What is Digital Marketing Strategy & how to plan ?

Check out what you will be learning about digital marketing strategy in this blog:

• What is a Digital Marketing strategy?
• Assets of Digital Marketing Strategy
• Why do you need a Digital Marketing Strategy?
• How to Make a Digital Marketing Strategy?
• Types of Digital Marketing Strategy with Examples
• Stages to Plan a Digital Marketing Strategy
• Example of a Digital Marketing Campaign
• Digital Marketing Strategy Success Factors
• Main Objectives of a Digital Marketing Strategy
• The Bottom Line

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What is a Digital Marketing strategy?

A Digital Marketing strategy is a plan designed specifically to fulfill business goals through online marketing. This online marketing should be implemented through relevant online marketing channels for optimized performance. Every digital marketing course first helps you identify the strategy that can work for you. It is very important to remember that not all marketing channels are suitable for all businesses.

For instance, photographers should focus on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Behance, Pinterest, etc. rather than spending time on YouTube if they want to showcase their photographs unless, of course, they also release photography tutorials on YouTube.

Similarly, an educational institute will have no use for Instagram or Pinterest unless they have interesting infographics to share. It all depends on where your target audience is. It is necessary to be able to identify the platforms that will bring in a larger audience. If you are advertising in the wrong place, then the effort is as good as wasted.

All successful businesses know about leveraging the appropriate tactics to identify and reach out to their target audience and convert them into leads. So, first and foremost, you have to identify your business goals and find the right Digital Marketing tools to achieve them.

Another important thing to pay attention to is that marketing strategies and marketing tactics, though they are often used interchangeably, are not the same. While the marketing strategy is a set of plans outlined to help achieve your business goals, marketing tactics are the set of actions within that strategy.

Assets of Digital Marketing Strategy

An asset of a Digital Marketing Strategy is a tool that you use online. Let’s take a look at some of the most common Digital Marketing Assets:

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Importance of Digital Marketing Strategy

A Digital Marketing Strategy is like a map to your Digital Marketing Objectives. Establishing a Marketing Strategy for your business is crucial to all your endeavours. Knowing what you want to achieve is important but if you don’t know how to get there, your campaigns will fail to drive any results.

You need to have a defined digital value proposition that caters to your target audience. A good Digital Marketing Strategy will help you attract your leads efficiently and reduce Digital Marketing Mistakes. Sometimes, even if a company is spending huge bucks on marketing, they are still unable to get through to their customers. This usually happens in big companies where different marketing teams use different tools to do similar marketing jobs for them.

The chaos that is created can be solved by investing in a good Digital Marketing Strategy that can help your team. A good Marketing Strategy can help you plan, optimize and manage all your digital channels and platforms effectively. It will help you achieve all your business goals, and boost your ROI.

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How to Make a Digital Marketing Strategy?

To create a Digital Marketing Strategy, you need to know who you’re selling to. For this, you’ll need to create buyer personas. A buyer persona would represent your ideal customer. It requires a lot of research, survey, and interviews. You can use web analytics, Google Analytics, and different research tools to find demographic information. You can easily identify their age, location, income, or job roles.

A buyer persona is incomplete without goals, challenges, interests, and priorities. All of this information can be gathered by speaking to your customers. Once you’ve built a good customer persona, next you’ll need to identify your marketing goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need to use. You’ll need to use the right digital marketing tools to be able to measure the success of your Digital Marketing Strategy. Otherwise, how will you know if it’s working or not?

It is always a good idea to evaluate and reevaluate your existing digital marketing channels whenever you’re creating a new Digital Marketing Strategy. This will help you create a comprehensive report on what is already being used and how effective it has been. Then you can decide what to keep and what to cut.

When you’ve got the Digital Marketing channels figured out, you’ll need to decide on the type of content or Content strategy you’ll be creating and how much budget will be spent on each of these channels. Once everything else is in place, you’ll need to bring all these things together so you can keep track of your digital marketing campaign.

A little further in this blog, we’ll discuss all of the stages to plan a Digital Marketing Strategy in detail. For now, let’s look at some types of Digital Marketing Strategies.

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Types of Digital Marketing Strategy with Examples

The most common types of Digital Marketing Strategies with examples are discussed in this section.

Social Media Marketing Platforms

On average, people have about eight social media accounts. They spend about 2 to 3 hours a day on social media. With consumption in such a huge amount across the world, it is no surprise that Social Media Marketing Platforms are very important for Digital Marketers.

