What Is Digital Marketing Strategy and How to Develop One?

What Is Digital Marketing Strategy? A Comprehensive Guide

Are you feeling lost in the digital marketing landscape, unsure of how to achieve success without a clear roadmap? Look no further. Introducing digital marketing strategy: the key that unlocks your business’s potential.

In this comprehensive guide, we will demystify the concept of digital marketing strategy and equip you with the knowledge to craft an effective plan. Say goodbye to aimless wandering and hello to a strategic approach that maximizes your chances of success.

Read on to discover the power of digital marketing strategy and take control of your business’s growth.

Key Highlights

  • Define business goals, identify target audience, select digital platforms, allocate resources for effective digital marketing strategy.
  • Analyze key performance indicators (KPIs), make continuous optimizations to enhance strategy effectiveness.
  • Digital marketing strategies offer precision, efficiency, and accurate campaign evaluation compared to traditional methods.
  • Develop a messaging strategy to resonate with your intended audience and ensure content relevance.
  • Tailor and optimize content to meet customer needs and seamlessly integrate into user journeys.
  • Continuously refine and adapt your digital marketing strategy to keep pace with evolving customer behavior.

Digital Marketing Strategy Types

Businesses can choose from digital marketing strategies to achieve their goals and objectives. These strategies include, but are not limited to:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is like a marathon runner training to run faster and longer. When done correctly, SEO can help your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), increasing the amount of organic traffic you receive.

When you optimize your website for SEO, you improve its ability to be found and indexed by search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This involves making sure your website is technically sound and free of errors that could hinder its ability to rank well in search results.

  • Craft high-quality content tailored to the specific keywords and phrases your target audience is actively searching for.
  • Conduct extensive keyword research to identify the most relevant and popular terms within your industry, seamlessly integrating them into your content.
  • Drive more traffic to your website through strategic link building and content creation for external sources.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Strategy

Pay-per-click (PPC) is like purchasing a billboard on the highway: you want to capture the attention of passersby and convince them to stop at your store. Instead of being limited to one physical location, PPC campaigns leverage search engines and social media networks to reach a broad audience quickly and easily.

With PPC advertising, you bid on specific keywords and phrases relevant to your business and create ads displayed to users who search for those keywords or are interested in those topics.

You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, which means you only pay for traffic actively engaging with your content.

  • Target your ideal audience with precision through PPC advertising based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.
  • Maximize your ROI by delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.
  • Optimize campaign effectiveness with highly targeted PPC advertising for desired results.

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing strategy is like the party host of digital marketing. It’s your brand’s face, personality, and voice; it helps engage with your target audience and creates relationships that can drive website traffic, leads, and conversions.

  • Create relevant and resonant content for social media platforms, tailored to your target audience.
  • Consistently post across multiple channels, measure performance, and adjust as needed for optimal results.
  • Build trust and credibility by delivering engaging content that drives conversions and brand engagement.

Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing strategy is about creating valuable, relevant, consistent content that resonates with the target audience to drive profitable customer action.

Think of it like giving a little teaser for something bigger, like a movie trailer, only this time it’s for your product or service. You want to give the audience enough information that they become intrigued and motivated to take action – purchase a product or sign up for a newsletter.

  • Create valuable content and leverage distribution channels like social media, email marketing, and SEO.
  • Promote your content across multiple channels to enhance its visibility and drive increased website traffic.

Email Marketing Strategy

Yup, email marketing is still a thing. Even in this day and age of digital marketing, it’s a tried-and-true strategy that remains an essential component of any good Digital Marketing Strategy.

Email marketing involves using emails to promote your products or services, nurture leads, and build relationships with your subscribers.

  • Leverage the versatility of email campaigns for various purposes, including product launches, customer appreciation, discounts, and industry-related content.
  • Tailor your emails to your subscribers, delivering relevant and engaging content for successful email marketing.
  • Use email campaigns as a powerful tool to connect with your audience and drive desired actions.
  • Provide a way for people to unsubscribe from your list and ensure that you’re compliant with applicable laws (such as the CAN-SPAM law in the US).

Influencer Marketing Strategy

Any digital marketing worth its salt should involve Influencer Marketing. It’s all about partnering with influencers or individuals with a substantial following on social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter to promote your products or services to their audience.

This type of marketing leverages an existing connection the influencer has with their followers, establishing trust between them and the brand, significantly increasing the chances of a successful marketing campaign.

It’s also great for targeting specific audiences and expanding your reach, as influencers often have engaged followers who tend to listen to their recommendations.

It may sound simple, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Influencer Marketing campaigns require research into relevant influencers with the right fit for your brand, an understanding of the influencers’ audience, and an effective strategy to connect them.

Mobile Marketing Strategy

In today’s ever-growing digital world, people increasingly use their smartphones and tablets for all sorts of tasks – from staying connected with friends on social media to making purchases and transactions.

As such, having a mobile-friendly website and content has become essential for businesses that want to stay competitive.

