How to Create A Digital Marketing Strategy In 10 Steps Like A Pro

In this post, you’ll learn exactly how to build a digital marketing strategy step-by-step.

In fact, it’s the same strategies I’ve used over the years to drive millions of visits to my website and clients’ websites.

So, if you want to learn how to use digital marketing to grow your traffic, this strategy guide is for you.

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan of action that describes how to use one or more online marketing channels to reach your target audience. It has a list of steps and specific digital marketing goals.

Having a digital strategy is important because it will help you orchestrate the different online marketing strategies so that they all work towards achieving your business goals.

The person responsible for designing and executing a digital strategy is the digital marketing manager of a company.

Together with his team, they will make sure that every marketing activity is part of your digital marketing plan.

How to Build a Digital Marketing Strategy

These are the steps to follow to develop an effective marketing strategy.

1. Specify Measurable Business Goals
2. Identify Your Target Audience
3. Understand User's Needs And Search Intent
4. Create a Content Marketing Library
5. Start with SEO As Early As Possible
6. Explore Paid Ads
7. Use Email Marketing Segmentation And Automation
8. Utilize New Traffic Sources
9. Use Retargeting And Personalization
10. Work on Conversion Optimization
11. Bonus Tip - Evaluate And Revise Your Strategy

1. Specify Measurable Business Goals

The first step in developing a digital marketing strategy is to specify your business goals. In other words, to determine what you want to accomplish with digital marketing.

Any goals you set have to be measurable and well-defined. Everything in a digital marketing campaign is measurable (from start to finish). You need to take advantage of this and form a digital marketing plan with specific milestones and targets.

Some typical goals are:

• Raise brand awareness
• Increase organic traffic
• Make more sales
• Get more email subscribers
• Reduce the cost of PPC campaigns
• Get more Facebook followers
• Get more YouTube subscribers

While the above is a good starting point, they are still vague. A better version would be:

Raise brand awareness by:

• Increasing Facebook Followers to 10K
• Increasing Facebook Ads reach to 400K
• Getting brand mentions from high-traffic websites
• Increasing YouTube video views by 10K

Increase organic traffic by:

• Getting higher rankings for keyword X
• Publishing new content targeting keyword Y
• Updating existing content that meets criteria A and B
• Run an email outreach campaign to get X links

A good way to come up with measurable goals is to use the top-down approach. Start by specifying your goals in business terms and then translate that to digital marketing goals.

Here is an example to understand this better.

Business goal: Increase sales to $50K per month from Google organic traffic.

Assuming that you make $1000 from every 5K visits you get from Google search, to get to $50K in sales per month, you’ll need to get around 250,000 visits from Google.

If your current traffic level is 140K Google visits per month, then your digital marketing strategy should include steps on getting from 140K visits to 250K visits.

A typical step could be “Publish 3 new blog posts per week”, which needs to be broken down further to specify which/topics and keywords the blog posts will target and what would be the expected outcome in terms of traffic increase.

Experienced digital marketing specialists know that this is not always easy to calculate because digital marketing is a dynamic industry that constantly changes.

But, having a detailed plan will help you adjust your strategies so as to get closer to your goals as possible.

It goes without saying that your plan has to be realistic, taking into account the competition and complexities of your industry.

Also, to be able to analyze data and make informed decisions, you first need to track it correctly and accurately, so having a good analytics system in place is more than essential.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

The second step is to identify your target audience. In other words, specify in detail who you want to target with your campaigns.

Some marketers place this as the first step in the process, and this is not wrong. What is certain is that this is an exercise you need to perform in the early stages and before finalizing the next steps of your marketing strategy.

What does identifying your audience mean? Specify in detail the characteristics of people potentially interested in your offerings.

In your audience identification, you should include things like:

• The countries/areas your potential customers live in
• Their age group
• Gender
• Educational background
• Marital status
• Family status
• Occupation
• Their interests

The exact details depend on your industry and the products/services you are trying to promote.

Digg into your Google Analytics reports, Facebook audience insights, and Google Ads reports, and start creating your customer profiles.

3. Understand User's Needs And Search Intent

Once you know the profile of your target customer, the next step is to use different techniques and try to understand their needs and how they express this when searching for information using a search engine or a social network.

There are two ways to approach this process. The first method is to take the typical digital sales funnel and identify your customers' needs at each stage.

The second method is to take the different customer profiles created above and create a separate sales funnel for each.

This is my recommended method because it makes setting up and running dedicated digital marketing campaigns for each customer profile easier.

Let me give you an example to understand this better.

My agency provides digital marketing services to small businesses, and we’re also offering online digital marketing courses. People looking for services have a totally different profile than people looking for training.

There are also variations within the same segment, i.e., beginners to digital marketing have different training needs than the more experienced marketers.

So, by analyzing each buyer persona separately, you can develop a more accurate plan of how your content, products, or services can help them solve their problems and needs.

Search Intent

In the digital marketing world, users' needs are expressed through search queries. When a user types a search query in Google, it has a specific intent, and if your content/products or services do not satisfy it, your digital marketing strategy will fail.

