Digital Marketing Strategy: Goals and Development Stages

The term "digital strategy" is widely used, but interpretations vary. We clarify what a digital marketing strategy is and provide a practical guide. Addressing questions such as what it is, when a company needs it, its components, and how to develop and implement it.

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a cohesive set of steps, leveraging tools and tactics in digital marketing, used to achieve specific business goals. Like any strategy, it originates from set goals and comprises three essential parts:

• Identifying the current situation and issues preventing goal achievement
• A fundamental plan to solve these issues
• A set of key actions necessary to achieve the goals

Goals of Developing a Digital Strategy

The primary goal of developing a digital strategy is to create a comprehensive, understandable, and justified plan for achieving business objectives. Completeness and justification also imply a high probability (reliability) of achieving your goals, distinguishing it from "patchwork" digital business promotion.

If you aim for reliable and predictable sales and profit growth, market share increase, and success in competitive environments, formulating a digital strategy for your company is essential.

When and Who Needs an Internet Marketing Strategy

You and your company are ready for it if:

• You have experimented with individual internet promotion tools and continue to use them.
• There are or were specific positive results.
• You have basic online presence (website, possibly social media).
• There is traffic (to the website or social media), inquiries, and sales.
• However, you are dissatisfied with the volume of inquiries and sales, your goals are not being met, and you don't know how to drastically change the situation.

In summary, a certain level of experience and engagement with your brand and product is required to transition to a level of work with a well-thought-out strategy. If you recognize your situation in this description, you need a digital strategy to address your challenges.

Overall Scheme for Building a Digital Strategy

Like any strategy, internet marketing strategy:

1. Is based on "What?": what we have at the moment, the disposition, and what we want to achieve (goals).
2. Answers the question "How?": how, through which key actions and changes, we want to achieve the goals.

Digital Strategy Development Plan

1. Gathering and Analyzing the Situation and All Initial Data:

You need numbers and facts. Collect all data related to the overall company development strategy. If you have conducted a SWOT analysis, this experience will fit in perfectly here: analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the company and the product, market opportunities, and potential threats. Identify growth opportunities.

You need to patiently and thoughtfully answer dozens of questions about your business, product, market, customers, competitors, pricing, sales cycle, sales funnel, etc. What do you sell, which products are the most profitable? How do you position yourself? What advertising campaigns are running? What is the state of your website? What is your company's current reputation? What is the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of your products? Why is it advantageous to buy from you? What do competitors offer? What are the advantages of their product? What sales volumes have been achieved? And what is the market demand? Objectively, how interesting are your offers, and many other questions.

Why so detailed? Because at the initial stage, it is important to establish a strong foundation for your future digital marketing strategy.

At this stage, you also need to analyze your target audience. Who buys from you, and what customer groups can you identify? Which of them are more active and make more purchases? For each target audience group, you need to create a Portrait of the Target Audience using the Persona method.

2. Goal Setting

Based on the overall goals of your company, you need to determine the marketing and sales indicators you aim for. They should be clearly quantified.

These can include:

• Quantities (inquiries, sales, active clients, etc.)
• Volumes (sales, market share)
• Percentages (website conversion rates, inquiries to sales, etc.)

Goals need to be defined (decomposed) for each of your key products and customer groups. Decompose them down to the number of target website visits for each product. How do you plan to achieve various overall figures, for example, in revenue considering market opportunities? This will be just a hypothesis; it is clear that you can make adjustments during the process—flexibility and adaptability are normal.

When setting goals, adhere to the SMART principle. Quantification itself implies specificity and measurability, and deadlines are also necessary. Be realistic 😊

3. Identification of Bottlenecks and Key Change Points

By this point, you already understand:

1. the current situation (conditions, available resources, and metrics),
2. the metrics you want to achieve as a result of implementing the internet marketing strategy.

Now you need to assess and determine where and what problems currently exist, hindering the achievement of your goals. Perhaps there's a bottleneck in traffic – do you have very low website visits? Or is the conversion rate too low? Or is the average check too low?