Social Media Platforms can be used in various ways to reach the target customers. You can use them to distribute paid ads or sponsored content. All these platforms have dedicated tools to help marketers create paid ad campaigns and place them based on interests, age, job, location, etc.

Social Media Platforms also help in organic promotions and reaching out to customers. Customer engagement and interaction help build customer loyalty.

There are brands that have gotten a reputation online due to their social media interactions.

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Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing is a great way to reach your target audience. Brands partner with celebrities, websites, or other experts in their fields. Brands can reach their audience with sponsored content, offers, and giveaways.

Email Marketing

Companies can stay connected with customers via email marketing campaigns. It is part of their Email Marketing strategy. This usually includes sending personalized newsletters and offers based on their history with the company.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When a customer is looking for something online, they usually click on one of the top three results that appear. If a company wants to make sure their website that appears in the top results, they do that by optimizing their content for the users.

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Pay-per-click (PPC)

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a type of paid advertising. Digital Marketers use this type of advertising to place ads on search engines or websites. They have to pay some amount every time a user clicks on their ad. The ads usually appear at the top of the search results page.

Also Read: SEO vs SEM

Content Marketing

Marketing teams can create different kinds of content to make customers aware of the brand. Once the customer has realized there is a need, they will start considering the product or service offered by your company and eventually make the decision to buy it.

Affiliate Marketing

In Affiliate Marketing, companies collaborate with individuals and companies. They promote your product and in return get commissions from each sale that comes from their referrals.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing is specifically aimed at mobile devices and includes many of the Digital Marketing Strategies discussed above. It includes things like push notifications, text messages, email, social media, and mobile apps.

To learn how to turn strategy into action, read our blog on What is Strategy Implementation? Key Steps, Tips, and Challenges

Stages of Digital Marketing Strategy

Not every business will have a common set of marketing strategies. However, there are some Digital Marketing techniques that may add value to your Digital Marketing strategy-building process. Let’s take a look at the different stages to plan a Digital Marketing Strategy:

• Understand Your Audience
• Don’t Lose Sight of the End Result
• Content Marketing
• Digital Marketing Campaigns
• Live Events and Meetups
• Mobile Marketing Strategy
• Personalized Experience
• Reflect Company Values and Vision
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

1. Understand Your Audience

A business is nothing without its customers. If you have no one to buy your product or service, your business is already failing. Designing your strategy around your customers is the quintessential starter pack in any Digital Marketing strategy.

You need to understand who your core customers are and why your product or service has drawn them in. Where are they from? Which age group do they belong to? A little bit of research can help you explore and identify your demographic. You also have to find professionals with expertise in those Digital Marketing skills.

Google Analytics is a great medium to do your research. Not only that, but you can try and understand what matters to your audience socially and culturally. Once you have locked these down, it will be easier for you to start coming up with ideas for your marketing moves.

2. Don’t Lose Sight of the End Result

Often, so much emphasis is given to the business offerings that it is quite easy to lose sight of your key business goal—to appeal to the audience. Understanding how your product or service is positively affecting your customers will not only remind you what your end goal should be but also remind the customers, time and again, why they loved your product in the first place. Give your customers a reason to keep coming back. Again, Google Analytics can help you view the areas that are more popular with your audience.

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3. Content Marketing

Content can never go wrong. It is an age-old tried and tested medium for marketing that has worked both offline and online. Any fresh piece of quality written content is valuable to anyone who is looking for information on the Internet. This blog is a perfect example of Content Marketing. Not only is it giving you information and knowledge on how to plan your Digital Marketing strategy, but also it can link you to more related and interesting reading materials like a blog on the best Digital Marketing Tools. Your content can also include CTAs like the below:

4. Digital Marketing Campaigns

Once you have identified a platform that is conducive to your business goals, it is time to start a social media campaign on that platform to boost your promotions and generate leads. Your Digital Marketing campaign should focus on three primary aspects as follows:

Brand awareness

Brand awareness is key to getting your products/services easily recognized.

SEO

A good SEO score is a sign that your marketing campaign is going well.

Social media followers

This number determines the audience’s interest in the business.

5. Live Events and Meetups

Through live events like webinars and meetups, you can ensure connectivity. The ones who attend these live events can later become valued contacts. During these live events, if the attendees find your content to be resourceful, they can reach out to you for more information on your products/services and what you have to offer them. It is also a great way to make contact with your existing database.

A ReadyTalk survey mentions that nearly 20–40 percent of the attendees at a webinar convert into leads.

