How to Create a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy in 9 Steps

It sounds simple, and most companies will believe they already intuitively know their market, but before you begin defining goals and target groups, thorough market analysis is essential.

Use tools like Google Trends, SEMrush, or similar to identify trends in your industry, analyze competitors, and gain insights into potential market opportunities.

By understanding the market, you can better leverage your strengths and identify areas where your company can stand out. It’s about doing the basic research so you can adjust and fine-tune your objectives.

The first step in any effective digital marketing strategy is to set clear goals. Without precise goals, you can easily get lost in the many digital tools and platforms.

Ask yourself: What do I want to achieve with my digital marketing?

Common goals include:

• Increased brand awareness
• Increased website traffic
• Lead or sales generation
• Improved customer engagement
• Building a loyal online community

Your goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

Also consider prioritizing your goals based on importance and feasibility. Short-term goals should support your long-term goals, working together toward your overall business strategy.

It’s important to define this part clearly and write it down, as it will help both you and your marketing department or partner understand the task and determine whether the actions taken have worked as intended. In other words, your goals will show whether your time and money were well spent.

Understanding who your target audience is, what they need and how they behave online is crucial to creating an effective marketing strategy. Develop as detailed customer profiles as possible and use customer journey mapping to visualise how your customers interact with your brand - from first encounter to conversion.

Segment not only by demographics, but also psychographics and behavioural patterns to get a more nuanced picture of what motivates your customers. Use tools and data from e.g. Google Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics, DreamData and your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce) or customer feedback via questionnaires (Typeform, SurveyMonkey) to gather deeper insights into their preferences and online habits. An accurate understanding of your target audience allows you to create more valuable and relevant content.

This is particularly valuable when you are addressing your customers on social media, newsletters or blog posts, so you know which topics and writing styles work best with your target audience. Write for your target audience.

Once you have a clear picture of your target audience, the next step is to choose the digital platforms that provide the most value. Instead of trying to be everywhere, focus on the channels where your target audience is most active.

• Social media like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok for brand awareness and engagement.
• Search engines for organic traffic through SEO optimisation.
• Email marketing for direct communication and lead nurturing.
• Paid advertising on Google Ads and social media to reach new audiences.

Choose platforms based on the preferences and behaviour of your target audiences, keeping in mind that each platform serves different purposes and attracts different demographics.

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Content is at the heart of every digital marketing strategy. The phrase ‘content is king’ is more relevant than ever. To engage your target audience, you need to create content that speaks directly to their needs and interests and aligns with the different stages of the customer journey (top, middle and bottom funnel).

Consider working with content funnelling strategies:

• Awareness content (Top-of-Funnel - TOFU) such as blog posts, SOME, video and guides to increase awareness. The purpose here is to attract attention and make people aware of your company or solution. Content should be informative, engaging and help solve problems or answer questions.
  
  
• Middle-of-Funnel (MOFU) content like case studies, webinars, email series or whitepapers that provide value and showcase your expertise. This is where people start to evaluate their options and consider solutions. Content should be more detailed and show how your company can help them.
  
  
• Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) conversion content like testimonials, offers, personalised advice and demos that call to action. The customer is ready to make a decision. It's all about removing the last doubts and convincing them that your solution is the best.
  
  
• Retention (After-Sale Funnel) such as how-to guides, follow-up emails and loyalty programmes. An often overlooked part of the funnel, retaining existing customers is often the easiest way to upsell. The aim here is to nurture the customer relationship and build loyalty so they become repeat buyers or ambassadors.

Content can take many forms: from blogs and videos to infographics and customer cases. Customise your strategy according to your goals and the customer journey to ensure your audience is met with relevant content wherever they are in the process.

SEO is a long-term investment that can drive sustained organic traffic to your website. As algorithms become more advanced, it's important to consider both technical and content factors.

• E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is crucial to how Google ranks your content. Make sure your content shows your expertise and is trustworthy.
  
