The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Strategies & How to Improve Your Digital Presence

Ultimate Guide to Marketing Strategies: As a business owner, you’re always looking for ways to reach more consumers and grow your brand. In today’s digital age, one of the best ways to do this is through a well-executed digital marketing strategy. By engaging with your target audience online, you can build relationships, generate leads, and drive sales.

However, developing a successful digital marketing strategy can be a challenge. With so many moving parts and constantly changing best practices, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. That’s why we’ve put together this Ultimate Guide to Marketing Strategies.

In it, you’ll find everything you need to know about building an effective digital marketing strategy, from developing your buyer personas to creating killer content and powerful campaigns. So what are you waiting for? Get started today and see the results tomorrow.

If you’re a small business and you’re unsure how to jumpstart your strategy, this digital marketing strategy template will help you get there. It includes actionable tips and templates to set you up for success.

Now back to this — are you confused about the difference between a marketing strategy and marketing tactics? We cover that below.

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Marketing or not, there are three parts of any strategy:

1. A diagnosis of your challenge
2. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge
3. A set of targeted actions that are necessary to accomplish the policy

Depending on the scale of your business, your marketing strategy may include several moving parts, each with different goals. With that said, working on your strategy can become daunting at times.

So, if you’re ever feeling overwhelmed about your marketing strategy, refer to these three steps to keep you focused on achieving your objectives.

Now, let’s look at digital marketing strategy.

A strong digital marketing strategy helps your business achieve specific digital goals through carefully selected mediums. Similar to marketing strategies versus marketing tactics, “digital marketing strategy” and “digital marketing campaign” are also often interchanged. So, how do they differ?

We cover that in the following sections.

What is a digital marketing campaign?

Digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks and actions within your digital marketing strategy that move you toward a specific end goal.

For instance, if the overarching goal of your digital marketing strategy is to generate more leads through social media, you might run a digital marketing campaign on Twitter. You may share some of your business’s best-performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through the channel.

1. Build your buyer personas.

For any marketing strategy – digital or not – you need to know who you’re marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them.

Organize your audience segments and make your marketing stronger with templates to build your buyer personas.

Buyer personas represent your ideal customer(s) and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business’s target audience.

It’s important to note that this information should be based upon real data whenever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to move in the wrong direction.

To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who align with your target audience.

But what kind of information should you gather for your own buyer persona(s) to inform your digital marketing strategy?

That depends on your business — it’s likely to vary depending on whether you’re B2B or B2C, or whether you sell a high-cost or low-cost product.

Here are some starting points that you can fine-tune and tailor to your particular business.

Quantitative and Demographic Information

• Location: Use web analytics tools to easily identify what location your website traffic is coming from.
• Age: Depending on your business, this may or may not be relevant information. But if it is, it’s best to gather this data by identifying trends in your existing prospect and contact database.
• Income: It’s best to gather sensitive information like personal income through persona research interviews, as people might be unwilling to share these details via online forms.
• Job Title: This is something you can get a rough idea of from your existing customer base and is most relevant for B2B companies.

Qualitative and Psychographic Information

• Goals: Depending on what challenge your product or service solves, you may already have a good idea of the goals of your buyer persona. Cement your assumptions by speaking to real customers and internal sales and customer service reps.
• Challenges: Speak to customers, sales and customer service reps, and any other customer-facing employees to get an idea of the common challenges your audience members face.
• Hobbies/Interests: Ask customers and those who align with your target audience about their hobbies and interests. If you’re a fashion brand, for example, it’s helpful to know if large segments of your audience are also interested in fitness and well-being to inform future content and partnerships.
• Priorities: Talk to customers and target audience members to find out what’s most important to them in relation to your business. For example, if you’re a B2B software company, knowing your audience values customer support over a competitive price point is very valuable information.

By combining all of these details, you’ll be able to create buyer personas that are accurate and highly valuable for your business.

2. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need.

Your marketing goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of your business.

For example, if your business’s goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your marketing team’s goal might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than the previous year to contribute to that success.

Use a high-level marketing plan template to outline your annual marketing strategy, identify top priorities, and more.

Download the Template

Whatever your overarching digital marketing goal is, you must be able to measure the success of your strategy along the way with the right digital marketing tools.

For instance, the Reporting Dashboard in HubSpot brings all of your marketing and sales data into one place, so you can quickly determine what works and what doesn’t to improve your strategy for the future.

3. Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets.

When reviewing your existing digital marketing channels and assets to determine what to incorporate in your strategy, it’s helpful to first consider the big picture — this will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed or confused.

Gather what you have, and categorize each vehicle or asset in a spreadsheet, so you have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.

Owned, Earned, Paid Media Framework

To do this effectively, use the owned, earned, and paid media framework to categorize the digital “vehicles,” assets, or channels you’re already using and decide what’s a good fit for your strategy.

Owned Media

This refers to the digital assets your brand or company owns — whether that’s your website, social media profiles, blog content, or imagery. Owned channels are what your business has complete control over.

This can also include some off-site content you own that isn’t hosted on your website (e.g. a blog you publish on Medium).

Earned Media

Earned media refers to the exposure you earn through word-of-mouth marketing. Whether that’s content you’ve distributed on other websites (e.g. guest posts), PR work you’ve been doing, or the customer experience you’ve delivered. Earned media is the recognition you receive as a result of these efforts.

You can earn media by getting press mentions and positive reviews as well as by people sharing your content via their networks (e.g. social media channels).

Paid Media

Paid media refers to any vehicle or channel you spend money on to catch the attention of your buyer personas.

This includes things like Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (e.g. sponsored posts on other websites), or any other medium through which you pay in exchange for increased visibility.

Since you have a better grasp of what this framework entails, let’s look at an example.

Say you have an owned piece of content on a landing page on your website that’s been created to help you generate leads. You know you want to incorporate different parts of the framework rather than just working with owned, earned, or paid media alone.

To amplify the number of leads the content generates, you make an effort to ensure it’s shareable so your audience can distribute it via their social media profiles. In return, this will increase traffic to your landing page. This is the earned media component.

To support your content’s success, you might post about the content on your Facebook page and pay to have it seen by more people in your target audience.

This is how the three parts of the framework are able to work together — although, it’s not necessary for success. For instance, if your owned and earned media are already both successful, you might not need to invest in paid. So, evaluate the best solution to help you meet your goal, and then incorporate the channels that work best for your business into your digital marketing strategy.

Now you know what’s already being used, you can start to think about what to keep and what to cut.

Keep track of your paid media efforts with this free Paid Media Template.

Download the Template

4. Audit and plan your owned media campaigns.

At the heart of digital marketing is owned media — and it almost always comes in the form of