How to build a digital marketing strategy in 2024?

Whether you want to start running digital campaigns for e-commerce or for a service site, you need to develop an effective plan of action. Without a digital strategy, you won’t know what direction you’re heading or what point you’re starting from. However, if you’ve been marketing “by feel” so far, without hard data, you probably don’t know how to develop a plan. Nothing lost – use our guide and create a digital marketing strategy from A to Z.

What is a digital marketing strategy?

Digital marketing strategy includes a comprehensive plan of marketing activities with which you want to promote your products or services online. A marketing strategy includes the following elements:

• the business and marketing objectives you want to achieve with digital marketing,
• channels you want to use to achieve your goals,
• analysis of the market and competition,
• types of content you need to achieve your goals,
• plan and schedule of activities,
• budget needed for activities,
• the automation methods you want to use in marketing your brand,

You already know the elements of a comprehensive marketing strategy. Now let’s examine the steps you need to take to build a digital marketing strategy that really works.

1. Set goals and measurable KPIs

Objectives are the overall goals that a digital marketing strategy wants to sz. They are broadly defined aspirations, such as “increasing sales”, “building brand awareness” or “improving customer service”. Goals should be realistic, but at the same time ambitious, in order to motivate the team to action. Closely related to goals are performance indicators (KPIs – Key Performance Indicators) and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). With these, you can clearly set not only goals, but also priorities. Let’s see how to use this strategy in practice when building a digital marketing plan:

Example:Let’s assume your goal is to Increase sales by 30% in a year. The KPIs that will allow you to determine if you are heading in the right direction are: Number of transactions per month, value of average order and conversion rate on the site. For this goal, the KPIs might look like the following:

• Increase the number of transactions from 1000 to 1300 per month.
• Increase the average order value from $50 to $65.
• Increase the number of returning customers by 20%.

Example 2: Suppose you want to increase your website traffic by 20% in 6 months. Your KPIs are: Number of visits to the site, average time spent on the site, average engagement rate. Your OKRs could be as follows:

• Increase the number of visitors from 50,000 to 60,000 per month.
• Decrease the rejection rate from 45% to 35%.
• Increase the number of visits from organic search engines by 15%.

2. Research the market and analyze the results

There is no effective digital marketing strategy without analysis and research. To know where you’re going and what goals to set for yourself, you must first know where you are. This is why you need to:

• evaluate your competition – check what marketing activities your competitors are doing and try to estimate what results they are achieving. Competitor monitoring tools such as SpyFu, SimilarWeb, BuzzSumo, Brand24 and even Google Alerts can be useful;
• Check how your brand ranks against competitors – are you leading the pack, setting trends, or are you in the middle? Evaluate the last year in terms of results and strategies used. Consider what you are doing well and what needs improvement, as well as what new measures you can implement. Or maybe some you want to abandon because they are ineffective?

3. Know your target group and create buyer personae

To build effective marketing, you need to know who you are addressing with your message. Simply stating that your target audience is Millenials or middle-aged men is far too little. Effectively knowing your target audience is based on:

• collect demographic data, such as your customers’ age, gender, location or income level and occupational status; this data can be found in Google Analytics 4, Facebook Audience Insights or in your CRM system,
• knowing the psychographics of your customers – psychographics are those elements behind your customers’ purchasing decisions; these include interests, lifestyle, values; you can obtain this data through surveys, analysis of social media discussions or thanks to tools – Brand24 or BuzzSumo,
• analysis of shopping behavior – understanding how your customers shop online can help you create better marketing campaigns. This information relates to purchase channels, purchase frequency and the decision-making process (how long it takes, whether the purchase is made after research or impulsively).

Based on this information, conduct audience segmentation and then create buyer personae. Personais a fictional, but based on real data, representative of your target audience. Creating personas helps you visualize and better understand your customers. Specify:

• Name and age: Give the person a name and specify the age (e.g. “Anna, 34 years old”).
• Occupation: what does he or she do professionally? What are her professional responsibilities and goals?
• Lifestyle and values: What are her daily habits, what is important to her?
• Objectives and challenges: What goals does she have for your product/service? What challenges does she face?

See how to ethically acquire user data in 2024.