  
• Content clusters and pillar content help search engines understand the context of your content. Create a main page on a topic (pillar content) that links to more specific, related articles.
  
  
• On-page and technical SEO should always be in place, from URL structure to mobile-friendliness. The vast majority of professionally built CMS systems will have this in place, but it's always a good idea to check for errors via Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Moz Pro etc.

Obviously, SEO is a more complicated area, but by following these basic SEO principles, you can improve your rankings and increase the chances of your target audience finding your content organically.

Social media allows you to interact directly with your target audience and build relationships that can lead to increased brand loyalty. Social listening can help you follow conversations about your brand and understand trends in your industry.

It's about monitoring conversations, mentions and interactions on social media and other online platforms to understand what people are saying about a company, brand, competitor or industry.

It's also important to analyse data to gain insights into customer sentiment, needs and behaviour. In addition, pay close attention to what your customers are saying about your services through feedback such as Google and Facebook ratings, as they can be crucial in determining whether new customers want to visit your brand.

To maximise the impact of your social media:

• Plan and post consistently, possibly using a content calendar.
  
  
• Create engaging content such as polls, ask good questions to the target audience, competitions and allow for user-generated content.
  
  
• Comment on and start conversations with related content creators.
  
  
• Partner with influencers relevant to your target audience.
  
  
• Use paid ads to target specific audiences and expand your reach.

Social media isn't just about exposure - it's an opportunity to build relationships and loyalty through two-way communication.

Email marketing remains one of the most effective tools for lead nurturing and conversions. It's also one of the cheapest ways to reach your target audience. Unfortunately, for many companies it's a somewhat overlooked marketing strategy, but to create an effective email marketing strategy you should consider:

• Segment your email list so that your recipients receive relevant content. The more targeted you can make your content to your customers' preferences, the higher your conversion rate and the lower your risk of them unsubscribing.
  
  
• Automate emails based on customer behaviour and use drip campaigns to nurture leads. This could be automated emails such as welcome emails, post-purchase follow-ups or nurture emails with ‘we miss you’ and a discount coupon. Drip campaigns could be a series of emails explaining the benefits of your products or services or an onboarding campaign that helps new customers learn how to best use your product.
  
  
• A/B test your emails to find the most effective messages and CTAs. This works incredibly well for testing which types of emails your customers respond best to and allows you to gain valuable insights much faster than if you don't A/B test.

By continuously analysing open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates, you can fine-tune your emails and ensure maximum effectiveness.

The final and perhaps most important part of your digital marketing strategy is to constantly measure, evaluate and adjust. Establish a test-and-learn culture where you continuously experiment with new initiatives and optimise based on data. It's about using small, controlled experiments to test hypotheses, gather feedback and adapt based on what works - and what doesn't. However, don't implement too many things at once unless you have a firm grasp of data.

Simple KPIs you can track include:

• Traffic and sources to the website
  
  
• Conversion rates and ROI
  
  
• Social media and email engagement data

By utilising tools such as Google Analytics, Matomo and other analytics tools, you can continuously improve your strategy and adapt to changing market dynamics.

It's important to set up tracking correctly from the start so that you can actually measure whether your time and budget are actually contributing positively to your business bottom line.

For most B2C companies, setting up tracking is fairly easy, but for some B2B companies it can be difficult to get the full picture. This is because it often takes a long time from a potential customer seeing your product to making a decision and the journey can also be longer and span multiple platforms. They might see your company on LinkedIn, read a newsletter or blog post, visit your website and finally call you.

This journey is difficult to quantify and it is often necessary to see if there is a correlation between increased marketing and the amount of leads/sales coming in to the sales team.

A winning digital marketing strategy requires purposeful planning, a deep understanding of the market and your target audience, and the ability to adapt quickly to new trends.

When you create valuable and relevant content, optimise for SEO and build strong relationships on social media, you're well equipped to drive growth and create lasting success.

Staying up to date and being prepared to adjust your strategy as digital evolves is the key to long-term relevance in a digital landscape.