What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan that outlines how your business will achieve its marketing goals via online channels like search and social media. Most strategy plans will summarize which online channels and digital marketing tactics you will use, plus how much you will invest in these channels and tactics.
What are some examples of digital marketing strategies?
Examples of digital marketing strategies include a social media campaign that includes partnerships with influencers, a content marketing strategy that uses online guides to drive leads, or a growth marketing strategy that uses social media and email build customer loyalty.
Why have a digital marketing strategy?
Establishing a digital marketing strategy is critical. If you partner with an experienced full-service digital marketing agency, like WebFX, you can trust that one of our initial to-dos is building a smart and competitive strategy for your company.
Without Internet marketing strategies, your business doesn’t have a map for achieving its goals or objectives and key results. You know what you want to accomplish, but you don’t know how. That often leads to the launch of a digital marketing campaign that fails to drive any results.
If you want to invest in digital marketing, you need to invest in a digital marketing plan.
How to create a digital marketing strategy
Curious about how to create a digital marketing strategy?
Follow these eight steps:
- Define your brand: Outline or use your brand guidelines to define your brand and how it’ll come through in your online campaigns. Think about your unique selling points (USPs), brand voice, and value proposition.
- Build your buyer personas: Determine who your business wants to reach with custom buyer personas. Think about user demographics, as well as the motivations that drive people to choose your company, products, and services.
- Create your S.M.A.R.T. goals: Use specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals (also known as S.M.A.R.T. goals) to guide your strategy. Think about your organization’s short- and long-term goals for growth.
- Choose your digital marketing strategies: Pick the best strategies for your business. Focus on the techniques that offer the most value for your business and industry, versus trendy strategies.
- Set your digital marketing budget: Research digital marketing pricing to build a realistic budget for your business. For reference, most businesses spend $2500 to $12,000 per month on online marketing.
- Brainstorm your strategy: Guide your strategy to success by planning your strategy. If you’re advertising, determine your ad spend. If you’re publishing content, build your content calendar.
- Launch your campaigns: Following your planning, launch your campaigns across channels. Ensure all your channels feature the appropriate tracking information. Your website, for example, should feature your Google Analytics tracking code.
- Track your results: Monitor and measure the performance of your strategies by tracking their performance. Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads to keep a pulse on your strategies and their return on investment (ROI).
With these eight steps, your company can launch your first online marketing strategy. If you need help creating your online marketing strategy (or want to create the best one), consider online marketing services, like from WebFX.
6 Types of Digital Marketing Strategies
There are several main types of digital marketing strategies. The action plan always depends on the product type and its target audience.
Social Media Marketing
SMM is a good opportunity to promote a product or service on social networks. The most popular platforms for advertising campaigns are:
To promote your product well on social media, you need to specialize in B2B and LinkedIn services.
How does it work?
Social media gathers customer data. Then, advertising offers are formed based on their interests. Facebook and Twitter are great for native text ads while on Instagram visualization plays a major role.
Video Content
Videos are a very powerful tool for influencing your audience.
These are types of videos used to achieve digital marketing goals:
- Educational. Demonstrate to the consumer how your product can be used to their benefit. Create a mini-course or short blog with tips.
- Interview. An expert recommendation is a powerful argument for a person considering purchasing your product.
- Reviews. The buyer gets the impression that a real person is in dialogue with them. Due to this, there is a trust in you as a seller.
- Videos from events. These can be from seminars, meetings, or parties. Create the illusion of being in the audience.
- Demonstrations. These videos are needed for the buyer to get to know the product better.
Google Ads
Paid ads at the top of Google search look pretty much the same as regular ads, except for one detail – they all have an “Ad” particle. Based on the auction, these results are displayed at the top of the search page. Many users just click on the first link and do not think this is an advertisement.
This method works well for companies looking to increase traffic to their site quickly. However, it is important to remember. There are very expensive requests – up to $100 per click – which may not pay off in some cases. Therefore, you need to calculate the ROI before choosing a channel. It may well be that the selected traffic channel is not efficient enough to make it worthwhile.
Email Marketing
The most popular and effective digital marketing method out there. Of course, that is only the case if you have your own collected email database. Buying unknown email addresses poses the risk of creating spam and negative user reactions to your brand.
The method works great if you need to identify your audience’s interests, create a relevant ad offer, and set up your mailing list.
To send emails, you must first create a lead base. These are the people who will read your email rather than sending it straight to their spam folder. Greeting cards and thank you letters increase customer loyalty while notifying them about all current promotions.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO – optimizing your site increases the number of potential customers.
The closer the site is to the TOP 3, the more organic traffic you will gain from the Google search engine. Google analyzes your website based on algorithms – how well it matches user requests – before it forms the rating. Therefore, it is necessary to start by analyzing the keywords that potential buyers are looking for in this niche.
A detailed analysis of your web pages should be based on:
- Studying the use of keywords.
- Understanding to what extent a service or category of goods meets the target audience’s requirements.
- Correction of all SEO errors that prevent Google from indexing the site.
- Creating a strategy for getting backlinks.
Skillfully performed SEO optimization helps to attract high-quality traffic to the site.
Marketing Analytics
This method helps analyze the project’s current state and determine the development perspective. Marketers need marketing analytics to monitor user behavior on a website page. The main disadvantage of this method is a large amount of data that needs to be constantly processed. With Plerdy, you can easily analyze an ad campaign and build hypotheses to improve usability.
