How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy: 8 Steps, Importance, and Case Studies

In today’s digital world, where technology is rapidly evolving, and consumers are increasingly moving to an online environment, a proper digital strategy is becoming extremely important for any company. From small businesses to large corporations — everyone from different industries and fields understands that the lack of a clear digital strategy can lead to losing competitiveness and connection with their target audience.

This article covers the essence of digital strategy, its key components, and its benefits for entrepreneurs and marketers. You will learn how to create a digital marketing strategy, where to start developing a digital marketing strategy, and how it helps achieve your goals in today’s competitive environment.

What is a digital marketing strategy?

First, let’s start with a digital marketing strategy definition. A digital marketing strategy is a comprehensive action plan aimed at using digital technologies and resources to achieve the strategic goals of an enterprise or organization. Why do you need a digital marketing strategy? Because it covers all aspects of activities related to the use of online platforms, social media, mobile apps, and other digital tools to: 

• increase awareness of your company;
• attract the target audience;
• increase competitiveness;
• increase profits;
• enter new markets.

A digital marketing strategy is necessary to create a holistic approach to interacting with customers and partners online. It takes into account the unique characteristics of your business, its goals, target audience, market, competitors, and potential opportunities for using digital communication channels.

An effective digital marketing strategy development includes the following key stages:

• goals and objectives;
• audience analysis;
• channel selection;
• content creation;
• analytics and measurement;
• adaptation and development.

Why your business should have a digital marketing strategy

A digital strategy is an integral part of modern business, as digital technologies and the online environment significantly impact how businesses interact with their audience and achieve their goals. Here are a few key reasons why digital strategy is so vital for companies:

1. Attract and retain customers. The Internet and social media have become important means of communication with the audience. Digital channels allow businesses to attract new customers, retain existing ones, and interact with them.
2. Increase brand awareness. A digital strategy helps to communicate about the brand, products, and services through various digital channels. All this increases brand awareness and forms a consumer opinion.
3. Effective marketing. Digital channels provide an opportunity to fine-tune advertising campaigns according to the target audience’s interests, behavior, and demographics. This allows you to spend your advertising budget efficiently.
4. Analysis and optimization. Digital tools provide detailed data on audience interaction with the website, social media, and other channels, which helps you measure performance, analyze results, and improve your strategy.
5. Global access. A digital strategy allows businesses to interact with audiences worldwide without geographic restrictions.
6. Process optimization. Using digital tools allows you to automate business processes, increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
7. Competitive advantage. Businesses implementing an effective digital strategy have more opportunities to win the market and attract the target audience.

8 steps to build a digital marketing strategy

There is much more to building a digital strategy today than just choosing the right digital tools. It is a process that requires a balanced approach, analysis, strategic thinking, and expertise. Creating a digital marketing strategy is a very complex process. If you do not have such experience or your strategies don’t work, we recommend contacting professionals and letting them develop your marketing plan. It will save you time and money and lead to better results. You can also involve a marketing consultant to help you formulate a strategy correctly. 

If you decide to create a digital strategy on your own, we have prepared a list of 8 universal digital marketing strategy steps that will help any business:

Setting goals

The first step of how to develop a digital marketing strategy is to define the strategic goals you want to achieve through digital channels. These could be increasing brand awareness, attracting new customers, increasing sales, entering new markets, or improving relationships with existing customers.

Take a deeper look at what you want to achieve through digital channels before setting goals. What successful digital marketing needs is for the goals to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

Here is an example of a goal for a solid digital marketing strategy: increase the number of new customers by 30% in 3 months. This goal is specific (we understand what exactly needs to be done), measurable (we know how many new customers we have now and by what percentage this figure needs to be increased), and time-bound (in 3 months).

Audience and market analysis

The digital marketing strategy process involves an in-depth understanding of your target audience and target market. Research their needs, motivations, and online behavior. Consider competitors in your industry to find niches and opportunities.

Pro tip: Use publicly available analytics and research tools to learn more about your audience. Observe their online behavior and study their wishes and needs.

Selecting digital channels and tools

Carefully evaluate your target audience and find out what platforms they are active on. Choose the channels that are most suitable for achieving your goals. This can be your website, social media, email, bloggers, or mobile apps. Based on your goals and selected channels, choose the necessary tools, be it SEO, PPC, targeting, SMM, content marketing, etc.

Setting KPIs and success metrics

Identify specific KPIs that will help you measure the success of your strategy. These can be metrics such as the number of website visits, conversions, social media interactions, etc. The choice of specific KPIs depends on your business goals and the specifics of your digital strategy, but here are some common KPIs you can include:

• number of visits (traffic);
• conversion rate (percentage of visitors who perform a desired action, such as registering, purchasing, or filling out a contact form);
• social interaction (number of likes, comments, reposts, and followers on social media);
• audience engagement (number of new subscribers, growth of brand awareness among the target audience);
• email marketing metrics (email open rates, click-through rates, number of subscribers);
• search engine optimization (SEO) metrics (position in search engines, number of keywords that lead to the website);
• ROI (return on investment) (ratio of revenue from digital initiatives to their costs);
• payment metrics (e-commerce) (number of sales, average check, profit from sales).

