Why a Digital Marketing Strategy Is Essential for Every Business

Let's face it: digital is the norm now. Every business needs a digital footprint for visibility. The first thing anyone does these days to learn about a business is Google it, check its social media, and read reviews. As more businesses compete for attention online, expressing your brand to connect with your target audience is key to your success.

Most business leaders and some marketers believe that the product and service are what set you apart from the competition. While there is some truth to that, it’s a small part of the bigger picture. The story itself is your brand, and what sets you apart.

A referral is a vetted story about your brand from a trusted known source. A review is a story about your brand from a third-party source. Your engagement on social media is a story about your ability to connect from a collective source. Your searchability is a story about how well you create content about your brand that connects with your audience.

Understanding the Importance of a Digital Marketing Strategy

This is where a digital marketing strategy comes in and why it's important. If you are just doing "marketing" without really understanding your story and what you want it to do for you, then you’re just doing things without truly knowing why. You have no North Star to guide you to where you want to go.

Only 17% of organizations clearly define their digital marketing strategy
- Smart Insights, 2023

My first boss and mentor growing up in New Zealand once told me:

"Business is like sailing; you need to know where you want to go, but the path is never a straight line. You have to read the waters, weather, and winds. If you don't know the capabilities of your ship and crew, then you’re not getting to your destination."

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

In a nutshell, a digital marketing strategy is the analysis of a business, products/services, target audience, and competitors to define the marketing efforts needed, based on its capabilities and budget, to connect to its target audience in the channels they engage in, with the story and message that connects with them. It's the answer to who, what, where, why, and how.

Why is a Digital Strategy Important for Your Business?

A strategy will give you and your team clarity in your goals to achieve your desired outcomes. It will sharpen that view of your North Star and plot a path to your destination. It's a holistic view of your business's capabilities to execute on marketing efforts, so you can be focused on what’s achievable and realistic.

To connect with your audience, you need to understand them. Really get behind their needs and wants, and how your products and/or services cater to them. A digital marketing strategy provides clear, targeted messaging to your potential customers so they understand the value you provide without ambiguity. With focused messaging in the right channels and clarity in mission, you can manage budgets and ensure results.

Clarity of goals and outcomes
Focused efforts with a holistic view
Defines your target audience and connects you with their needs and wants
Targeted messaging for a more consistent brand story
Better budget management

Organized marketers are 397% more likely to report success
- CoSchedule, 2023

Digital Marketing Strategy vs. Tactics vs. Plan

A recurring theme I've experienced running an agency is that most people conflate and confuse a strategy with tactics and plans. So let’s dive into those to make sure we are on the same page.

What’s a Strategy?

A strategy is the bigger picture idea of what a business wants to achieve in a specific space, e.g., digital marketing. It defines the direction, vision, target audience, value proposition, and roadmap for efforts. A strategy focuses on the "why", "what", and "where" questions.

What’s a Tactic?

A tactic, on the other hand, is the specific actions, methods, or steps taken to execute and implement the strategy. They are short-term, specific, actionable, and measurable. Tactics address the "how" questions and deal with practical details and execution.

What’s a Plan?

Plans outline the details: timelines, resources, and responsibilities required to execute the tactics and implement the overall digital marketing strategy. It bridges the gap between the "why, what, and where" of the strategy, and the "how" of tactics, with a "who and when".

Strategies inform tactics, tactics are guided by plans, and all three components are interconnected and essential for effective execution and goal achievement in digital marketing.

Key Components of a Digital Marketing Strategy

Research - The More You Know

This goes without saying, but the research phase is the launch point of your strategy. Depending on what stage your business is in or what market you are in, there are different ways to research your goals. Established industries will have research papers, industry statistics, commissioned reports, and government reviews. New and nascent industries might rely on surveys, user interviews, social media analysis, etc. The key point here is to gather as much information about:

Competition

This phase is usually done as part of a business plan, but to make it specific to the digital marketing scope, it has to align with which channels your business is going to focus its efforts in and what the competition is doing to pull customers away from you. A SWOT analysis here will help surface gaps in their messaging or marketing to differentiate you.

Audience

Researching your assumed target audience vs. the reality is crucial because sometimes you might think you know your audience, only to realize you are completely missing the mark. Back in the early 2000s, Hummer's core audience was seen as "rugged individualists," but after some market research, they realized the "soccer moms" were also a viable segment. But since that didn't align with their brand narrative and risked alienating their core audience, they didn't go after it. That didn't mean they didn't apply tactics to sell to the "soccer mom" segment.

Channels

Understanding which channels your audience is in, and what capacities you have to engage, are key. Staffing and budgets have a direct impact on what you can do in each. Having a focused approach on what you can do well is much better than spreading resources thin trying to be everywhere all at once poorly.

