The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing: How to Build a Comprehensive Digital Strategy

• Updated on: 2018-10-21
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In short: Your digital marketing strategy is the arrangement of activities that will help you accomplish your goal(s) utilizing web based marketing. The expression "strategy" may appear to be threatening, but building an effective digital strategy doesn't should be troublesome.

In an ever-changing digital landscape, success in business can often depend on what you do (or don’t do) in terms of marketing your company online.

From SEO to content marketing and analytics, it can be overwhelming figuring out where to start -- and, more importantly, what’s going to have the biggest impact on your business. To be effective at digital marketing, you’ll need a strategy and startup ideas.

It’s easy to confuse your digital strategy with your digital marketing, but here’s how to distinguish the two.

As we’ve already outlined, your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to help you achieve your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you towards meeting that goal. You need to create very intelligent campaign and business ideas with low investment.

For example, you might decide to run a campaign sharing some of your best performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through that channel. That campaign is part of your strategy to generate more leads.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned by analyzing historical performance. Consider these insights as you move forward. What worked? What didn’t? It is helpful to outline your performance in great detail so that you have a benchmark for goal-setting. Make note of any tracking issues or caveats, if applicable.

For any marketing strategy -- offline or online -- you need to know who you’re marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them.

Identify your goals & the digital marketing tools you’ll need.

Your marketing goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of the business. For example, if your business’s goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your goal as a marketer might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than you did last year to contribute towards that success with top web hosting services.

At the heart of digital marketing is your owned media, which pretty much always takes the form of content. Everything your brand says is your content, whether that’s your ‘About Us’ page, your product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, social media posts -- it’s all considered content. Content helps convert your website visitors into leads and customers, and helps to raise your brand’s profile online. Whatever your goal, you’re going to need to use owned content to form your digital marketing strategy.

Your strategy document will be very individual to your business, which is why it’s almost impossible for us to create a one-size-fits-all digital marketing guide template. Remember that the purpose of your strategy document is to map out the actions you’re going to take to achieve your goal over a period of time -- as long as it communicates that, then you’ve nailed the basics of creating a digital strategy.