Digital Marketing Strategy: A Beginner’s Guide

Just like an NBA game: the players have the skills, the coaches have the strategy. When you see the whole field and know your team’s skills, you can make adjustments, offer insights, and give guidance to get the best end results.

See your digital marketing strategy in the same way.

It’s your game plan for success, and without one, you won’t get out of the local league. Use this guide on how to create a digital marketing strategy to align your team, play to their strengths, and get the crowd (your target audience) wanting more.

What is a marketing strategy?

A marketing strategy is a road map for a company’s marketing efforts. It outlines how the company will reach its target audience, promote its products or services, and achieve its business goals.

What is a digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is the process of outlining how you will achieve the goals in the overarching digital marketing plan, including boosting your presence online. This means considering the various channels you’ll use and how you’ll use them to encourage both inbound and outbound leads.

To create an effective strategy, you should use data across the business to inform, speculate and adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape.

A traditional marketing strategy vs a digital marketing strategy

“What is a marketing strategy”, we hear you ask. Well for one, a traditional marketing strategy lacks the technology and data that allows digital marketing to be so customized and targeted, as well as the ability to track efficiently.

Not to mention the fact that once that (traditional marketing) ad is on a bus, it’s on a bus – no room for error because there’s definitely no edit button…

8 types of digital marketing strategies

There are 8 common types of digital marketing, and with that, comes 8 different types of digital marketing strategies:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
2. Pay-per-click (PPC)
3. Affiliate marketing
4. Content marketing
5. Email marketing
6. Social media marketing
7. Video advertising
8. Native advertising

How to create a digital marketing strategy: 5 quick steps

Wait a second… 5 steps to create our next digital marketing strategy? Count us in.

1) Set the right goals and KPIs

First things first, you need to know what direction you’re heading in and what goals you’re aiming for. These goals can be part of the bigger picture (eg. double your website traffic in a year) or more of a short-term goal (eg. breaking into a new market in Q1).

Either way, it’s important to track your progress, motivate your teams to meet these targets, and make sure you’re all aligned and working efficiently.

While challenging targets are crucial to business growth and success, they need to have the perfect balance of challenging and realistic. To understand what is realistic for your industry and business size, competitive benchmarking is key.

Check out our 2024 Marketing Benchmark Report where we evaluated 7 big industries, the key marketing channels they use, and how they use them.

2) Define your target audience

Your digital marketing strategy is all about how you can reach your target audience, grab their attention, get them to engage, and turn them into a customer.

Without an in-depth understanding of who your target audience actually is, including their pain points and buyer behaviors, your marketing efforts will just go right down the drain.

But there’s more to it than that. By delving into buyer personas, you gain insight into so much more than just an age range, job title, or marital status. It can build a bigger picture of who you’re selling to, detailing how they use different marketing channels, as well as other interests or hobbies they have, and trends they’ll be following – gold dust to any marketing strategy.

One example of this is keeping an eye on trending search terms that would relate to your audience. You can use this keyword data to inspire your PPC copy, your blog and social media content, or build campaigns around trending topics. This gives an element of personalization in the eyes of your target audience and lets you ride the wave of increasing search volume.

Don’t know where to start when it comes to building out your buyer personas? Use our handy guide and buyer persona template.

3) Audit your existing digital assets

Before you start thinking “I have so much to do, where do I even start”, it’s really beneficial to have a look at what you’ve already got.

While some of it may be no good anymore, some of this material could be:

• Updated and optimized for your 2024 strategy
• Reinvented with new product features or images
• Chopped up to create newer, smaller digital assets
• Used as inspiration for future digital assets

Once you’ve got your existing digital assets together, you then need to work out where they fit in the customer journey or funnel, which tends to be split into:

• TOFU: Aimed at prospects at the beginning of their journey, to create awareness and increase your visibility
• MOFU: Aimed at targets in the consideration state, as they search for a solution to a specific issue that your product addresses
• BOFU: Aimed at potential buyers, where you’re persuading them that your solution is the best with product-specific information and values

When you’re aligned on what you can use from your existing digital assets, this might inspire more content to bulk out each stage of the funnel.

Something else that will inspire you for new digital assets? Seeing what your competitors are up to. Speaking of…

4) Perform competitive analysis

To know what your competitors are up to, you’ve got to do the research. Competitive analysis tools like Similarweb give you all the data and insights you need to reveal your competition’s digital marketing strategy, including:

• Marketing channels that are working for them
• Organic vs paid keyword lists
• Ads that see the most click-throughs
• Best-performing pages
• And (lots) more!

By performing this type of competitor analysis on around 5 of your top competitors, you’ll gear up your own strategy with inspiration, knowledge of things to avoid, optimizations, and best-practices.

Basically, this is your chance to take your biggest competitors’ ideas… and make yours 10x better.

Here, competitors of wired.com can look into the brand’s search ads that are live, giving an idea into the focus areas and how it is promoting those focus areas.

If competitor analysis is something you want to learn more about (the how-tos, the dos and the don’ts), check out our guide on how to do competitor analysis for digital marketing.

5) Plan your campaigns and content creation

Now you have a bunch of juicy insights, backed by accurate and actionable data, to start planning out your campaigns and content creation strategy.

You should have enough information to understand:

• Which marketing channels are best to reach your target audience
• How to use those marketing channels in most efficient way possible
• What content is likely to boost your engagement rate

This, in turn, will help you set your priorities as a marketing business, set realistic budgets, and create marketing calendars so you can start building out your content and getting things live.

Digital marketing strategy examples

1) SEO marketing strategy: Pepsi.com

Taking a look at the big brand, Pepsi, we can see organic traffic dominates, showing that its marketing team really works its magic with SEO – particularly as its products are sold across many websites.

By using Similarweb website analysis data, you can see March 2023 saw a particular boost, indicating that there was a (successful) campaign that went live in that time. And yep, that indication would be correct.

That’s when Pepsi Nitro was launched; the first-ever nitrogen-infused cola. This inspired a bunch of curious searches with both informational and transactional intent, and ‘pepsi nitro’ and ‘nitro pepsi’ hit the top 3 search terms for the brand giant for that month.

2) PPC marketing strategy: Booking.com

Booking.com has always had a strong presence on searches for travel and accommodation, especially with its paid marketing efforts, and it looks like the brand is using this expertise to break into new markets.

Diving into the data, we can see that both its current top-performing ads and paid landing pages point towards an overarching goal to build brand awareness across Europe.

Combining a relevant keyword list with true localization is key to breaking into new markets.

3) Social media marketing strategy: BBC.co.uk

Much like breaking into new geographies, BBC has put more emphasis on its social media marketing to reach new audiences and distribute its content further. As you can see, the brand don’t really use paid or display advertising:

With Similarweb data, we can find out more about how the BBC uses social media to increase its content reach and engagement rates, including the platforms used and the ratio between each of the platforms.

Get down and digital with Similarweb

To create an effective digital marketing strategy, you need data. Data that will inform, educate, optimize, prioritize and help you adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape.

Similarweb equips you with everything you need to build and execute a successful digital marketing strategy, including all the data for:

• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis
• Opportunities and threats
• Trending keywords and topics
• Competitive PPC ads and spends

Try all this (and more) for free today.

FAQs

What is a digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a long-term plan to achieve digitally measurable marketing goals, using digital tools.

What are examples of digital marketing strategies?

Digital marketing strategies include SEO, content marketing, affiliate marketing, and video advertising.

What is a digital marketing campaign?

A digital marketing campaign is a plan set in place to achieve small-term marketing goals. A digital marketing campaign is a smaller plan within your digital marketing strategy.