1.

What is a marketing strategy?

It's important to understand how a marketing strategy differs from a digital

marketing strategy before implementing one or both at your company.

A marketing strategy is a plan for reaching a specific marketing-related goal (or

goals) in a focused and achievable way. It takes into consideration what your
business is currently doing well and what you're missing in regards to the
objective you set, so you're more likely to accomplish it.

But what's the difference between a marketing strategy and marketing tactics
— two terms often used interchangeably?

Marketing Strategy vs. Tactics

As we mentioned above, a strategy is an achievable and focused set of steps

used to help you reach a specific goal.

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, and 3) a set of
targeted actions that are necessary to accomplish the policy. (watch the video)
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 time. So, if you're ever feeling
overwhelmed about your marketing strategy, refer to these three steps to
keep you focused on achieving your objectives.

Marketing tactics, or tactics of any kind, are the specific actions you choose to
take throughout your strategy to help you reach your end goal. In other words,
a strategy is your destination — it's the achievable, focused plan for getting
you to your target. Tactics are concrete and definable steps within your
strategy that ensure you reach your objective.

To provide a better understanding of what they may entail, check out the
following list of basic marketing strategies commonly utilized by teams across
a range of industries.
 Basic Marketing Strategies

 Publish a blog.

 Advertise on a specific social media platform (e.g. Facebook Ads, Instagram

Ads).

 Offer free educational resources

 Search engine optimize your digital content.

 Create a giveaway and/ or contest.

 Test different campaign types to determine what works best for your
audience.

 Organize a webinar.

 Product a podcast.

 Create an email campaign.

Now that you understand what a marketing strategy is, let's look at how one
differs from a digital marketing strategy.

What is digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan that helps your business achieve specific
digital goals through carefully selected online marketing channels such as paid,
earned, and owned media.

Similar to marketing strategies and marketing tactics, another couple of similar

terms that are often, incorrectly, used interchangeably are digital marketing
strategy and digital marketing campaign. So how do they differ?
 What is a digital marketing campaign?

As mentioned, a digital strategy is the series of actions you plan and take to
achieve your overarching digital marketing goal. In contrast, digital marketing
campaigns are the building blocks and actions within your strategy that move
you toward a specific, digital 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.

Next, let's look at the steps involved in creating a digital marketing strategy for
your business.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

1. Build your buyer personas.

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

3. Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets.

4. Audit and plan your owned media campaigns.

5. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you'll need.

6. Audit and plan your earned media campaigns.

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.
 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 businesses — 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-tine 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 us, 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.

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 the 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 on 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.
4. Audit and plan your owned media campaigns.

At the heart of digital marketing is owned media — and it almost always takes
comes in the form of content. That's because nearly every message your brand
broadcasts can be classified as content, whether it's an About Us site page,
product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, or social
media posts.

Content helps convert your website visitors into leads and customers while
improving your brand's online presence. And when this content is search
engine optimized (SEO), it can boost your search and organic traffic.

Whatever your digital marketing strategy goal is, you'll want to incorporate
owned content. To start, decide what content will help you reach your goals.

If your goal is to generate 50% more leads via the website than last year,
your About Us page is most likely not going to be included in your strategy,
unless that page has somehow been a lead-generation machine in the past.
Here's a brief process you can follow to work out what owned content you
need to meet your digital marketing strategy goals.

Audit your existing content.

Make a list of your existing owned content, and rank each item according to
what has previously performed best in relation to your current goals.

For example, if your goal is lead generation, rank your content according to
which pieces generated the most leads over the last year (such as a blog post,
ebook, or site page).

The idea here is to figure out what's currently working, and what's not, so that
you can set yourself up for success when planning future content.
 Identify gaps in your existing content.

Based on your buyer personas, identify any gaps in the content you have. For
example, if you're a math tutoring company and know through research that
a major challenge for your personas is finding effective ways to study — you
don't currently have content that speaks to that concern — create some.

By looking at your content audit, you might discover that ebooks hosted on a
certain type of landing page convert really well (better than webinars, for
example). In the case of this math tutoring company, you might make the
decision to add an ebook about "how to make studying more effective" to your
content creation plans.

Create a content creation plan.

Based on your findings and the gaps you've identified, make a content creation
plan outlining the content that's necessary to help you hit your goals.

This should include:

 Title

 Format

 Goal

 Promotional channels

 Why you're creating the content

 Priority level of the content

This can be a simple spreadsheet, and should also include budget information
if you're planning to outsource the content creation, or a time estimate if
you're producing it yourself.
5. Audit and plan your earned media campaigns.

Evaluating your previous earned media against your current goals can help you
get an idea of where to focus your time. Look at where your traffic and leads
are coming from (if that's your goal) and rank each earned media source from
most effective to least effective.

You may find a particular article you contributed to the industry press drove a
lot of qualified traffic to your website, which boosted conversions. Or, you may
discover LinkedIn is where you see most people sharing content, which
increased traffic.

