What exactly is a digital marketing strategy, you may ask? Well, a digital marketing strategy is not just a mere plan; it’s a grand vision that harnesses the mighty online channels to establish an unassailable internet presence and achieve specific marketing objectives. Picture this – organic search, social media, paid ads, your website, and more, all encompassed within this ingenious strategy. Its ultimate purpose? To amplify your business’s visibility and magnetise those precious new customers to your brand.

Now, let´s take a momentary detour into the land of marketing jargon. Sometimes, the terms “digital marketing strategy” and “digital marketing campaign” are used interchangeably, much like the ever-lasting debate of “chicken or egg.” But fret not, we’ll decipher their subtle differences in a mo.

What´s a Digital Marketing Campaign?

So, what exactly is a digital marketing campaign, you ask with bated breath? Think of it as the dynamic building blocks and action steps that propel your digital marketing strategy towards a laser-focused end goal. Imagine this: your overarching objective is to generate a deluge of leads through the captivating realm of social media. Lo and behold, you plot a digital marketing campaign that takes Twitter by storm. Offering a tantalising taste of your finest gated content, you entice and bewitch prospective leads, magically drawing them into your marketing web.

7 Steps to Create Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Now, let look at how we craft a formidable digital marketing strategy. These 7 steps are our recipe for success, if you will:

1. Who is your ideal buyer?
2. What are your goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need?
3. Inspect and analyse your existing digital channels and assets.
4. Strategise and Organise Your Owned Media Endeavours
5. Audit and plan your earned media campaigns.
6. Audit and plan your paid media campaigns.
7. Bring your digital marketing campaigns together.

1. Who is Your Ideal Buyer?

In marketing, whether traditional or digital, understanding your audience is paramount. A stellar digital marketing strategy hinges on comprehensive buyer personas, making it imperative to kick off your strategy by crafting them.

Streamline your audience segments and fortify your marketing approach with meticulously designed templates for constructing your buyer personas.

These personas epitomise your ideal customer(s) and are forged through rigorous research, surveys, and interviews with your business’s target audience.

It’s crucial to underline that this information should be rooted in real data whenever feasible. Making assumptions about your audience can veer your marketing strategy off course.

To create a well-rounded persona, your research pool should encompass a blend of customers, prospects, and individuals beyond your contacts database who resonate with your target audience.

But what sort of information should you gather to shape your buyer persona(s) and enlighten your digital marketing strategy?

The specifics will hinge on your business – it’s likely to diverge based on whether you operate in a B2B or B2C capacity, or whether you market a high-cost or low-cost product.

Here are some initial points to consider, which you can fine-tune and tailor to your specific business:

Quantitative and Demographic Information

• Location: Leverage web analytics tools to pinpoint the geographical origins of your website traffic.
• Age: Depending on your business, this information may or may not be pertinent. If relevant, discern trends in your existing prospect and contact database to gather this data.
• Income: Delicate details like personal income are best acquired through persona research interviews, as individuals may be disinclined to share this information via online forms.
• Job Title: Rough insights can be gleaned from your existing customer base, particularly crucial for B2B companies.

Qualitative and Psychographic Information

• Goals: Depending on the challenges your product or service addresses, you may already have a grasp of your buyer persona’s goals. Solidify your assumptions by engaging with actual customers and internal sales and customer service representatives.
• Challenges: Engage with customers and customer-facing personnel to understand the common obstacles your audience encounters.
• Hobbies/Interests: Inquire about the hobbies and interests of your customers and target audience. For instance, if you’re a fashion brand, understanding if a sizable segment of your audience is inclined towards fitness and well-being can shape your future content and partnerships.
• Priorities: Consult with customers and target audience members to ascertain what holds the most significance for them in relation to your business. This insight can be invaluable; for example, for a B2B software company, understanding if your audience values customer support over a competitive price point is crucial.

By amalgamating these details, you’ll fashion buyer personas that are precise and immensely advantageous for your business.

2. What are your goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need?

Your marketing goals should invariably align with the fundamental objectives of your business.

For instance, if your business aims to augment online revenue by 20%, your marketing team’s goal might revolve around generating 50% more leads via the website compared to the previous year, contributing to this triumphant outcome.

Leverage a comprehensive marketing plan template to delineate your annual marketing strategy, pinpoint top priorities, and more.

Irrespective of your overarching digital marketing goal, you must possess the means to gauge the success of your strategy using the appropriate digital marketing tools.

3. Inspect and analyse your existing digital channels and assets.

When delving into the assessment of your existing digital marketing channels and assets to determine their integration into your strategy, it’s prudent to begin with a holistic view – this approach prevents feelings of overwhelm and confusion.

Collate your resources and methodically categorise each platform or asset in a spreadsheet, affording you a lucid overview of your current owned, earned, and paid media.

Owned, Earned, Paid Media Framework Unveiled

To execute this task with precision, employ the owned, earned, and paid media framework to classify the digital “vehicles,” assets, or channels you are presently utilising, and discern which ones seamlessly align with your strategy.

Owned Media

This encompasses the digital assets exclusively owned by your brand or company – be it your website, social media profiles, blog content, or visual elements. Owned channels epitomise what your business has complete control over.

This category can also encompass off-site content that you own but isn’t hosted on your website (e.g. a blog you publish on Medium).

Earned Media

Earned media embodies the exposure garnered through word-of-mouth marketing. Whether it’s content you’ve disseminated on other platforms (e.g. guest posts), your PR endeavours, or the customer experience you’ve cultivated. Earned media encapsulates the recognition stemming from these endeavours.

