38+ SAMPLE Digital Marketing Strategy

What is Digital Marketing Strategy?

Digital Marketing Strategy is any marketing initiative that influences online media and the internet through different connected devices such as mobile phones, home computers, or the Internet of Things (IoT). Common digital marketing initiatives focus around distributing a brand message through search engines, email, social media, applications, and websites. Modern marketing depends on technology to analyze the complete performance of a marketing campaign, and help guide future strategies and decision making.

Currently, digital marketing often concentrates on reaching a customer with progressively conversion-oriented messages across multiple channels as they move down the sales funnel. Ideally, marketing teams will be able to track the role each of these messages and/or channels played in accomplishing their main goal.

Why is Digital Marketing Strategy Important?

In 2019, due to the exponential rate of the present consumers on online channels, Digital Marketing trended and it surpassed spend-on traditional marketing. With the technology advancements such as AI and machine learning, marketers are better prepared with the marketing technology needed to reach consumers on digital devices at just the right moment. This is opposed to traditional marketing methods–which have to be planned and placed well in advance.  Deliberate the following:

Out of the world population—which is 7.7 billion people—there are about 4.4 billion people who use the internet. Almost 30 percent of consumers prefer interacting with companies or brands via social channels versus going to the physical store. In order to be competitive, organizations need to be seen across digital channels and devices. Yet, this does not mean offline channels should be overlooked all in all. The best way to reach the consumer demands is with an omnichannel presence—combination of offline and digital elements.

8 Types of Digital Marketing Strategies

The 8 common platforms for digital marketing include social media, content marketing, email, influencer marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), affiliate, and mobile. Let’s take a deeper look at each:

Social Media Marketing Platforms. Nowadays, consumers rely on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. This is why it is crucial that brands are active across accounts. Average users have about 8 social media accounts, and about an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes are spent on social media per person per day. In addition, out of the 5.11 billion people who have a phone, 3.26 billion access social media using it. In so many ways, social media platforms allow marketers to reach their prospects. First, marketing teams can use these channels to dispense paid ads and sponsored content. Each platform has a way for marketing teams to create paid ad campaigns and segment users so these ads appear on the feeds of target audience members. While each platform varies, most have abilities that allow marketing teams to place ads based on location, age, job title, interests, etc. Social media is also an effective way to endorse products or resources organically to the followers, and interact with consumers. Some people who follow your brand on social media have likely purchased from you before. Interacting with them on social media or responding to customer service-oriented questions is another way to ensure continued engagement with the brand and nurture positive experiences and customer loyalty.Influencer Marketing. Another efficient way to harness digital channels to reach target audiences is with influencer marketing. Brands can collaborate with sites, celebrities, or others who are considered specialists in their field, that share comparable values. Brands can then influence these influencers’ followers with branded content and proposals. Many marketers have found success with influencer marketing, with 9 out 10 remarking that it was the same or better than other channels they use. Moreover, 1 out of 2 women based a purchase decision on an endorsement from an influencer.Email Marketing. Email marketing promotions let organizations stay connected with prospects and customers, giving them customized newsletters or proposals based on brand engagements or past shopping history. If an individual has interacted with a few of your branded touchpoints–like an email offer for 10 percent off the items they have been thinking about, or free shipping –that may be what eventually brings about a conversion.Content Marketing. Content marketing allows marketing teams to be active in answering their users’ questions. Marketing teams produce content, videos, and other assets to deliver a context to consumers throughout the three stages of the buyer’s journey:
  1. The awareness stage: Buyer realizes they need something;
  2. The consideration stage: Buyer determines a course of action to satisfy this need;
  3. The decision stage: Buyer decides on a product /service to purchase to meet the need.
  4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Marketing

Search engine optimization often goes together with content marketing. For example, when the customer is doing research for which office bag to buy, they will probably click on one of the first three results that appear on Google. With this in mind, the office bags’ marketing team wants to ensure their article appears in those top results. This is done by optimizing cosntent for user experience and ensuring the technical elements are in place to allow search engine crawlers to effortlessly find and index this content.Pay-per-click (PPC). Pay-per-click is a kind of a paid advertising that lets marketing teams basically purchase traffic to their website. Marketers put up ads on websites or search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing, and pay a fee each time the ad is clicked on. These ads are often at the top of the search results page, and are naturally determined by bids on specific keywords, on the other hand, banner ads on websites usually have set prices.Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is comparable to referral programs—means in exchange for a commission from each sale that can be credited to the efforts of working with outside individuals or companies under the agreement that they promote your product. This is a way to outsource some of the heavy lifting of promotion, however, this also means putting your brand’s reputation in someone else’s hands, so this type of marketing often requires more extensive monitoring and tracking.Mobile Marketing. Mobile marketing initiatives can contain many of the digital marketing strategies mentioned above, and typically powers a combination of text messages, email, social media, push notifications, and mobile applications. The significance of mobile marketing is growing, as it is expected that by 2024, the number of mobile shoppers will increase to nearly 187.5 million users. Generally, marketers need to think about how they can optimize their current marketing efforts for mobile to be able to deliver a continuous and user-friendly experience.