Mobile marketing is the key to success in the new digital landscape. It optimizes your website and content for devices, uses mobile-advertising, and targeting, and leverages mobile apps and messaging platforms to reach your target audience.

Why Is Digital Marketing Strategy Important?

Yes, digital marketing strategy is important for businesses that want to succeed in the digital age. It allows businesses to connect with customers online, increase brand awareness, drive website traffic and conversions, and ultimately grow their business.

Without a well-planned digital marketing strategy, businesses risk being left behind in a competitive online marketplace.

Here are the main reasons why digital marketing strategy is so important:

Enables Data-Driven Decision Making

Tracking and analyzing the performance of marketing efforts is essential for businesses to optimize their marketing activities for maximum impact.

By understanding which marketing channels and tactics generate the most leads and conversions, businesses can adjust their strategies to achieve better results and increase their return on investment (ROI).

Improved Brand Awareness

The importance of a digital marketing strategy is undeniable. To reach and engage today’s digitally-savvy consumers, businesses need to think beyond traditional advertising methods and embrace the power of the Internet.

An effective digital marketing strategy can help a business reach its target audience through various digital channels, including social media platforms, search engines, and email.

This is especially important when it comes to improving brand awareness. With so many competitors vying for the attention of potential customers, a well-crafted digital marketing strategy can help businesses stand out from the crowd.

For instance, an effective content marketing campaign can help attract and engage new prospects while educating them on your products or services. PPC campaigns such as Google Ads can also help businesses gain traffic from people actively searching for their services.

Builds Lasting Relationships With Customers

Through digital channels, businesses can interact with their target audiences in meaningful ways and create lasting connections.

Think of it like a long-term relationship: first impressions are essential, but strong communication, mutual understanding, and consistent effort all help to create a strong bond and encourage loyalty. That’s exactly how digital marketing strategy works for businesses.

By engaging with customers through multiple digital channels – emails, social media posts, ads, websites, etc. – businesses can build trust and loyalty in the eyes of their target audience.

Provides a Competitive Advantage

A digital marketing strategy provides your business with a roadmap that guides you to where you want to go and how you’ll get there. It sets goals, identifies opportunities, and outlines the steps to achieve successful outcomes.

Having a well-thought-out and executed digital marketing strategy can give your business the edge over competitors by increasing brand awareness, improving customer engagement, and providing better insights into customer behavior.

It allows you to target customers with the right messages at the right time, increasing sales, conversions, and higher ROI.

Offers Cost-Effective Marketing Solutions

Digital marketing is typically much more affordable than traditional methods, allowing businesses to reach a larger audience with smaller budgets. In comparison, traditional advertising often requires a large upfront investment and can miss potential customers due to its limited reach.

Digital marketing provides access to various new technologies and methods, enabling businesses to target specific customer segments and tailor their messages for maximum impact.

From email campaigns to social media advertising, companies can choose the most effective approach for their goals while cutting costs compared to traditional marketing efforts.

How to Develop a Digital Marketing Strategy

To succeed in digital marketing, it is important to continuously modify and adjust your strategy to stay up-to-date with the ever-changing digital world.

  • Define Your Business Objectives
  • Conduct a Situational Analysis
  • Identify Your Target Audience
  • Develop a Messaging Strategy
  • Choose Digital Channels and Tactics
  • Create and Optimize Content Strategy
  • Allocate Resources and Budget
  • Implement and Execute Your Plan
  • Measure and Analyze Results
  • Refine and Adapt
  1. Define Your Business Objectives

Firstly, you must determine what your business objectives are for your digital marketing strategy.

You must ensure these goals are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. These objectives should tie into your company’s overall vision and mission and be realistic enough for you to achieve with the available resources.

An example of a SMART objective for digital marketing would be: “Increase website visits from organic search by 10% within 3 months”. This is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. It’s all about setting measurable goals that will help drive your business forward.

  1. Conduct a Situational Analysis

This situational analysis will help you understand the external factors affecting your digital marketing strategy. This includes analyzing customer behavior and preferences, understanding the competitive landscape, and noting any technological shifts in the industry.

By assessing these elements, you can identify your target audience needs, who your competitors are targeting, their strengths and weaknesses, and what disruptors may be affecting the industry.

  1. Identify Your Target Audience

Once you’ve identified your business objectives, it’s time to identify your target audience. Understanding who you want to reach with your digital marketing efforts is crucial for developing a successful plan.

Consider their demographics – age, gender, location, and occupation – and what resonates with them culturally. This will help you to tailor messages that will appeal to your target audience and encourage them to engage with your brand.

You should also research the customer journey – how they discover, interact, and convert with your business – to create targeted campaigns optimized for different stages of the buyer’s journey.

  1. Develop a Messaging Strategy

A messaging strategy is the foundation of any good digital marketing strategy. When creating content and marketing materials, ensuring they speak directly to your target audience is important.

Crafting a messaging strategy will help you do this – after all, if your message isn’t tailored to its intended recipients, it’s unlikely to resonate with them.

To make an effective marketing campaign, you must plan your destinations ahead of time. You need to know your target audience, what message you want to communicate, and how best to reach them.

