How to Present a Digital Marketing Strategy

Most of your marketing strategies are probably moving to the digital arena. And the possibilities are both endless and overwhelming.

So how do you create a digital marketing strategy that will be effective for your business needs?

Every brand or business is different. So you need to customize your approach to presenting a digital marketing strategy.

In this post, we'll cover the most common digital marketing categories. Then provide a simple guide to cover the basics of creating a digital marketing strategy.

But First, What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan of action that will help your business achieve digital marketing goals.

This is the "why" behind all your digital marketing efforts. Your strategy must showcase how you will achieve your goals.

And with today's online world, there is more than one way to market your business. In the next section, we'll talk about some of the leading digital marketing categories.

These categories are different from one another. But they can be used together to achieve your goals and ultimately grow your business. 

5 Leading Digital Marketing Categories

Content Marketing

This is a marketing strategy that is focused on creating and distributing content.

What type of content?

Content is everything your prospects or customers interact with. This includes your website, blog posts, emails, newsletters, eBooks, etc.

Content marketing uses these types of content to:

  • Attract
  • Educate
  • Nurture relationships 

That said, your content must be valuable and relevant to your target market. It must help solve their issues.

So instead of spammy advertisements, you're providing useful information to your audience. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

More than a digital marketing strategy, SEO is a practice. It aims to boost your websites' ranking to get organic, high-quality traffic from search engines.

Without SEO, your target audience won't find you online. One of the many optimization techniques include:

  • Adding relevant keywords to your website copy, blog titles, meta tags, and content
  • Improving your website's loading speed
  • Building credible and high-quality backlinks

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

This digital marketing approach uses social media platforms to build brand awareness. With social media, you can attract more attention. It boosts exposure. Most importantly, it helps build relationships with your customers.

At its core, social media marketing is about listening to your audience. How? By sharing valuable content, engaging with them, and opening channels of communication.

With SMM, you can also boost exposure through sponsored ads. In fact, you can hyper-target your audience so your ads will be shown to the right individuals.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Pay-per-click is basically paid online advertising. With this model, you will pay a fee every time an individual clicks on your ad.

With this digital marketing strategy, you're paying for website visits. You're not gaining them organically through SEO efforts, SMM, or other types of digital marketing.

Email Marketing

Email marketing isn't dead. In fact, there is a 78% increase in email engagement in the last 12 months.

This approach uses email to promote your product or service. It's also used to nurture prospects and customers.

Ideally, your email message should encourage them to interact with your brand. But this approach can be tricky. You wouldn't want to end up in someone's spam folder.

That said, you need to consider a few factors including:

  • What time you're sending out emails
  • Your subject line
  • The value and relevance of your emails

There are plenty of other digital marketing categories. And while big businesses can invest in using one or more methods, a small business can still benefit from using just one.

In the next section, we'll guide you through the basic steps of creating a digital marketing strategy.

Ready to get started?

presenting digital marketing strategy

Basic Guide on How To Present a
Digital Marketing Strategy

Identify Your Goals

What do you want to accomplish? What is the end result you want to achieve?

Here are a couple of common goals:

  • Boost brand awareness
  • Increase website traffic
  • Generate more leads
  • Get more sales
  • Increase number of email subscribers

Now that you have an idea of your goals, list them down. Your goals must be specific and measurable. This will help you keep track of how well you're doing.

And of course, your goals must also be attainable, relevant, and timely.

Here's an example:

Increase generated leads by 25% in the next three months, and create a promotional offer: a free eBook. It should be available in the first week next month.

Without this crucial step, your strategy will fall apart.

Create a Buyer's Persona

The next step is identifying and understanding who your target market is. You can do this through surveys, or contacting a predefined target group, or engaging with existing customers.

Buyer personas must be specific. So what information should be included?

  • Name
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Occupation
  • Income
  • Goals
  • Challenges/pain points
  • Interests
  • Priorities

Don't use stereotypes when creating a persona. Do your research. Or use analytics tools, including Google Analytics or Facebook/Instagram Insights.

This is important in identifying what digital marketing approach to use. Which social media platform can you find them? And how best to interact with them.

Determine Your Funnel Stages

Now you know who your customers are. You also have an idea of their interests and pain points.

The next step is knowing how to connect with them. It's not enough to put up a website and optimize it.

Your digital marketing strategy will be for nothing if it's not useful to your audience.

So how will you make sure that your digital marketing strategies are relevant? Provide content relevant to where your prospects are in the funnel stages.

The Marketing Funnel

Here's an example to better understand the concept:

Let's say you're a done-for-you website design company. You do everything from website branding to optimizing your client's websites.

Here are a few scenarios: 

  • Someone who is thinking about creating a website for their company might google phrases like "what do I need to create a website". If they can find your business blog, that could be how they discover and hire you.

  • A person who wants to redesign their website might look into Instagram or Pinterest for branding inspirations. Showcase your portfolio or sample designs on your feed.

  • A prospect is choosing between you and your competitor. So make sure to have a price page on your website. This page must have a comprehensive comparison of your services, features, and prices to that of your competitors.

  • A satisfied customer will still need guidance about updates and other support. Follow-up through email to let them know of the latest trends and updates. 

In the previous section, we've listed some of the leading digital marketing categories. Consider all your options - both the paid and organic marketing channels.

Think about who you're targeting. Then check which channel will help you reach your prospects and customers.