What Are the Benefits of Digital Marketing?

Your organization can develop a more unified, customer-centric customer journey that meets your target audience where they are by employing digital marketing initiative. This can help marketing teams more effectively foster brand loyalty and improve customer retention and it opens up the door to ongoing engagement even after a purchase.

8 Steps to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy:

There are plenty of big and little things that can support or hinder a digital marketing strategy’s success from personas to the right tools. Here’s the introductory work you need to make sure the strategy works well, including the useful tools and software:

Step 1: Create a Customer Persona

Buyer personas are a term used to define the ideal customer that can be described by surveying and contacting the pre-defined target group. Formerly, digital marketers collected qualitative and quantitative information about the target audience that included gender, age, occupation, interests, and location. The definition of the possible customer has been taken to another level recently, with buyer personas being successful. Now, the most effective marketing strategies are incomplete without them.

Step 2: Identify Your Goals

This stage is very crucial for every professional marketer. If there are no goals, the strategy will simply not work, so defining them is the main task. Make sure that the goals you established are suitable and measurable.

Step 3: Focus on Blogging

Producing high-quality content is vital for any digital marketing strategy. In order to create quality content for a site and expand your content marketing strategy, Blogging is the way. This key aspect of the strategy shows some critical functions, including reinforcing social media presence, bringing more traffic to the website, positioning against other companies, and ranking all those long-tail search queries and keywords.

If there is a regularly updated blog that the visitors find useful, it means that your website will be easily found through the search engines and can be used as a platform for any marketing campaign.

Step 4:  Evaluate Existing Digital Marketing Channels

Examine the channels and digital assets that you are already using including, blog content, website, social media account, native advertising, word-of-mouth, Google AdWords, paid advertising, and so on. It is okay if your future digital marketing strategy process does not combine all of these elements, but it should use those that were the most effective in the previous year. For instance, if a landing page you recently made has been effective in creating leads, use it again but improve it.

Step 5: Automate Marketing

With the new technology and software getting better, Marketing automation is becoming huge. The leading marketing automation platforms can now do wonders for any digital marketing strategy, making it easier to automate activities such as content marketing, lead generation, email marketing, and more. Also, it is easy to find marketing automation platforms that are conformed with your company’s sales CRM, which improves the entire sales process.

Step 6: Nail Mobile Optimization

It is a mobile-first era, and there is no excuse for not refining the site for a wonderful mobile experience. Mobile optimization includes site design, page speed, and other search engine optimization performance to ensure that people who come to your site using a mobile device have a good experience.

Evaluate the mobile responsive design and email templates to guarantee that the latest methods are being used and make sure to provide only relevant and latest data.

Step 7: Make it Easy for Customers to Reach You

The traffic on your website should be high to ensure positive outcomes since, online business is all about connecting with potential customers. Engaging with your customers is invaluable for your business. Your digital marketing strategy should guarantee that your leads and visitors are not exerting unnecessary effort to connect with you.

Step 8: Track Your Process

Consistent monitoring should be provided to confirm that the strategy is working efficiently. Assigning teams that would deliver this task is important. Remember to learn from the errors and find enhancement opportunities! There is a lot of work involved in designing a digital marketing strategy procedure, but an effective and well-thought plan will make it better.

FAQs

What is a digital marketing platform?

A digital marketing platform is a solution that acts as a chain of variety of functions within the realm of marketing over the internet. Platforms are tools that provide multiple business or technology capabilities in the context of modern business. It also supports multiple functions across these needs such as a single tool to schedule social media updates alone while, there are tools to address specific functions within one business need. Platforms classically allow a more extensive set of purposes with APIs, integrations, and partnerships with other applications or data sources.

What to look for in a digital marketing measurement platform?

A digital marketing measurement platform is vital to understanding what is or what is not effective or helpful in a campaign. When trying to determine which measurement platform is the best fit for your needs, there are a number of considerations to keep in mind like a clean data, relationships with third parties, the ability to look at campaigns holistically, and the marketing attribution model.

Can social media marketing really help my business?

Of course, it will. It has been proven by a lot of businesses. In fact, not applying social media marketing can actually harm your business since, being present on social media is simply expected of any reputable firm these days.

Digital marketing platforms are great resources as brands make an effort to be present across different channels. Tools enable marketers to measure and optimize marketing performance, engagement, and sales by providing a complete view into the success of a campaign at every area. With the capacity to follow granular data like media exposures, sales, and geolocation, you can stem actionable insights that can enlighten decisions and guide marketing efforts in the forthcoming. Be sure to determine your goals to find the platform that covers the correct functionality to align with your business needs.