How Can I Create a Robust Digital Marketing Strategy?

Whether you’re just starting out, or you’ve been in business for a while, having a robust digital marketing strategy that helps you grow and develop your online presence while generating great, high-quality leads is critical.  

Digital marketing is not an extension of traditional marketing – it requires its own approach – and that’s why creating a digital marketing strategy that is informed by a deep understanding of your brand, market and ideal customer is so important. The way your customers interact with your business will differ greatly between your online and offline presence, and in almost every case, they will use both digital and physical channels at multiple points in their journey with your business.  

Having a robust strategy in place means taking a step back from your business, removing your personal biases, and crafting a realistic and representative understanding of your business’s online presence.  

How do I build my digital marketing strategy?

Establish your strategy pillars

Firstly, you’ll need to build the pillars of your strategy. You’ll do this by gaining a thorough understanding of your business, either through placing yourself in the customer’s shoes and being critical of your own business, or physically conducting market research. While this might sound intimidating, it can be extremely beneficial to take off the rose-tinted glasses and identify and reflect on key aspects of your business. 

Our Advice: Start With Your Finish Line 

Planning your digital marketing strategy is all about starting with the end goal and working backwards. Businesses that don’t plan their digital marketing simply employ tactics that can be used to achieve performance, without considering how these tactics work in harmony, or how they help the business reach an end goal. 

When you create your robust digital marketing strategy, you’ll be informed by objectives, play to your strengths, leverage data and insights to outperform competitors, and know how to best use your assets to achieve those goals.  

Now you’ve worked out the moving parts that have the biggest effect, you can form an approach to your digital marketing. This means allocating your resource to specific tactics that are relevant to your businesses and will achieve success based on your strategy. This will be different depending on whether you are B2B or B2C, a professional or trade service, e-commerce or lead-generation. 

What are digital marketing tactics? 

A basic list of tactics employed within digital marketing strategies include: 

• Search Engine Optimisation 
• Organic Social Media
• Paid Search Advertising
• Paid Social Media Advertising
• Email Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Influencer Marketing 

But this list isn’t conclusive. For example, content marketing does not only include publishing blog articles – it also comprises of new web page content creation, content optimisation and wider tactics such as podcasting, on-demand video or live webinars.  

At Netmatters, our digital marketing experts can offer you a full consultation on how to achieve success with your digital marketing strategy and recommend which tactics are best for your business. We’ll look at your objectives and your measures of success and break these down into workable solutions – for example, if your goal is to promote your business in your local area, maybe organic social media is the way to go. Or if you’re looking to grow more enquiries from your website, perhaps you need SEO to make your website more visible on Google. 

Discover how we helped pet food supplier Bunny Bistro meet customers at every stage of their journey with paid social media marketing. 

What else should I consider in my strategy?

• Not all assumptions or decisions should be data driven – nobody ever innovated by basing decisions on past experiences or data. Taking risks and being creative with your employment of tactics within your wider strategy can often lead to impressive successes. 
• You can’t anticipate everything – a robust strategy often contains lot of moving parts and assumptions. Knowing your customers is a challenge, markets change, and competitors are constantly adapting their approaches. Regularly reviewing your strategy, objectives and goalposts, is paramount. 
• Objectives need to be dynamic to consider external factors – not all success is achievable, it’s always worth benchmarking successes against competitors. This is why secondary objectives are key. If progress is being made towards objectives that supplement the primary goal, but you’re not seeing bottom-line success, you may have other factors at play that are affecting performance against your top-level objectives. You may need to adapt your approach, or expectations, in order to achieve success. 
• Ensure all stakeholders buy into the strategy – most stakeholders care about the end goal and won’t understand the efforts and buy-in required from all parties to execute a successful digital marketing strategy. Particularly in the diagnosis stage, stakeholders will look at your business through rose-tinted glasses. Establishing a buy-in from all relevant parties from the beginning of your strategic planning exercises will make your life much easier when it comes to executing the strategy. 

How can a robust strategy help my business in the future? 

A robust strategy ensures that your marketing budget produces return on investment and that your business grows by becoming more visible in the marketplace. Ultimately, the right digital marketing strategy helps you understand your business in the wider marketplace, as well as how you can set clear objectives and use your assets effectively to achieve growth in visibility online. 

At Netmatters, our digital marketing team are passionate about helping you execute your digital marketing strategy. Whether you require paid advertising, search engine optimisation or organic social media support, we can help you achieve your measures of success, taking you closer to your finish line and your objectives. Book your free consultation now.