Read: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

6. Mobile Marketing Strategy

According to a report by Statistica, the number of smartphone users in 2020 surpassed 3 billion worldwide. It is only going to grow further by several hundred million in the upcoming years. Even without numbers, it is quite obvious how using mobile phones for everything, from shopping online to reading reviews on places, has become the new norm. A smart Digital Marketing strategy is to leverage this.

Here is how you can get started:

• Make your website mobile-optimized
• Connect the contact details to a map app
• Work on your website’s loading time
• Review social media ads or ads on other mobile-friendly platforms
• Use contact numbers, addresses, and clickable CTAs (calls to action), e.g., see the below CTA:

7. Personalized Experience

Don’t hesitate to give your customers a personalized experience. You have to make your business more approachable by posting more relatable content or videos. Videos have been observed to draw in more people and are considered one of the top conversion factors. A simple yet touching video will always appeal to the masses. You can also introduce more interactive elements as required. Personalized user experience helps build trust.

8. Reflect Company Values and Vision

Share posts and content that reflect your company’s values and vision. You can give your customers a purpose to come back and retain their trust. Any marketing strategy that is not a reflection of who you are as a company will not make a lasting impression on people’s minds.

9. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Every business will have its own KPIs, i.e., key performance indicators. You will have to set yours in a way that truly gives you the best insights into your performance. Once again, identifying your goals and objectives is key to setting up your KPIs. Here are a few points you can take into consideration:

• Don’t focus on the numbers that don’t reflect long-term success (vanity metrics)
• Isolate critical metrics and analyze them to drain out any negative performances
• Learn to be flexible with your KPIs
• Make sure to set up continuous intervals for the analysis and measurement of performance reports

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Digital Marketing Strategy examples

Let’s take a look at an example of a Digital Marketing Campaign.

McDonald’s Famous Orders

In 2020, McDonald’s started a Digital Marketing Campaign called ‘Famous Orders’. This campaign launched custom McDonald’s orders from artists like Travis Scott and J Balvin. This continued into 2021, with McDonald’s launching custom orders by Saweetie, Mariah Carey, and South Korean pop band BTS.

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In India, McDonald’s collaborated with actress Rashmika Mandanna and released ‘The Rashmika Meal’. The meal was available across all McDonald’s outlets in South India for a limited time.

This campaign was launched in 50 different markets. It helped customers relate to their favorite celebrities in a fun way. There were instances when outlets ran out of celebrity meals because of high demand.

All these meals were curated according to the celebrities’ choice of food from McDonald’s menu. They were instantly popular among fans who were curious to explore the meals. Because of the involvement of celebrities and the huge number of social media posts, the Digital Marketing Campaign became an instant hit.

Digital Marketing Strategy Success Factors

A good Digital Marketing Strategy helps you make the correct decisions for the company. There are some things that can make sure a Digital Marketing Strategy is successful:

• A strategic approach
• A process to improve performance
• A management buy-in
• Good resourcing and structure to the campaign
• Data and infrastructure
• Integrated customer communications
• Customer experience

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Main Objectives of a Digital Marketing Strategy

All Digital Marketing Strategies have important objectives. Let’s look at the four main objectives of a Digital Marketing Strategy:

Increase direct sales

Since so much money is spent on a campaign, you would obviously aim to increase direct sales to get a good ROI.

Maintain a continuous flow of new leads

You need to keep generating new leads so that your sales team always has enough prospective customers to work with.

Reduce the cost of acquiring new customers

With Digital Marketing Campaigns, you can reach a very segregated target audience that would be interested in your products or services. This helps reduce the cost of acquiring new customers.

Keep the customer engaged

You need to make sure your customers are engaged with your brand so that they will keep coming back. This will eventually lead to customer loyalty.

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The Bottom Line

Although there are Digital Marketing frameworks available on the Internet, following these Digital Marketing strategy steps will always make your strategy unique. B2B Digital Marketing strategies will be different from B2C Digital Marketing strategies.

Just like every child needs to be handled differently, your business will need its own strategy and its own set of Digital Marketing strategy planning tools to thrive and grow. There is no one-size-fits-all template to do the work for you.

If you are completely new to this, you can always find numerous Digital Marketing examples and strategies on the Internet that are similar to your business needs. You can take a leaf out of those books, test those methods, and customize them to something that best reflects your business’s core and purpose. Whether you publish a blog, create an email campaign, or have a giveaway contest, make sure your strategy is designed around your goals over a period of time.