A complete guide for making a digital marketing strategy

A digital marketing strategy and planning is the building block within your digital marketing that moves you towards achieving your goals. You might, for example, run a marketing campaign on X if your digital marketing goal is to generate more leads through X. You may also share some of the best-performing gated content on X to generate more leads.

Build your buyer personas

You should know who you are targeting. This applies to all forms of marketing, including traditional marketing. The best marketing strategy is built upon buyer personas. The first step should be to create your buyer personas.

Buyer personas typically represent your target audience and can be created by surveying, researching and interviewing the target audience of your business. You should note that this critical information should be based on real data. Making assumptions about your target audience can cause your strategy to go in the wrong direction.

Your research pool has to include a mixture of prospects, customers, and people outside your database but align with your audience to get a rounded picture of your target audience. The type of information you gather for your target audience to inform your strategy is likely to vary depending on whether you are a B2C business or B2B business or whether you sell cheap or expensive products.

Identify your marketing goals

Your marketing goals should be tied back to your business goals. This means that your digital marketing agency should know your business goals in order to come up with marketing goals. You should be able to measure your strategy’s success with the right marketing tools irrespective of your overarching digital marketing goals.

Evaluate your existing digital assets and channels

You should consider the big picture when reviewing your existing marketing assets and channels to determine what to include in your marketing strategy. This will prevent you from feeling confused or overwhelmed. You need to gather what you already have and categorise each asset in a spreadsheet. This will ensure you have a clear picture of your earned, owned and paid media.

Audit and carefully plan your owned media campaigns

Owned media is at the heart of digital marketing. It almost always comes in the form of quality content. This is because nearly every message you broadcast can be classified as content. Content plays an important role in converting your website visitors into customers and leads whilst improving your online presence. This content can be used to boost your organic traffic through search engine optimisation. You should incorporate owned content irrespective of your goals. Start by deciding the right content that will help you achieve your goals.

Bring your marketing campaign together

You should bring your digital marketing campaign together after creating your marketing strategy and planning. Planning and research give you a solid vision of all elements that will make up your marketing strategy. You need to know some of the basic marketing strategies to understand what digital strategies entail. These basic marketing strategies include paid advertising, content marketing, account-based marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimisation, podcasting, influencer marketing, video marketing and email marketing.