4. Build a content marketing strategy

When you already know your business goals and your target audience and their needs, you can start the process of building a content marketing strategy It includes a comprehensive plan of content that you will create not only for the website, but also in other channels such as social media, newsletters, etc. How to create it

• Determine the goals you want to pursue with your content (build brand awareness, generate leads, foster conversions, attract traffic, build authority).
• Choose what content formats you want to pursue. These can be blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, ebooks, and certainly social media posts.
• Search for content ideas – you can do this on Google (Google prompts, related queries), Answer the Public hashtags on Instagram and trends on TikTok, browse Pinterest).
• Prepare a content schedule – determine the frequency of publication (e.g., 2 blogs per week, 1 video per week, 1 podcast per month), plan topics taking into account seasonality and important events, holidays, and assign people to be responsible for specific content. See also how to build seasonal campaigns.
• Plan your content promotion process – consider in which channels you will promote specific types of content. Ensure diversity – the content of posts on LinkedIn should be different from the content on Facebook or Instagram roaz TikToku.

See also:

• how much content marketing costs,
• how to test the effectiveness of content,
• 9 ways to create engaging content for your blog,
• how to build an online content distribution strategy,
• 41 tools useful in content marketing

Google Search Hints

An Answer the Public tool for finding content ideas

5. Select promotion channels

Different channels can serve different purposes – some are ideal for building brand awareness, others for generating leads or direct sales. Therefore, digital marketing channels must match your business and marketing goals and target audience. If your audience is fashion fans, you need to be on Pinterest. If you write about current events, you need to set up an account on X platform. If your goal is to build business relationships, choose LinkedIn.

Certain ideas for marketing channels you will see in our examples:

• Example 1: Imagine you are running an online clothing store for teenage girls. For promotion you should choose: Instagram, E-mail marketing and TikTok.
• Example 2: You run a B2B company offering IT services. Choose LinkedIn, SEO, content marketing. Google Ads and webinars.
• Example 3: You want to open a local restaurant. The channels you should consider are: local SEO, Instagram, Facebook and your company’s Google profile.

6. Set a marketing budget

To carry out effective activities, you must have the funds for them and place them appropriately. To do this:

• Determine how much your company can spend on marketing as a whole. Typically, the marketing budget is a percentage of company revenue. Typical values range from 5% to 20% of annual revenue, depending on company size, industry and goals.
• Divide the budget by marketing channel – each channel requires a different investment, depending on its effectiveness and costs. Typical budget breakdown:
  • SEO and content marketing: 25-35%
  • Paid advertising (PPC, Google Ads, Facebook Ads): 30-40%
  • Social media: 15-25%
  • E-mail marketing: 5-15%
  • Influencer marketing or PR: 5-10%
• Set priorities and adjust budget – not all channels will be equally important to your strategy. Determine which ones will yield the greatest return on investment, and adjust your budget to focus on those key areas. If you find that your Facebook ads are yielding the best results, you can increase your budget for this channel while reducing spending on less effective activities.
• Include operating costs – remember that a marketing budget is not only the cost of advertising campaigns. You must also include expenses for:
  • Marketing tools – software for marketing automation, analytics, social media management, etc.
  • Content production – content creation costs, such as copywriters’, graphic designers’, video producers’ salaries.
  • Employees – salaries for the marketing team or freelancers.
  • Training and development – investment in competence development of the marketing team.
• Save a reserve for unexpected expenses – always include a reserve in your budget for unforeseen expenses. The marketing market is dynamic, and emergencies may require additional funding. Allocate 5-10% of your total marketing budget as a reserve for unexpected campaigns, PR crises or additional marketing initiatives.

7. Identify automation methods

Marketing automation is the use of technology and tools to automate repetitive marketing tasks to save time, increase efficiency and improve campaign performance. It’s a good idea to assess which automation methods you want to use as early as the stage of building your digital strategy.

• Select automation tools and check their functionalities and costs. Popular tools include Mailchimp, Hubspot, Get Response, Zapier or Buffer, for example.
• E-mail marketing campaigns – reminders for abandoned shopping carts or automatic sending of welcome emails to new subscribers and messages to odviorców who haven’t visited your site for a long time.
• Determine what automation options you want to use in your ad campaigns (A/B testing, automatic rate adjustments).
• Consider using automation to collect leads.
• Discuss how to apply automation to analytics and reporting.

Summary

Building a digital marketing strategy in 2024 requires a thoughtful approach that takes into account rapidly changing technologies, changes in consumer behavior, and the growing importance of personalization and automation. Without a good understanding of your audience, market situation and competition, and defining your goals, you are unlikely to reach your audience at the right time and place. However, you can build a plan now that will deliver the results you want in the long run.