How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital marketing strategy is a plan for using online platforms to grow your business and reach your goals. These platforms include search engines, social media, paid ads, and your website. It looks at what your business is already doing well and what you could improve to meet your goals. Then, it creates clear steps and tactics to get you there using digital tools like social media, websites, email, and more.
Create Your Ideal Customer Profiles
A successful digital marketing strategy begins with knowing your audience. Start by defining who your ideal customers are and creating detailed profiles to represent them, called buyer personas. A buyer persona represents the type of customer you want to attract, based on real research, surveys, and interviews with your audience.
It’s essential to base your understanding of your audience on real data rather than assumptions. Wrong assumptions can lead to a poor marketing strategy. Buyer personas are especially useful if you have a specific or niche audience. For example, if you run a blog or business targeting a specific group, like minority entrepreneurs, it’s better to deeply understand their needs and challenges rather than guess what they might want.
To create a full picture of your buyer persona, gather input from a mix of sources, such as your current customers, potential customers, and even people outside your usual audience who match your target group.
The type of information you should gather for your buyer persona will vary depending on your business. The details might vary if you’re selling to other businesses (B2B) or directly to customers (B2C), or if you offer high-cost or low-cost products.
Define Your Goals and the Digital Tools You’ll Use
Your marketing goals should align with your business’s main objectives. For example, if the goal of my business is to boost online sales by 20%, the marketing team’s goal could be to get 50% more leads through the website compared to last year, helping achieve that target.
Tip: I suggest using a simple marketing plan template to outline your yearly strategy, highlight key priorities, and more.
No matter what your digital marketing goal is, it’s important to track your progress with the right tools. For example, HubSpot’s Reporting Dashboard combines all your marketing and sales data, so you can easily see what’s working and what’s not. This helps you improve your strategy going forward. My favorite feature is the customizable dashboard, where you can select the metrics that matter most to your business.
Assess Your Current Digital Channels and Resources
When looking at your existing digital marketing channels and resources to decide what to include in your strategy, it helps to take a step back and see the bigger picture. This way, you won’t feel overwhelmed or confused.
Start by collecting all the digital tools and assets you have. Then, organize them into categories in a spreadsheet. This will give you a clear overview of what you own, what you’ve earned, and what you’ve paid for.
Owned, Earned, and Paid Media Framework
To organize your channels, use the “owned, earned, and paid media” framework. This helps you decide which assets fit best into your strategy.
- Owned Media: These are the digital assets that your business owns and fully controls, like your website, social media accounts, blog, or images. For example, if you have a blog on your website or a page on social media, those are owned media.
- Earned Media: This refers to content created about your business that you didn’t pay for, like press mentions, reviews, or people sharing your content. It’s earned because others share or talk about your business without you paying them. This could include media coverage or customer word-of-mouth.
- Paid Media: These are the channels where you spend money to get attention. This includes ads on Google, paid posts on social media, or sponsored content on other websites. Essentially, any place where you pay to be noticed falls under paid media.
Review and Plan Your Owned Media Campaigns
Owned media, like content, is a key part of digital marketing. Almost everything your brand shares online can be considered content, including your website pages, product descriptions, blog posts, social media updates, and more. Content helps turn website visitors into leads and customers, while also improving your brand’s visibility online. Plus, if your content is optimized for search engines (SEO), it can bring more organic traffic to your site.
No matter what your digital marketing goal is, owned content should be a part of your plan. Start by deciding what type of content will help you reach those goals. For example, if your goal is to get 50% more leads this year, your “About Us” page may not be as helpful unless it has previously brought in leads.
Audit Your Existing Content
Don’t worry, content audits are much easier than they sound! Just list all the content you already have and rank it based on what performed best in helping you meet your current goals. For example, if your goal is to generate leads, rank your content by how well each piece has helped in lead generation over the last year.
The purpose is to see what’s working and what’s not, so you can create better content in the future.
Identify Gaps in Your Content
Ensure your existing content aligns with the needs, challenges, and goals of your target audience. For example, if you offer graphic design services and know your clients struggle with creating visually compelling social media posts, create content that addresses this challenge. This could include guides on making impactful graphics or tips for branding.
Analyze performance metrics to understand which content types resonate most with your audience. You might find that ebooks on landing pages generate more leads compared to other formats like webinars. Tailoring your content strategy based on these insights helps you meet your audience’s needs effectively.
In this case, you could plan to create an ebook on “how to study more effectively.”
Create a Content Plan
Based on your audit and the gaps you find, create a content plan. Your plan should include:
- Title of the content
- Format (e.g., blog post, video, ebook)
- Goal of the content
- Where you’ll promote it
- Why you’re creating it
- Priority level (how important it is)
You can keep this in a simple spreadsheet, and include a budget if you plan to hire someone, or a time estimate if you’re doing it yourself.
Review and Plan Your Earned Media Campaigns
Reviewing your past earned media can help you decide where to put your efforts. Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that’s your goal) and rank each source based on how well it performed.
For example, you might find that an article you contributed to an industry publication brought lots of visitors to your website, leading to more conversions. Or you may see that most of your content is shared on LinkedIn, which brings in more traffic.
The goal is to figure out what types of earned media have worked best for you and what hasn’t, based on past data. If there’s something new you want to try, don’t dismiss it just because it’s untested.
Audit and plan your paid media campaigns
Auditing your paid media campaigns is a simple process. Just look at your ads across each platform (like Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and figure out what’s helping you reach your goals.
For example, if you’re spending a lot on ads but not seeing the results you expected, it might be time to adjust your strategy or try a different platform that works better for you.
By the end of this review, you should know which paid media platforms you want to keep using and which ones you might want to stop using.
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Combine All Elements of Your Digital Marketing Campaign
You’ve done the research and planning, and now you have a clear picture of what your digital marketing strategy will look like. To recap, here’s what you should have figured out so far:
- Clear profiles of your ideal customers (buyer personas).
- One or more specific marketing goals.
- A list of your current owned, earned, and paid media.
- A review of your existing media (owned, earned, and paid).
- A plan for creating or improving your owned content.
Now it’s time to bring everything together and plan the campaigns that will make up your strategy.
Understanding digital marketing strategies is key to your success. While earning a degree in marketing can help boost your career, there are also many basic marketing strategies used by teams in different industries that you can start with right away.
A successful digital marketing strategy starts with understanding who your audience is, setting clear goals, and choosing the right tools and content to help you reach those goals.
By reviewing your current media, planning your content, and analyzing what works, you can create a strategy that helps your business grow online.
If you need expert help to build or improve your digital marketing strategy, working with a digital marketing agency in Edmonton can make the process easier. They can help you plan, manage, and execute campaigns that attract more customers and boost your online presence.