What Is Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a series of carefully selected actions and tactics that utilize online marketing channels to achieve your business objectives. These channels generally include owned, paid, and earned media.

Owned Media: any media owned by your brand or business such as websites, blogs, apps, email marketing, and social media.

Paid Media: marketing channels that you pay for to increase traffic to your owned media. These can include display ads, social media ads, and search engine marketing.

Earned Media: publicity or exposure gained from methods other than paid advertising.

A Three Step Process To Get You Started On Creating Your Very Own Digital Marketing Strategy

However necessary, creating a digital marketing strategy for your business is no small task. It can be helpful to remember that the purpose of your marketing strategy is to detail or map out the steps you intend to take over a set period of time and that your strategy will be unique to you and your business based on your goals. If you’re having difficult getting started, try this three step process to get your wheels turning:

Step One: Build your buyer personas. A buyer persona is a detailed and research-based profile that depicts your target audience. One common mistake businesses will make is to craft their buyer personas without real data, and unfortunately what one assumes about their audience may not be based in reality. A few things to consider when crafting your audience are: age, location, income, goals, interests, and priorities.

Step Two: Identify your goals and what marketing tools are required to achieve those goals. Consider the big picture or financial objectives you have set for your business and then ask yourself how your digital marketing can tie into and support them. From there, work on developing S.M.A.R.T. goals (specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused, timebound) that will help you achieve those business objectives and decide what tools you need to get you there. Example: You want to boost next year’s online sales by 10%, so you set a goal to increase online lead generation by 30% to help you reach that goal and decide you will need to increase your paid media efforts to do so.

Step Three: Evaluate any existing digital marketing channels and assets. It’s good to know what you already have in regards to owned, paid, and earned media so that you can assess what is necessary to accomplish your business goals as well as what you could do without. Always ask yourself: Does this support my goals and strategy? Do I have the bandwidth and resources to use this channel effectively?

Need help creating or revamping your digital marketing strategy? Let’s chat.