Or, in general, you are not offering and selling to all target audiences, or perhaps you are not upselling enough?

You need a list of specific hypotheses about constraints. These constraints will later turn into key points of impact influenced by your digital strategy.

After creating the list, prioritize it: choose the most suitable hypotheses in terms of the "resources/potential impact on goal achievement" ratio.

4. Identification of Fundamental Tactics and Tools for Goal Achievement

At this stage, the concrete framework of your digital strategy emerges. You reconsider the data obtained in previous stages:

• which products you plan to strengthen with the strategy
• what advantages these products have
• which target audiences you will increase sales to
• where you can find each of these target audiences, their pain points, and purchasing motivations
• how they make decisions, what interactions with your company they need to buy, and what the purchasing process is like

You also evaluate whether the current promotion tools and touchpoints align with how your target audience makes purchases.

As a result, you formulate key changes and tactics for your digital strategy. It's important to note that these outlines are developed for each of the priority combinations "Product + Target Audience," no matter how many such combinations you have.

To increase the sales volume of the "Corporate Bankruptcy" service for the target audience "Corporate Entities with financial problems and tax debts over 1.5 million euros" to the amount of 1,300 thousand euros per month, we need to:

• Utilize content marketing on bankruptcy topics.
• Launch advertising on social networks.
• Drive at least 1200 visitors to the website per month.
• Revise landing pages to match the Buyer Persona for increasing conversion to hot traffic by 4%.

5. Determination of Necessary Resources (including budget), Timelines, and Responsibilities

After setting goals, formulating fundamental action plans for implementing the digital strategy, and having a set of tactics and tools, you need to plan resources.

What resources will you need?

Team: Individuals responsible for developing specific action plans and executing them. This could involve several people, one person, a project manager from your company plus an external team—there are various options.

Budget for Work: Including amounts for developing or revising existing touchpoints, budgets for paid traffic, SEO, copywriters, etc.

Time: Both in terms of a) implementation timelines—assess realistically, don't try to solve all problems in a couple of months, and b) the time of managers and experts from your company for participating in the strategy implementation. This could range from a couple of hours per month to several hours per week, depending on the tasks, but time will likely be required.

It's important to understand that both timelines and budgets at this stage will be tentative. Concrete work plans, which could be accurately estimated, do not exist at this point. However, these benchmarks are necessary, including to detail plans correctly (which will already be part of implementation tactics, not the strategy).

How to Create an Implementation Plan for the Digital Strategy

Next comes the strategy's execution, i.e., tactical actions. You need to:

1. Outline a work and expense plan for at least 3-6 months (the farther ahead, the more generalized). Here, you compile all the promotion tactics and tools devised earlier into specific combinations to lead your target audience to sales and achieve your goals. The refinement (or even the creation from scratch) of the website, landing pages, traffic tools, SMM, conversion rate improvement, audience warming mechanics—all need to be planned here.
2. Refine timelines and budgets (this doesn't mean the budget has to change, but like other resources, it can be unevenly distributed).
3. Distribute the initial task pool among performers, define specific key performance indicators (KPIs), plan checkpoints, and allow the team to start executing the initial tasks.

When creating a specific plan for implementing an internet marketing strategy, there are several important principles and rules:

• All specific action plans are built solely based on detailed Buyer Personas and an understanding of their Customer Journey Map.
• Big results come from small results. Think through specific conversion paths, attract the right traffic, create landing pages, and other touchpoints. The results (in target numbers) for such chains may not always be significant, especially if you have a large matrix of products and target audiences. Simply launch more of these "chains," and their cumulative results will lead you to achieve strategic goals.
• When planning promotion actions, start by addressing existing hot demand before moving on to colder leads (conversion chains for hot demand will be simpler, shorter, and cheaper).

By following this plan, you will formulate an effective digital strategy for your company.

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