You can amass earned media through press mentions, positive reviews, and by people sharing your content within their networks (e.g. social media platforms).

Paid Media

Paid media encompasses any platform or channel on which you invest to captivate the attention of your buyer personas.

This encompasses avenues such as Google Ads, sponsored social media posts, native advertising (e.g. sponsored posts on external platforms), or any other medium where you pay for heightened visibility.

Now that you have a comprehensive understanding of this framework, let’s explore an illustration.

Illustrative Example of the Owned, Earned, and Paid Media Framework

Imagine you have a piece of owned content on a landing page on your website designed to generate leads. Rather than confining yourself to owned, earned, or paid media in isolation, you aim to incorporate various facets of the framework.

To enhance the lead generation potential of the content, you ensure it is shareable, enabling your audience to distribute it across their social media profiles, thereby augmenting traffic to your landing page – this exemplifies the earned media facet.

To bolster the content’s traction, you may promote it on your Facebook page and invest in expanding its reach to a wider audience, constituting the paid media aspect.

This elucidates how the three facets of the framework can synergise, although it’s not a mandatory formula for success. For instance, if your owned and earned media are already thriving, you might not necessitate investment in paid media. Hence, evaluate the optimal solution to accomplish your goal, and subsequently integrate the channels that align best with your business into your digital marketing strategy.

Now equipped with insights into your current repertoire, you can commence consideration of what to retain and what to relinquish.

4. Strategise and Organise Your Owned Media Endeavours

At the core of digital marketing lies owned media, typically manifested in the form of content. This is because almost every communication your brand disseminates can be construed as content, whether it’s an About Us webpage, product descriptions, blog entries, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, or social media posts.

Content serves as the catalyst for converting website visitors into leads and customers, concurrently enhancing your brand’s online footprint. When this content is imbued with search engine optimization (SEO), it has the potential to elevate your search and organic traffic.

Irrespective of your digital marketing strategy’s objective, integrating owned content is indispensable. To commence, delineate the content that will propel you towards your goals.

Should your objective entail augmenting website leads by 50% compared to the previous year, your About Us page is unlikely to feature in your strategy, unless it has historically been a prolific lead generator.

Below is a concise process to assist you in determining the requisite owned content to fulfil your digital marketing strategy goals.

Evaluate Your Existing Content

Catalogue your current owned content and rank each item based on its historical performance vis-à-vis your current objectives.

For instance, if lead generation is your focus, rank your content according to their lead generation prowess over the past year (such as a blog post, ebook, or webpage).

The aim here is to discern what is presently effective and what isn’t, enabling you to pave the way for success in future content planning.

Identify Content Gaps

Tailored to your buyer personas, identify any voids in your content inventory.

For example, if you operate a math tutoring company and research reveals that one of the prevalent challenges for your personas is devising effective study techniques, then create content to address this need.

Upon scrutinizing your content audit, you may unearth that ebooks hosted on a specific type of landing page yield superior conversion rates (outperforming webinars, for instance).

In the case of the math tutoring company, you might opt to incorporate an ebook on “enhancing study effectiveness” into your content creation roadmap.

Craft a Content Creation Blueprint

Grounded in your discoveries and the gaps you’ve pinpointed, devise a content creation plan outlining the content necessary for achieving your objectives.

This should encompass:

• A title
• Format
• A goal
• Promotional channels
• Rationale behind creating the content
• Priority level of the content

This can be encapsulated in a simple spreadsheet, and should also encompass budgetary details if outsourcing content creation is envisaged, or a time estimate if self-production is the chosen route.

5. Review and Strategise Your Earned Media Endeavours

Assessing your previous earned media in light of your current objectives can offer valuable insights on where to direct your focus. Scrutinise the sources driving your traffic and leads (if that’s your aim), and rank each earned media channel from most impactful to least.

You might uncover that a specific industry press article you contributed to drove substantial qualified traffic to your website, resulting in heightened conversions. Alternatively, you may ascertain that LinkedIn serves as the primary platform for content sharing, consequently augmenting traffic.

The objective is to discern the types of earned media that align with your goals (and those that don’t) based on historical data. Nonetheless, if there’s a novel approach you’re eager to experiment with, don’t dismiss it simply because it’s uncharted territory.

6. Audit and Strategise Your Paid Media Endeavours

This process mirrors much of the same approach: Evaluate your current paid media across each platform (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to identify the avenues most likely to aid you in achieving your existing goals.

If substantial expenditure on Ads hasn’t yielded the anticipated results, it may be time to refine your approach or consider diverting resources to a platform demonstrating greater efficacy.

Upon completion of this process, you should have a lucid understanding of the paid media platforms you intend to persist with, and those that you may contemplate removing from your strategy.

7. Unify Your Digital Marketing Campaign

After meticulous planning and research, you now possess a clear vision of the components that will constitute your digital marketing strategy.

To recap, here’s what you should have delineated thus far:

• Clear profiles of your buyer persona(s)
• One or more digital marketing-specific goals
• An inventory of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
• An assessment of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
• An owned content creation plan or wishlist

With these foundational elements in place, you are primed to advance towards a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that resonates with your audience and propels your brand towards success.

Return here tomorrow to get the final part of our Expert Marketing Strategies, in which we´ll be unveiling the different types of Digital Marketing Strategies.

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