The Ultimate Guide to Building a Robust Digital Marketing Strategy That Yields Results

To achieve the target of acquiring new customers, higher sales, and long-term growth, you must not only include online marketing as the thrust area of marketing but also back it up with the right strategies. It is undeniable that in the modern marketing landscape digital marketing strategy occupies a significant place. How much success you enjoy in business depends on how well you create the digital marketing strategies. When you have well defined and clear-cut approach, it becomes easy to keep in tune with trends and stay ahead in the digital marketing curve. Strategies ensure that you never lose sight of the goals that remain submerged within the activities. It is just not enough to create plans of approach, but you have to fine-tune it and maintain it too.

In this article, we will discuss what digital marketing is, how strategies differ from campaigns besides showing the way to build a digital marketing strategy.

Digital marketing strategy explained

Although it might appear heavyweight and intimidating, digital marketing strategy is simple if you understand its purpose by knowing what it includes. It is normal that you undertake a variety of marketing activities to achieve the ultimate business goals you have set, but you just cannot let things happen on their own. Instead, you need to have a plan of action for achieving the goal and then break it down into various activities so that all the efforts can focus towards the goal. The course of action is what constitutes the strategy. The strategy might include several objectives depending on the size of the business, and consequently, the number of activities would increase. Having a strategy in place helps to stay focused on the objectives.

How to make your strategies stand out?

While the digital marketing strategy encompasses all actions you take for realizing the ultimate goal/s, the digital marketing campaign constitutes the individual steps or a group of activities directed to accomplishing objectives that lead to the bigger goal. All digital marketing campaigns come under the umbrella of the digital marketing strategy. The marketing campaigns are sub-sets of the marketing strategy and exist because the strategy had included it.

If you want to engage a link building company to handle your link building activities, then it constitutes a link building campaign that aims to realize the ultimate goal of driving more traffic to the website, increase leads and improve conversions. Let us now look at some measures you should take to build the strategy.

Know your buyer personas

Creating buyer personas is the top agenda in any digital marketing strategy because you must know to whom you are catering, as the marketing campaign would revolve around them. Once you have identified the target audience for your business, you have to create the profile of ideal customers by creating buyer personas. Gathering real data through research, interviewing and surveying people across the target audience is necessary to develop accurate personas that throw light on the audience behavior and their likes and dislikes. Besides the customers, you also have to include the prospects and people beyond your contact base who have similar traits as that of your customers. Collecting demographic and psychographic information helps to gain insight into the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the audience.

Define your marketing goals and the digital tools you need

The marketing goals emanate from the fundamental goals of the business, which usually targets increased revenue. Since you need more leads to improve revenues, gathering a specific quantum of leads could become the marketing goal. How much improvement in lead generation is required would depend on the percentage of revenue increase considered in the business goal. For setting the goals, you have to ensure that it should be achievable and even measurable. You must have quantifiable targets because it would help to access what you could achieve. Knowing how to measure the achievement is essential, for which you should consider what kinds of digital tools like analytics you would require for measuring the success.

Evaluate the marketing channels

For effective digital marketing, you need the proper digital vehicles on which to place the marketing campaigns. The choice of the digital channels plays a crucial role in the success of the campaign, and you should include it in the digital strategy. Evaluate the digital channels that could consist of owned media, earned media and paid media.  

  • Owned media - The channels like the website, blog content and social media profiles are entirely under your control and constitute the owned channels. It can also include blogs that belong to you but that you have published in another medium.
  • Earned media – The recognition you receive by way of delivering better customer experience or by doing some good work in public relations and the appreciation you receive from guest posting all form the crux of the earned media.  Reviews, press mentions and sharing of content also come under the ambit of earned media.
  • Paid media – The advertising campaign you carry out to support the marketing activities constitute the paid media.

Create a plan for various media

Create a plan for each platform to augment the digital marketing strategy.  Have a proper approach to creating content for your website because it would not only drive traffic to the site but also facilitate the conversion of leads. By optimizing content, you can create a sharp brand image that enhances your efforts in online marketing. Develop a digital strategy around content so that it helps to achieve the business goal.

Audit how you had performed earlier on the earned media platforms and identify the areas for improvement so that you can focus in the areas from where traffic comes and improve lead generation. Google Analytics can help to derive the data that determines the metrics. Evaluate how the paid media initiatives have provided returns and figure out ways of leveraging it to realize the current goals.

Now that you have identified the elements that would constitute the strategy, you have to put the pieces together to draw the larger picture of the digital marketing strategy.