Remember, you could have the best campaigns. But unless you're connecting with your prospects, you're not going to see any conversions. 

Audit Existing Digital Marketing Channels

Do you have previous or existing digital marketing campaigns?

If so, it's best to perform a self-check routine. This process is known as a digital marketing audit.

A what?

A digital marketing audit examines your brand's activities, techniques, and overall performance of your digital marketing campaigns. Ideally, this should be done periodically.

In doing so, you will understand how your programs are performing. Are there inadequacies in your strategy? Does it have weak spots? Which campaigns performed well?

How effective were these campaigns and can you still use them in the coming months?

Here are a few considerations when conducting a digital marketing audit:

Health Check: Review the status and performance of each digital marketing campaign. Determine the level of engagement and conversion rate. What was its impact on your bottom line?

Gap Analysis: Identify the gap between your existing content and what content you should have. Identify which digital strategy must be prioritized. And which one will give you the biggest savings and return on investment.

Create A Guideline - Putting Everything Together

To recap, here's what you have so far:

  • Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals
  • Clear and specific buyer personas
  • Your funnel stages and the content needed for each funnel
  • A comprehensive audit of your existing digital marketing campaigns

Now's the time to tie everything together. Create a set of tactics that will help you reach your business goals. These tactics must be written in a cohesive digital strategy document.

These tactics are a series of actions you'll need to take to achieve your goals. Here are a few examples:

  • Creating lead magnets and placing them at the bottom of a blog post. Add a CTA at the end of each post.
  • Send follow-up emails to nurture customer relationships and encourage loyalty.
  • Add a CTA to encourage customer response.
  • Create a branded hashtag on Instagram. Use user-generated content to build a relationship and increase customer loyalty.

When listing down your strategies, be specific. Specify the steps you’re going to take and what goals it'll achieve.

Set Your Metrics

Last, but definitely not the least, you need to set your key performance indicators (KPIs).

What are KPIs?

Key performance indicators are measurable values that show the effectiveness of your campaigns. That said, your KPIs must reflect your business goals.

So what are the top KPIs I should measure?

Web Traffic: Keep track of your traffic over time. The best indicator is if your overall traffic steadily increases. You may begin to see patterns that'll give you an edge over the competition.

Online Conversion Rate: A conversion is often times measured when a visitor becomes a paying customer. High conversion means your campaigns are doing well. Low conversion can mean that your campaign is unappealing or your audience is disinterested. So track your conversion rates.

Channel-Specific Traffic: Where did you get your traffic from? Was it from your Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter accounts? Looking into this metric will help you determine what channels your prospects use to find your brand.

Here are a few more things to remember:

  • Avoid vanity metrics. An example of vanity metric is the number of followers on your Instagram account. A high number of followings doesn't mean more customers. So it's not a crucial metric for your long-term goals.
  • Use KPIs to measure the success of your campaigns. But be flexible.
  • Periodically analyze, measure, and report.

You now have a basic idea of how to create a digital marketing strategy. But it doesn't end here!

In the next section, we'll cover a few more tips for presenting a digital strategy to your boss.

Bonus: Tips for Presenting a
Digital Marketing Strategy to Your Boss

Let's say you already have a digital marketing strategy in place. Do you think the next step is launching your campaign?

As a marketer, it's not enough to create an online strategy. You also need to sell your ideas to your boss. That said, you must demonstrate and prove the value of your strategy.

And the best way to do that is to share numbers, specifically ROI.

Here are a few tips:

Alleviate Concerns

It's perfectly normal for executives to be concerned. After all, they're accountable for the success and failure of your marketing strategies.

So they'll have lots of questions. Here are some of them:

  • How much will the campaign cost?
  • Will it have a positive effect on the bottom line?
  • What's the projected return on investment?
  • When will we begin to see results?

Thankfully, digital marketing is measurable.

You can prepare answers to these questions in advance. Ease their concerns not only with words, but with measurable proof.

Prove Value

Do you think executives will invest in your strategy because it's the latest industry trend?

They need to see evidence that this strategy works. Your proposal must have the potential to pay off.

So do your research. Look into some case studies. Make sure that they are from the same industry that used the same strategy. This serves as your supporting data.

Here are a few sample details you must include:

  • Increased organic web traffic by 25%
  • Customers who watched the brand's videos are 2x more likely to buy
  • Generated 40% more sales-qualified leads

Your suggested solutions must be supported with relevant data. It'll help prove why the strategies you've listed will be beneficial to your business.

Give executives a glimpse of what success looks like.

Measure Costs

When creating a digital marketing strategy, you need to consider the costs.

Even before your presentation, you need to have answers to these questions:

  • Will you need a third-party company to help with your campaign?
  • At what cost?
  • What's the timeline of your project?
  • Who will manage the campaign?
  • How much is the projected return on investment?

The goal is to show the value of your strategies. And it wouldn't hurt to think of it from the executive's perspective as well.

So be empathic yet provide proof to help ease their concerns.

Conclusion

Creating a digital marketing strategy can be intimidating and overwhelming. But once you have the basics down, you can easily work your way throughout the succeeding steps.

As a marketer, it's tempting to try every new trend. Or be visible on as many platforms as possible. Unfortunately, you'll only be setting yourself up for failure.

That said, you need a solid digital marketing strategy. It must be rooted in your business goals. And most importantly, the focus must be on your target market.

With these in mind, you'll be able to create content that will get you results.

So are you ready to create your digital marketing strategy?