Owned Media: Digital assets you have full ownership and control over, e.g., your website and email marketing.
Paid Media: Any channel where you spend money to get attention, e.g., ads and paid/boosted social posts.
Earned Media: Anything written about you from third parties, e.g., reviews, mentions, and media coverage.

Goals and Objectives - Defining the Why, What, and Where

Based on your research, this is where you define where you want to go with your efforts. Defining your goals can be in the form of Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) or SMART goals.

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Whichever method you choose to outline your goals and objectives, these will be used to define the tactics and plan to deliver on the strategy.

Audience Analysis - Understanding Who

Your research will inform your audience analysis and will help you refine who they are, what they want, where they geographically are, or which channels they engage in. Creating buyer personas will give you the insights to refine your story and narrative to connect with them better.

To define your target persona and their buyer journey, you can gather:

Quantitative and Demographic Information, such as Location, Age, Income, Job Title
Qualitative and Psychographic Information, such as Goals, Challenges, Hobbies/Interests, Priorities

Another way to view your audience and really refine your messaging is to understand your audience’s "ValueGraphics." The ValueGraphics framework, created by David Allison, identifies ten core values considered universal across different demographics. These values are essential for marketers and organizations to understand as they shape how people make decisions and what they care about most.

Content Strategy - Crafting the Story

With the right audience profile and understanding of the competitive landscape and which channels you want to engage in, it's time to outline your content plan. For an effective content strategy, you need to define your narrative, value proposition, and tone and voice for each channel you want to engage in.

To get the right brand narrative, you need to center your audience. For each persona you developed a buyer journey for, consider what you would say to them at each step of their buyer journey and how your products/services align with their needs. Then develop that further to create a story that will appeal to their wants.

Developing Your Voice & Tone

Creating a consistent tone and voice for your business is crucial as it helps you define how you communicate with your audience and how they perceive your brand. Tone and voice are elements of your brand's personality, reflecting its values to your target audience.

Voice

Your brand's voice represents the personality of your brand as expressed through communication. It should be consistent across all content. Consider adjectives that describe your brand's personality, like: Professional, authoritative, friendly, whimsical, sincere, direct, technical, informative, casual, or sophisticated.

Tone

While your voice remains consistent, your tone can change depending on the context, medium, or audience's mood. Tone refers to the emotional inflection applied to your voice. For example:

Social media posts might be more casual and fun.
Customer service communications might be more empathetic and reassuring.
Technical guides might be more formal and straightforward.

Implementing SEO to Be Found

Keyword research will help you understand what people are searching for to find products and services like yours. While you might know the technical terms for the features of your products or the jargon about your service and industry, your audience might not. Search gives you insight into what the adjacent or colloquial terms used by the general public to describe what they are looking for. Knowing how your audience sees your product/services will help you create content that aligns what you want to say about your products with what your audience thinks about your product/service vertical.

There is a lot more to keyword research and SEO, and I'll dive into that in another article. There is too much to cover here.

60% of people purchase a product after reading a blog post about it
- Demand Metric, 2022

User Experience - Refining Owned Channels

Whether you are building a site from scratch or already have a website, the research about your audience and the story you want to tell will shape your site information architecture, content, and user experience. You will find clear cues on how to make your site navigation clearer, create more engaging calls to action, and refine when and where to present your conversion points.

Depending on your audience, mobile-friendliness will play a key factor for users on the go, or younger audiences that rely on smartphones for their internet consumption. Older and business-centric audiences find themselves on larger screens with work computers or tablets.

Developing a clean and clear user experience for your target audience in your owned channels will help increase the conversions needed to achieve your goals.

Data Analytics - What to Measure

In the industry, we are plagued by vanity metrics. These are numbers that sound and feel good, but in general really don't tell much of a story about what's happening. Metrics like social media followers or website traffic are very surface level. Understanding the ratio of engaged followers is a much better metric. Knowing how long site visitors stay on your site, how many pages they visit, and conversions on CTAs tells a better story.

Defining metrics that will help you understand how you are getting to your true goals as part of your strategy will give you the insights you need to learn, adapt, and maneuver to improve your tactics.

Final Thoughts

Before diving into any digital marketing efforts, I find it imperative to go through the digital marketing exercise. Most small businesses and entrepreneurs will try and skip this phase, thinking because they know their product or business or have been in the game for a while, that it's a waste of money or unnecessary. But the need for it is to align business goals with current realities, creating clarity for everyone involved in delivering results. For business owners and entrepreneurs, it extracts the ideas and goals and makes sure their teams are clear on what to do.

Do you need a digital strategy to connect better with your audience?

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Mohamed Hamad

Mohamed Hamad is the founder of Third Wunder, a Montreal-based digital marketing agency, with 15 years of experience in web development, digital marketing, and entrepreneurship. Through his blog, The Scratchpad, he shares insights on digital marketing and design trends, and the lessons learned from his entrepreneurial journey, aiming to inspire and educate fellow professionals and enthusiasts alike.