What Is A Digital Marketing Strategy?

Have you ever tried to run a marathon without focussed training? Unfortunately, even if you exercise and eat healthily, the chances of you being able to run a marathon successfully may be small.

The same assumption applies to your poorly driven, but equally healthy-looking marketing efforts. A lack of strategy behind your actions could be the reason you’re not getting any results.

With the absence of a backed strategy, your online marketing efforts wouldn’t gain motion as they are still mutually exclusive. A digital marketing strategy is an inbound channel strategy which relies on the what, why and where as well as the ‘how do we get there?’

Without a strategy, there’s no way of understanding or even knowing the results of your actions. The same applies to your digital marketing efforts – without a strategy, you won’t be able to track progress and make sure that you’re sending the right message, to the right audience, at the right time.

Let’s discuss six components of a digital marketing strategy that could have a substantial impact on your business growth.

Buyer personas

Once you start to understand the value that your marketing activities add to your overall business goals, it’s important to consider who will ultimately determine their success – your customers.

But who exactly are they?

Here’s where buyer personas come into play. Considering your value proposition which includes your product, customer service and unique selling proposition (USP) – actual, core and augmented products – start to hypothesise and map out who you believe will be wanting or needing your business the most. In developing your buyer personas, you’ll also develop an understanding of what their pains are, which can help shape your business goals and product development.

Content

As a marketer, you have to be mindful that not everyone who visits your website is ready to buy yet, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll never make a purchase.

To spark engagement with your audience and to draw people to your marketing funnel, you need to create related content for your leads. These can be blog posts, testimonials, eBooks and free guides. Content to spark awareness will bring in leads, and nurture them without intrusion.

To generate marketing qualified leads (MQLs) – people who are considering to buy your type of product or service – you can gate your content. In this way, the prospect will have to input their personal information in order to consume your content. From here, you can identify whether this person is likely to engage with more tailored content to pull them through the marketing funnel.

via GIPHY

Website

What’s the one way to display your content online?

A website with your user in mind, with the right design and functionality, will draw in your audience. By kickstarting the buyer journey, your website is one of the first assets your audience sees.

A digital marketing strategy needs to determine the stage of the buyer’s journey that a lead is in, so a website needs to work in facilitating this. A pillar page works well in displaying all your content on one page. From here, your content should map itself out on the page in a way that mimics your buyer journey.

Social media

Did you know that social media counts as part of your digital marketing strategy?

As well as creating awareness of your brand, social media is a key performance indicator (KPI) for efficiently roadmapping your strategy.

Analytics can tell you about follower growth and engagement statistics. Paired against marketing campaigns, you are in a better position to understand what your audience responds well to, and what they don’t. Social media can also give you a blueprint of your buyer personas, where you’re able to see what other brands they’re interested in, whom they interact with, and which of your content they engage with most.

Marketing automation

To capitalise on the engagement you’re creating through building relevant and interesting assets, you need a system which can funnel and filter the leads that are generated. Building a strategy around the marketing automation software you’re using will greatly enhance your efficiency, as you can adapt your business goals around the return on investment (ROI) generated from your inbound activities.

Marketing software prevents data from being duplicated; a challenge for businesses who don’t have full visibility of real-time information for all departments. In understanding your digital marketing strategy, marketing automation makes sure the right content gets to the right people, at the right time.

Marketing and sales alignment

In a digital marketing strategy, marketing and sales need to work together in disseminating relevant data, and to combine their efforts for effective lead nurturing and generation.

The ultimate objective for a digital marketing strategy is to convert leads to sales qualified leads (SQLs) which means that the lead needs to pass through the marketing team and verified before the sales team makes contact. This will allow you to get a better ROI on your contacted leads.

A digital marketing strategy feeds off communication to fulfil its potential. Without communication, a strategy fails. A digital marketing strategy should incorporate every aspect of your business as its formation relies on the strength of all your activities – not just your marketing. How can a digital marketing strategy help your business?

Take a look at our free eBook if you’d like to learn more about how you can begin your digital marketing journey.