The key components of a good messaging strategy are market segmentation and positioning. By segmenting your target market, you’ll be able to determine which people will most likely respond positively to your message.

  1. Choose Digital Channels and Tactics

Once you have established your target audience, messaging strategy, and business objectives, it’s time to decide which digital channels will most effectively reach your goals. Different tactics work differently for different audiences, so it is important to tailor your approach for each one.

For example, if you target older generations or those living in rural areas, traditional media such as print or television may be better suited for your campaign.

On the other hand, if you are targeting younger generations and tech-savvy audiences, digital channels such as paid search ads, email marketing, and social media campaigns will work best.

  1. Create and Optimize Content Strategy

Content is essential to any digital marketing strategy and should be tailored to your target audience’s needs. It helps you build customer relationships, create brand awareness, and drive conversions. Good content should engage your audience and provide value that leads them down the sales funnel toward conversion.

To create a successful content strategy for digital marketing, you need to consider the audience’s interests and preferences. This means understanding their values, the topics they are most interested in, and what resonates with them emotionally.

You can then create content tailored to your target audience’s needs. This could include blog posts, social media campaigns, videos, podcasts, webinars, and other types of content that will provide value to your audience.

  1. Allocate Resources and Budget

When allocating your budget, it’s important to consider both traditional and digital channels – such as paid search ads, email marketing, and social media campaigns. You must decide which channels will most effectively reach your target audience and achieve your goals.

Having an understanding of the cost-benefit of each channel is important for creating a successful digital marketing strategy. This way, you can allocate more of your budget to channels that offer better ROI and less to less successful channels.

  1. Implement and Execute Your Plan

This involves creating and distributing content, running marketing campaigns, and engaging with your target audience on various digital channels.

Content should be tailored to the interests and needs of your target audience, while campaigns should be designed around specific objectives and goals.

By leveraging digital channels, businesses can reach their target audience more efficiently and effectively than traditional methods.

Email marketing campaigns can be tailored to specific customer segments, ads can be targeted to people who have expressed an interest in your products or services, and social media posts can be used to engage with customers in meaningful ways.

  1. Measure and Analyze Results

After the hard work of planning and executing a digital marketing strategy, you’ll reach the exciting stage of measuring and analyzing your results.

This is where all your efforts pay off! To properly assess your strategy’s effectiveness, it’s important to track key metrics. Pageviews, unique visits, and session duration can measure website traffic.

Conversion rates help you understand how many visitors turned into customers or took practical actions, such as signing up for your newsletter or downloading content. Finally, engagement levels can be seen by looking at the time on the page, pages per session, and bounce rate.

  1. Refine and Adapt

This involves optimizing your current campaigns, adjusting your messaging and content strategy, and testing new digital channels and tactics.

By continuously refining and adapting your digital marketing strategy, you can ensure that it’s always up-to-date and meets the needs of your target audience.

This could be setting benchmarks for success, test approaches, and marketing channels and noting any changes in customer behavior.

Conclusion: Create and implement an effective digital marketing strategy

Creating and implementing an effective digital marketing strategy is essential for businesses in today’s competitive landscape.

By defining clear business objectives, conducting a situational analysis, identifying your target audience, developing a messaging strategy, and choosing the best digital channels and tactics, create a powerful digital marketing strategy to help them reach their goals.

With the right approach, businesses of any size can develop an effective digital marketing strategy to provide a competitive edge while increasing customer engagement and ROI.

Take these next steps to start creating your digital marketing strategy

Next Steps: What Now?

Further Reading – Useful Resources

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a digital marketing strategy and a traditional marketing strategy?

Digital marketing strategy employs digital channels like social media, search engines, and email to interact with and attract the targeted audience. On the contrary, a traditional marketing strategy relies on mainstream media, including print, TV, and radio, for audience reach. Digital marketing is often more cost-effective and targeted in comparison to the traditional marketing approach.

How do I measure the effectiveness of my digital marketing strategy?

You can use KPIs like website traffic, conversion rates, engagement levels, and ROI to gauge how well your digital marketing strategy is performing. Analyzing and keeping track of these metrics can help you refine your digital marketing strategy and make it more effective.

What are some common mistakes to avoid when developing a digital marketing strategy?

To create a successful digital marketing strategy, avoiding common mistakes is important. These include not establishing specific business objectives, lacking a deep understanding of your intended audience, failing to create a messaging strategy tailored to their needs, using ineffective digital platforms, and not dedicating enough resources and budget to execute your plan effectively.

How can I ensure that my digital marketing strategy stays relevant?

To ensure that your digital marketing strategy stays relevant, it’s important to continuously monitor industry trends, track the performance of your marketing campaigns, and adapt your strategy to changing consumer behaviors and preferences.

How often should I update my digital marketing strategy?

It is important to regularly update your digital marketing strategy to ensure its relevance and effectiveness. The frequency of updates will depend on various factors, such as changes in business goals, alterations in the target audience or market, and the emergence of new digital channels or technologies. A systematic review and strategy update once a year is a recommended best practice.

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