Marketing analytics are also needed to:
- Measure and objectively assess brand capabilities.
- Compare attribution metrics online and offline.
- Drill down to human-level data.
- Contextualize customer and market information.Incorporate different types of marketing into your strategy, don’t be limited to one or two methods.
What is the Difference Between Digital Marketing Strategy and Digital Marketing Tactics?
Marketing strategy and tactics – what’s the difference between these terms? Let’s figure it out in order.
Marketing strategy contains the steps you need to take towards achieving your goals. How to build your marketing strategy:
- First, determine what makes you stand out from the competition.
- Second, try to emphasize that in your promotion campaign plans.
- Last, calculate finance costs, human resource costs, and deadlines.
This will determine the profitability of your ad campaign and the estimated profit. It is necessary to draw both positive and negative predictions of results. Develop a plan of action in the event of an ad campaign failure. Analyze competitors’ sites and find their weak points. Remember: the flaws of your opponents are your advantages. Once you have set your ultimate goal, determine how you will achieve it.
Marketing tactics are a set of tools for successfully implementing a marketing strategy. For each site, you need to develop an individual plan. Here are the marketing steps that are used most often:
- Website or online store development.
- Analyze market potential based on user queries.
- Site improvements and testing new targeted traffic channels.
- Analysis of competitors from the site’s point of view and advertising campaigns.This can be easily done using services such as similarweb.com, ahrefs.com, and semrush.com.
- Launch the first Google Ads campaign and analyze the results of the micro and macro versions.
- On-page site optimization followed in 1-2 months by off-page planning.
- Using Plerdy, conduct an ongoing analysis of user behavior based on click maps and video sessions, study the impact of site elements on sales.
Digital marketing strategies and tactics are interdependent – use them simultaneously to achieve your business goals.
Digital Marketing Strategies Examples and Case Studies
Airbnb
Airbnb is an online marketplace for posting classifieds and finding short-term home rentals worldwide. The company took a comprehensive approach to its marketing strategy. First, the site gave the owners advice on presenting their property in the best possible light.
Airbnb has created neighborhood guides to help customers pay attention to the addresses they want. Thus, clients saw sights and cafes and places to rest.
Why this ad campaign was successful:
- Users take this offer as advice.
- No obsessive sensation is created.
- A wide choice – the client chooses what is right for them.
Trust and an assortment of options are the main strengths of this campaign. Airbnb uses digital marketing strategies to help sellers better communicate about their product. In this case, the consumer determines whether the proposed product is interesting or not. The advertiser proposes but does not impose.
BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed is a media company that has gained incredible popularity among users precisely because of its advertising.
The bottom line is that each person indicates their interests when registering – based on this, a mailing list with promotional offers is created. For example, if you like to eat pizza – get an email list of restaurants and cafes that are tasty and inexpensive.
Why users love this ad campaign:
- Personalization. Each person feels that these offers have been specially selected for them.
- Need. People are interested in savings so these letters are read, not deleted.
Such simple techniques always increase consumer loyalty to the company. BuzzFeed is an example of a smart strategy focusing on user interests. Additionally, the company eventually opted to use more sophisticated digital marketing tactics and were equally successful.
Lay’s
Lay’s is a potato chips company. It is an offshoot of the PepsiCo holding.
The essence of the unique #SmileDekeDekho ad campaign was a simple smile. 350 influential and popular personalities from all over the world were selected to promote the company. They became the brand ambassadors and the faces of the advertising campaign.
Why this marketing strategy was successful:
- Flash mob on social networks. Snapchat and Instagram users took photos with a packet of chips and thus attracted new customers.
- Good mood after purchase. A pack of chips was associated with a smile and a positive mood for consumers.
Active, positive action is what truly unites people around the world. Digital marketing has a variety of strategies, but the one where the audience is screaming about the product is the most effective.
Nikon
The company launched a flash mob: “I …” – each person could try on any role and capture it in a photo. This ad worked especially well with examples of childhood nostalgia. Remember how we played with bubbles in the bathroom or pretended to be a shark there? Thousands of consumers remembered how fun it was – and happily, as adults, took funny pictures.
Why this ad campaign is good:
- Brand association with positive moments in life.
- Involvement in something interesting and large-scale.
Please note that positive activity was involved in this project, as in the previous example. This is the optimal digital marketing strategy.
Android
Android is the most popular operating system in the world. However, it also needs constant promotion and advertising. For example, the Friends Furever animal video ad campaign made a splash on the web.
Why this marketing strategy is attractive:
- Users do not have the impression that this is an advertisement.
- Customers associate a positive video experience with the company.
- Fact: Users are happy to share videos that cause affection. This strategy is not like direct advertising. Instead, it perfectly demonstrates the essence of digital marketing – to captivate the user and create positive associations with the product using digital tools.
Conclusion :
A well-built digital marketing strategy is the key to successful promotion. Focus on the result you want to achieve and make a detailed plan that you can follow step by step. Apply various marketing tactics and look for creative solutions to increase your audience. In most cases, customers do not buy because they need to, but because of good advertising. Product presentation plays a critical role in product promotion. Stand out from the competition and demonstrate your value to the consumer. A smart digital marketing strategy is guaranteed to increase profits.