Creating targeted content

Develop interesting and useful content for your audience that matches your chosen channels and meets your goals. These can include articles, videos, infographics, webinars, banners, etc.

Analysis and optimization

Digital marketing strategy planning requires constantly monitoring the results and analyzing data. Make adjustments to your strategy based on the results. This will help ensure its effectiveness and adapt to changes in the online environment.

Adaptation

The digital environment is constantly changing. Therefore, it is essential to be ready to adapt and change your strategy to stay relevant and effective.

Creating a solid strategy is complex but critical to the success process. This tool allows you to build strong relationships with your audience, achieve your goals, and increase the competitiveness of your business in the digital environment.

Our digital marketing case studies

At the stage of developing any commercial proposal, our team goes through all the steps of digital marketing, forming not just an offer but our vision of how to achieve the set business goal with the help of digital marketing. That’s why we have so many effective digital marketing case studies, one of which we will give as an example.

Bvblogic

This online marketing case study required us to develop a paid media strategy to help B2B businesses generate more leads. Direct sales do not work for tech companies, and the decision-making cycle for a deal can take some time (1-3 months).

When we started working with Bvblogic, we used a three-stage funnel, which included:

1. Stage 1. Here, we introduced users to the business and showed them articles that aroused interest. We made it clear to our readers that Bvblogic services can help them solve their problems and meet their needs.
2. Stage 2. We applied remarketing to return users who viewed the content of the first stage to articles that maximized the benefits of integrating Bvblogic with their business.
3. Stage 3. We redirected users who viewed cases from Stage 2 to an offer that directly proposed Bvblogic services as development experts.

Providing the best content marketing strategy services and using this approach, we gradually warmed up users in our marketing funnel by showing more converting content and directing the most interested readers to the offer page.

During this digital marketing strategy case study, we analyzed the performance of our advertising campaigns for the first month. This helped us to see the traffic quality based on KPIs from Google Analytics (average time spent on the landing page and page depth) and the cost per click in each advertising system.

The Google Ads and Facebook campaigns generated a large amount of quality traffic, so we decided to reallocate the budget to them and replace Twitter with LinkedIn, as the behavior metrics of traffic from Twitter were much lower.

In the second month of work, we saw that the three-stage funnel was an effective digital marketing strategy in the long run and with a large budget. In our case, we needed to get results in a shorter time and at a more affordable price. Therefore, we decided to optimize and simplify the funnel structure to meet our goals and capabilities.

The best solution was to shorten the conversion path. We settled on a funnel where new users landed on either an article or a case study, and then the remarketing campaign brought these users directly to the offer page.

We reached peak KPIs in the fifth month of cooperation: 75 form submissions from the offer page, 2 form submissions from the blog pages, and 20 chat messages.

You can learn more about this case by following the link — digital marketing case study for Bvblogic, or check out other successful digital marketing case studies.

Conclusion

Now, you understand how to build a digital marketing strategy and the importance of a digital marketing for your business growth. To create a digital marketing strategy plan, you need to understand your goal, research your audience and market, choose channels and tools, define KPIs, analyze and optimize your results, and adapt your strategy to internal or external changes. 

However, all these tasks require a high level of expertise in marketing and strategic thinking to reach set goals. Therefore, delegating this task to professionals, like a Livepage team, is better. As you might see from our internet marketing case studies, we have vast experience in boosting businesses through various digital channels. This helps us to build an effective marketing strategy for any company and guarantee the success of this endeavor. 

Contact us now, and see for yourself the benefits of working with a team who knows their job.

FAQ

What is a digital marketing strategy?

A digital strategy is a comprehensive action plan aimed at using digital technologies and resources to achieve the strategic goals of an enterprise or organization. It covers all aspects of activities related to the use of online platforms, social media, mobile apps, and other digital tools to: 

• increase awareness of your company;
• attract the target audience;
• increase competitiveness;
• increase profits;
• enter new markets.

What are the steps of a digital marketing strategy?

The stages of a digital marketing strategy are as follows:

1. setting goals;
2. market and audience analysis;
3. selecting channels and tools;
4. setting KPIs;
5. creating targeted content;
6. results analysis and optimization;
7. strategy adaptation.

What business needs a digital strategy? 

A digital strategy is essential for any business that wants to reach an audience in the online environment, increase its visibility, attract new customers, boost sales, and ensure competitiveness. From e-commerce to services, digital strategy helps businesses achieve their goals and make the most of the digital world.

How do you develop a reliable digital marketing for a business?

Developing a reliable digital strategy requires a lot of experience and expertise. Only a professional can create a strategy that best uses resources and guarantees efficiency in the online environment.

What is the importance of a digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy allows businesses to:

• attract and retain customers;
• increase brand awareness;
• spend resources efficiently;
• optimize processes;
• create a competitive advantage.