That’s why it is important to perform keyword research from the very beginning and capture all topics, keywords, and phrases throughout the buyer journey, from awareness to conversion.

Social media networks don’t reveal the ‘searchers' intent’. What happens then?

It’s true that users browsing Facebook may not have a specific intent in mind, but they have a particular profile.

To increase your chances of targeting the right type of audience, you can analyze the profile of your search visitors (using Google Analytics) and use custom audiences to find matching audiences (Lookalike Audiences) on Facebook.

Always use any available data that you have as your starting point for research. The results will be more accurate than using data that is external to your website.

Use the following resources to learn more about digital marketing.

4. Create a Content Marketing Library

The next strategic step you need to make is to create a library of content assets. You know your audience and their needs; now it’s time to create various assets for your campaigns.

A digital asset can be a blog post, infographic, image, video, podcast, cover image, logo, and anything else you can publish on your website or social networks.

In the digital marketing world, this is what content marketing is all about. Content marketing is important because it’s the process used to decide what kind of content to create, when, and where to publish it.

I prefer to execute this step in the beginning and before running any campaigns because it’s more efficient to have a pool of content assets ready in advance rather than doing this every time you’re about to start a campaign.

When you follow the steps described in this guide (set goals, create customer personas, identify needs, and search intent), you'll have all the information you need to work on your content assets.

It’s also easier to assign the content creation part to the different members of your team to work in parallel.

Use the following resources to learn more about content marketing.

5. Start With SEO As Early As Possible

A strategic decision to make that can positively impact your digital marketing efforts is to start with SEO as early as possible.

SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies, but it has a caveat. It takes time to work.

Unlike other digital marketing strategies, when you start an SEO campaign, it may take 4 to 6 months to generate any results.

This is a long time to wait, so most marketers tend to focus on other digital channels first (like Facebook Ads and Google Ads) that are more immediate.

That’s a good approach, but the common mistake is that they forget about SEO and only re-visit SEO after realizing they cannot build a successful digital marketing campaign based solely on paid advertising.

So, a better strategy is to allocate a portion of your marketing budget from the very beginning on SEO related tasks. In parallel, you can start working on your paid campaigns and other channels.

In business terms, this means an increase in revenue and profit, which is exactly the goal of a successful digital marketing strategy.

How to get started with SEO

SEO is a huge topic. Search engines consider hundreds of parameters before deciding which web pages to show in the results for a particular query.

To make it easier to handle, SEO can be broken down into three main sub-processes: Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.

Each process is responsible for optimizing your website for several parameters that will eventually lead to higher rankings and traffic.

SEO is important because the majority of search traffic is distributed to websites that appear in the first 5 positions of the search results. So, if you want to get traffic from search engines, you must appear in the top positions for search terms related to your business.

The best way to get started with SEO is to follow a step-by-step approach:

Step 1: Review your technical SEO and ensure search engines can access and index your content without any problems. This is important since any issues at this stage will be catastrophic for your efforts.

Step 2: Optimize your content for search engines. In Step 4 above, you will create content that satisfies the user's needs. Before publishing, you need to make sure that it’s SEO optimized.

This means giving the right signals to search engines (through your titles, descriptions, headings, etc.) to help them understand your content better.

Step 3: Promote your website and content. One of the most important SEO ranking factors is how other websites on the Internet ‘think’ of your website.

If other relevant websites trust your website and express this through a backlink, this is a strong signal to Google that your website deserves to be in the top positions.

If SEO is something that you haven’t done before for your website, the best way to approach this is to add it to your digital strategy and assign this task to SEO experts.

You can also use the resources below to learn more.

6. Explore Paid Ads

When you start an online business, you know in advance that a large portion of your marketing budget will be allocated to PPC marketing (paid ads).

But, not all PPC platforms are the same. Based on your previous analysis (steps 2 and 3 above), you must choose which platforms suit your audience.

You can use the table below to understand how the user profile looks for the most popular social networks.

For example, if you have an eCommerce website selling directly to consumers (B2C), then Facebook is probably a good choice. If, on the other hand, you are targeting Business executives, then LinkedIn is more appropriate.

Run Pilot Campaigns First

The best way to determine which platforms to incorporate into your digital marketing strategy plan is to run pilot campaigns.

A common mistake made by digital marketers is to blindly allocate all their budget to one channel because it’s the trend without testing or considering all of the available channels they can use.

Here is a list of the most popular advertising platforms you can use to reach your target audience:

• Facebook Ads - ideal for all kinds of businesses. Works better for B2C. The best platform to raise brand awareness.
• Instagram Ads - suitable if you want to reach a younger audience.
• Twitter Ads - Business oriented. Great for informing your community of updates.
• Linked Ads - Strictly for business-related advertising. Use it to reach decision-makers.
• Google Ads - The most reliable platform to get targeted traffic to your website through paid search ads.
• Google Display Ads - Use it for retargeting purposes and to reach your audience in the various Google products (YouTube, Gmail) and thousands of websites that participate in Google AdSense.
• Bing Ads - Not as powerful as Google, but a good alternative to get more search traffic to your website.

To learn more about PPC Marketing, use the following resources.

