marketing strategy, it is necessary to create tactics as well to delineate the plan and the timelines. Otherwise, it may be difficult — if not impossible — to properly execute a marketing strategy and achieve marketing goals. Digital marketing campaigns are also vital to evaluate in this discussion. These digital campaigns involve the execution of marketing strategies across all of an organization’s digital channels. The marketing tactics used to execute these campaigns often vary by channel, audience, and other factors. But an effective digital marketing campaign will reflect a substantially similar message across multiple channels.

What Are Several Common Examples?

There are countless digital marketing tactics in existence, often adjusting to meet the varying organizational goals and marketing strategies. But there are several common digital marketing tactics that many organizations employ successfully,

including:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — SEO refers to the practice of optimizing content to improve rankings in major search engines. By following established SEO practices with all digital content, organizations can better reach prospective customers through major search engines.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) — SMM is the practice of utilizing social media networks to reach customers and communicate corporate messaging. Businesses that leverage Social Media Marketing tactics effectively can reach customers directly through their preferred social channel.
• Digital Advertising — Digital advertising refers to the placement of company ads in various online locations, including search engines and social media networks. Paid placement in search results and pop-up ads are examples of digital advertising.
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising — PPC advertising is a subset of digital advertising where companies place ads with a third-party website to drive online traffic. But unlike other forms of advertising, companies only pay for PPC advertising when a user clicks on the link.
• Content Marketing — Content marketing is the practice of utilizing a company’s owned media channels to target prospective customers. When companies create and post high-quality
• Website Marketing — Within the domain of content marketing, an organization’s website is an extremely powerful tool. By creating geo-targeted and optimized landing pages, an organization can become a thought leader within their industry and reel in potential customers with effective call-to-action messaging.
• Email Marketing — Used to drive engagement with a current or prospective audience base or to grow customer relationships. Email marketing services are a strong tool with proven success.
• Downloadable Content — A subset of website strategy, downloadable content provides an efficient way to build leads. Companies can produce high-quality content that prospects can download for free, providing valuable contact information in the process.

Taken as a whole, there are many different marketing tactics that organizations employ every single day. Successful marketers can identify goals and then choose appropriate tactics to achieve those goals while maintaining focus on overall strategy, business needs, and budget constraints.

How Can I Devise an Effective Marketing Strategy?

1. Conduct SWOT Analysis:

A cornerstone of marketing strategy, SWOT analysis is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. From this standpoint, SWOT includes both internal (strengths/weaknesses) and external (opportunities/threats) components:

• Strengths — Strengths are internal factors that help organizations reach and, potentially, exceed their goals. Examples of strengths can include high sales and profits, customer loyalty, long-term employees, or an attractive brand/culture.
• Weaknesses —Weaknesses are internal factors that prevent businesses from reaching their goals. Examples of weaknesses can include improperly marketed products or services, regular customer complaints, high levels of employee turnover, inadequate funding, or supply chain issues.
• Opportunities — Opportunities represent potentially positive, external situations that might help an organization succeed in the future. Examples of opportunities can include changing attitudes or aspirations, new laws or legislation, trade agreements, or removal of tariffs/sanctions. 

1. Establish SMART Business Goals:

Another popular acronym in the marketing strategy context, SMART refers to business goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. By establishing SMART business goals, organizations can help ensure that their marketing strategy moves forward in a positive direction.

3. Engage in Market Segmentation:

Market segmentation is usually a vital piece of an effective digital marketing strategy. This practice involves dividing an organization’s target market or audience into smaller groups. By segmenting an entire customer base into digestible pieces, it becomes easier to tailor unique marketing tactics to each market segment.

4. Create Buyer Personas:

Often utilized in conjunction with market segmentation, buyer personas are fictional profiles that represent the customer. Buyer personas are particularly helpful in helping to understand a company’s customers — whether existing, prospective or desired. Correspondingly, buyer personas vary greatly from industry to industry and organization to organization. As noted above, it is common practice for marketers to unify buyer personas with market segmentation initiatives. In doing so, marketers attempt to create profiles of ideal customers based on demographic, firmographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. In that way, organizations can individually customize their messaging, products, and services to match each different buyer persona and market segment.

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5. Identify Budget Constraints:

Fundamentally, commercial and nonprofit organizations of every flavor must ensure that they budget appropriately to roll out an effective digital marketing strategy. Even the best marketing strategies and tactics are dependent upon adequate cash flow. Consequently, organizations need to think realistically about their budget to determine which marketing tactics are achievable and affordable.