Digital marketing strategy sets the goals and execution tactics for digital experiences, channels, campaigns and media.
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What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Achieving digital marketing excellence
Digital marketing strategy is what separates best-in-class performers. Our annual list of “Genius” brands outrank others on digital performance, maturity and digital investments. Download this report to discover:
- The 45 brands that made the cut — and why
- The digital marketing tactics these brands employed, with examples and results
- Inspiration and lessons learned to apply to your own organization
Key components of a digital marketing strategy
Top-notch digital marketing strategy enables brands to scale reach and engagement across websites, social media and digital advertising to target, acquire and retain customers.
- Strategy
- Channel Management
- Advertising
Articulate your goals and execution tactics for digital experiences, channels, campaigns and media.
For most organizations, digital marketing plays an increasingly strategic role in driving business growth. Best-in-class brands focus relentlessly on optimizing digital marketing channels, blending digital and physical experiences, and embracing emerging technologies that can provide a competitive edge. More recently, the pandemic radically shifted customer engagement preferences and elevated digital experience to a pivotal role in social and business relationships.
Digital is no longer just a means of enhancing customer relationships; it’s a primary medium for building new connections with target audiences, whether that’s employees, business partners or social influencers.
Digital marketing strategy framework
There is no single digital marketing strategy framework, but key components of any digital marketing strategy include:
- A vision for the role that digital marketing strategy and execution plays in driving enterprise growth. For example, an impetus to increase profit could translate into a business objective of increasing customer lifetime value. A resulting marketing objective might be to drive customer engagement or cross-sell/upsell customers.
- A clearly scoped and defined set of responsibilities for the digital marketing team and leadership. Digital marketing leaders, for example, set and oversee budgeting, hiring, technology selection and campaign planning in support of strategy execution.
- A detailed roadmap that lays out near-term digital marketing program objectives, as well as longer-range performance achievements. Improving lead quality, driving increased sales among identified leads and increasing brand awareness are all key digital marketing objectives tied to the goal of new customer acquisition.
- An assessment of team skills, tools and processes needed to support digital marketing objectives — and a plan for closing gaps in performance.
Align the best channel with your target audiences and specific goals.
A digital marketing strategy requires meaningful, personalized engagement with customers down the funnel and across multiple channels. To maximize the value of digital channels and engagement, and their impact on customers’ shifting digital behaviors, marketers need to plan, execute and evaluate the impact of digital marketing efforts holistically.
Multichannel
Multichannel is the marketing practice of using more than one channel to communicate with customers and prospects. Best-in-class digital marketers drive business growth by leveraging multichannel to span a multitude of touchpoints with target audiences.
These include websites, paid and organic social media, search and display advertising, TV, over-the-top (OTT) streaming media, digital video, email and mobile marketing (e.g., SMS, push notification, in-app messaging and consumer messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp), and voice-enabled endpoints (e.g., smart speakers and smartphone-based virtual personal assistants).
Personalization
Scaling the delivery of personalized content and experiences is one of marketing’s most important roles in driving effective digital experiences, and it’s imperative to align personalization approaches to overall multichannel marketing objectives. Yet according to Gartner research, 63% of marketers face a moderate or significant challenge in delivering personalized experiences to customers.
The challenge is how to connect a customer’s experience of “rightness” with a digital marketer’s ability to measure, and hopefully optimize, “rightness.” Although 86% of individuals responding to a recent Gartner personalization survey said they are open to some personalized communication from brands, 55% say they’ll stop doing business when a brand communicates in a way they find invasive. A further 40% said they would stop doing business when they perceive a brand’s communication as irrelevant.
With such a fine line and big consequences separating good from bad personalization, it’s no wonder the topic continues to drive digital marketing leaders’ objectives as a critical element of their digital marketing strategy.
Although personalization has a long history within marketing, external challenges in recent years (from fragmenting privacy regulations to channel proliferation) have exacerbated the pain of fulfilling personalization’s promise. Specific challenges digital marketing leaders face when it comes to personalization are:
Scaling personalization efforts in a cost-effective way that also doesn’t overburden complementary workstreams
Falling short of the expected ROI
Driving conversion rate and revenue through better segmentation
Increased pressure to deliver incremental financial results
Managing inertia and misalignment
To combat these challenges, marketing leaders would do well to focus on the following areas:
Alignment between business objectives and personalization strategy
Prioritization of tactics across business outcome impact, feasibility and customer perceptions
Assessment of the personalization technology landscape through clear business outcomes
Overcome complex advertising challenges, confidently assess new marketing channels and achieve demonstrable digital marketing results.
Digital advertising comprises display, video, mobile and social ads. To succeed, digital ads must communicate with audiences using appropriate timing, context, content and tone across relevant channels. Paid search specifically refers to advertising on search engines and other websites; ads are presented based on the content and context of a specific search query.
Digital marketing leaders accountable for advertising are on the front lines of rapid change due to macroeconomic disruptions and consumer behavior, as well as a continuously evolving landscape of adtech, service providers and agencies, new formats and platforms, and data and measurement partners. They also must confront issues such as changing privacy regulations and cookie deprecation.
Privacy and cookies
Digital advertising is essential for the success of modern brands, both for awareness and to drive sales. Key to this success is the availability of data about prospects and customers’ online behavior, which helps you target and personalize marketing campaigns.
However, changing consumer privacy laws and data usage regulations are forcing digital marketing leaders to change how they collect, store and use this data. The deprecation of the cookie and restrictions on third-party data will change how ads are bought, targeted and measured.
To limit the impact of privacy regulations and changes to cookies:
Own, assign someone on your team or find a trusted partner to keep up with the latest news on privacy changes, cookies and third-party data regulation and their impact on the brand’s business
Build first-party data assets by homing in on core customers and building direct-buying relationships with strategically important media partners
Work across the organization, e.g., with the partnerships and legal team, to ensure compliance across user data collection and digital media activation
Partner with media companies, as well as established and emerging technology firms, to test novel targeting strategies like Google’s Topics, contextual targeting and data clean rooms to reduce the eventual impact of the loss of cookies on existing media strategies
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Frequently asked questions
Why have a digital marketing strategy?
Digital is no longer just a means of enhancing customer relationships; it’s a primary medium for building new connections with target audiences, whether that’s employees, business partners or social influencers. A digital marketing strategy enables brands to scale reach and engagement across websites, social media and digital advertising to target, acquire and retain customers.
What are digital marketing tactics?
Scaling the delivery of personalized content and experiences across touchpoints is one of marketing’s most important roles in driving effective digital experiences. It’s imperative to align personalization approaches to overall multichannel marketing objectives.
What is a digital marketing strategy framework?
There is no single digital marketing strategy framework, but key components of any digital marketing strategy include: A vision; a clearly scoped and defined set of responsibilities for the digital marketing team and leadership; a detailed roadmap that lays out near-term digital marketing program objectives; and an assessment of team skills, tools and processes needed to support digital marketing objectives.