7. Use Email Marketing Segmentation And Automation

The end goal of a digital marketing campaign is to generate more revenue for a business. But in order to get to your ultimate goal, you first need to consider micro-conversions.

For example, while one of my goals is to sell my digital marketing course, an intermediate goal is to get people to subscribe to my email list (micro conversion).

I consider this an important step because I know from my statistics that a large percentage of people who subscribe to my list will eventually convert.

The same concept can be applied to any business or product. You need to incentivize users to sign up for your email list and then send them personalized emails that will help them make the final decision, which is to convert by buying your products or services.

An important element to make this work is segmentation and automation.

With email segmentation, you segment your list into groups of people who share the same interests and send them customized content.

For example, people registering to my list to download the SEO Checklist will get different email content than people who register to receive my post updates.

If email marketing is a new concept for you, then you can realize that it involves a lot of work, and that’s where email automation comes into play.

Here is a visual example of how email automation works.

With email automation, you can orchestrate the whole process without intervention and manual work. Your job is to set up the automation campaigns, monitor their performance, and take corrective actions.

In addition to micro-conversions, email marketing is a great way to raise brand awareness and build a community around your brand. This is something that can positively influence the performance of all your digital marketing campaigns.

Explore the following resources to learn more about email marketing.

8. Utilize New Traffic Sources

A complete digital marketing strategy should consider traditional online marketing channels and cater to new digital marketing strategies that rise to the surface.

To be more precise, at the time of writing this post, there are a number of new channels that you can explore like:

• Google Discover Ads
• Google Shopping Search
• Google Shopping Ads
• Tik-Tok
• Voice search
• ChatGPT and Other AI
• Optimizing your content for Google rich snippets

These channels are new and most probably less competitive than established channels. This means you can get better results at a lower cost.

Will these help your strategy? The only way to find out is to test them by running pilot campaigns (as explained above).

9. Use Retargeting And Personalization

So far, all of the above strategies are related to how you can reach more people, but it’s equally important to follow up on users who already know your brand but are not yet customers.

This is known as ‘retargeting’ or ‘remarketing’. With retargeting, you can show specific ads to users who visited your website (or social network page) but did not convert.

It’s a very powerful technique with higher conversion rates and less CPA (cost per action) than other marketing techniques.

The ‘marketing rule of 7’ (established in the 1930s by marketers) states that prospects are more likely to convert if they see or hear an ad at least 7 times.

Unsurprisingly, it is a rule that is applicable today, and remarketing is the way to implement this.

The concept is simple. You connect your website with Facebook and Google by adding a piece of code provided by the platforms.

You then create custom audience lists that include those who visited your website but did not convert.

You then create campaigns and ads shown to these users as they browse Facebook or visit other websites on the Internet.

To make remarketing more effective, you can also add the element of personalization. Instead of treating all visitors as one group, you can add rules to show different ads to people based on their actions on your website.

For example, you can create a retargeting campaign for people who added an item to their shopping cart but did not checkout. To give them an incentive to come back and finish the process, you can offer them a discount via coupon code.

As a matter of fact, retargeting should be a strategy to include in your digital marketing plan from the early stages. This way, you’ll maximize the return for any money spent on paid ads or SEO.

10. Work on Conversion Optimization

Another area that needs to be part of your overall marketing strategy is conversion optimization.

What is conversion optimization?

In simple terms, conversion optimization is optimizing your website so that a higher percentage of your visitors will perform the desired actions.

This starts with your website design, content, landing page optimization, email signup forms, shopping cart, checkout process, and other elements that contribute (directly or indirectly) to conversions.

One of the techniques to use is A/B testing. By applying a/b testing principles you can measure the effect on conversions by carefully changing parts of your website or sales funnel.

I’ll not go into the details on how to perform A/B testing or conversion optimization (you can follow the links in the resources below to learn more), but from a strategic point of view, it’s important to add conversion optimization activities to your digital marketing plan.

Here is an example of what a conversion optimization plan looks like:

You can add it as a step to be executed as part of a single campaign or your general strategy review process.

What I advise my team to do is to review conversion optimization after a campaign is considered to be optimized in terms of traffic.

In other words, it’s better to optimize your campaign to get as many visits as possible at a lower cost and then start testing different landing pages and messages to see which one performs better in terms of conversions.

As a rule of thumb, when doing A/B testing, you should focus on specific changes to accurately measure their effect on conversions.

Bonus Tip - Evaluate And Revise Your Strategy

Digital marketing is a highly dynamic industry. The rules change constantly, and it’s extremely important to evaluate and revise your strategy to stay current and relevant.

The best way to evaluate your campaign is to do it based on KPIs and other metrics. The most important metrics for any kind of digital marketing campaign are:

• Number of website visits
• Cost per visit
• Cost per conversion
• Click-Through Rate
• Number of Conversions
• Number of micro-conversions
• Time on site
• Bounce rate
• Number of social shares
• Number of comments

If you have a good analytics system in place and can track these for every campaign that is part of your strategy, then it will be easier to make informed decisions.

Remember that part of your evaluation should include looking for new channels to add to your strategy.

It’s always a good idea to examine your competitors' strategies and identify which strategies you can incorporate into your marketing mix.