The idea is to build a picture of what types of earned media will help you
reach your goals (and what won't) based on historical data. However, if
there's something new you want to experiment with, don't rule it out just
because it's never been done before.

6. Audit and plan your paid media campaigns.

This process involves much of the same process: You need to evaluate your
existing paid media across each platform (e.g. Google AdWords, Facebook,
Twitter, etc.) to figure out what's most likely to help you meet your current
goals.

If you've spent a lot of money on AdWords and haven't seen the results you'd
hoped for, maybe it's time to refine your approach, or scrap it altogether and
focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results.

By the end of the process, you should have a clear idea of which paid media
platforms you want to continue using, and which (if any) you'd like to remove
from your strategy.
 7. Bring your digital marketing campaign together.

You've done the planning and the research, and you now have a solid vision of
the elements that will make up your digital marketing strategy.

To review, here's what you should have solidified so far:

 Clear profile(s) of your buyer persona(s)

 One or more digital marketing-specific goals

 An inventory of your existing owned, earned, and paid media

 An audit of your existing owned, earned, and paid media

 An owned content creation plan or wish list

Now, it's time to bring all of it together to form a cohesive strategy document.
Let's revisit what digital strategy means: the series of actions that are going to
help you achieve your goal(s) through online (digital) marketing.

Meaning, your strategy document should map out the series of actions you're
going to take to achieve your goals, based on your research up to this point.

(Pro tip: A spreadsheet is an efficient format for this — and for the sake of
consistency, you might find it easiest to map out according to the owned,
earned, and paid media framework we've used so far.)

You'll also need to plan your strategy for the long term — typically, around 6-
12 months is a good starting point, depending on your business. This will
allow you to overlay when you and your team will be executing each action.
For example:

 In January, you'll start a blog which will be continually updated once a week,
for the entire year.

 In March, you'll launch a new ebook, accompanied by paid promotion.

 In July, you'll prepare for your biggest business month — what do you hope to
have observed at this point that will influence the content you produce to
support it?

 In September, you'll focus on earned media in the form of PR to drive

additional traffic during the run-up.

By taking this approach, you'll create a structured timeline for your activity,
which will help communicate plans among colleagues.

Lastly, here a some well-known examples of digital marketing campaigns, and

the strategies they employ, to get you inspired .

Digital Marketing Campaign Examples

1. GoPro

2. Delta Airlines

3. Geico

4. Wayfair

5. Mastercard

6. ETF Securities

7. Red Bull
1. GoPro: Earned Media User-Made Video
GoPro is famous for its unique point-of-view style footage, all taken from the
company's classic fisheye lens.
What you might not know is that so much of the video content you see on
GoPro's YouTube channel wasn't made by GoPro — rather, it's created their
loyal users.

By populating their YouTube channel with user-made video content, GoPro has
encouraged their fanbase to capture their footage and adventures, and then
post it online (crediting the GoPro product for their footage and experience).

This ongoing digital marketing campaign has championed the use of video to
spread the word about GoPro's product line as well as created a community
of loyal customers and fans. (watch the video)
2. Delta Air Lines: Owned Media Twitter Stories
Delta Air Lines is a prolific user of social media, specifically on Twitter. The
brand uses the platform to engage potential passengers in a variety of ways
that are both timely and emotionally stimulating.
For example, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the company
shared personal stories from Delta employees with audience members via the
company's Twitter feed.

This type of digital campaign promotes loyalty, positive brand awareness, and
gives prospective and current customers an idea of what Delta cares about
and stands for.
3. Geico: Paid Media YouTube Preroll Ads
For many, when you hear the word "Geico," you automatically remember you
can "save 15% or more on car insurance."
But even a company with such a memorable and successful tagline can risk
annoying audience members (repetitive things can become old, quickly) when
a marketing campaign becomes too longwinded.
That's why Geico launched a series of preroll ads on YouTube that admit to the
ad's brevity. Preroll ads are a form of paid content on YouTube in which you
pay YouTube to roll 15-to-20-second ads ahead of videos that have the same
audience as the advertiser. (watch the video)

While some companies try to squeeze as much messaging as they can into that
short slot, Geico has taken the opportunity to make fun of their brand for
taking up your time in the first place.

This makes Geico's YouTube preroll commercials entertaining and unique, and
shows the level of self-awareness the brand has.
4. Wayfair: Owned Media Instagram Tags
Wayfair, a home furnishings and decor merchant, has an innovative Instagram
strategy — their Instagram photos aren't just photos. That's
because Instagram provides companies with the ability to create purchase
pages from within the platform.
With Instagram Shopping, Wayfair has posted home interior shots on
Instagram and tagged the products in the photos with information and pricing
details.

This is a digital marketing campaign that shows people exactly how much each
item in the photos cost. It also directs audience members to purchase the
items seen in the photos without ever leaving the app. In return, Wayfair can
boost conversions and revenue from within Instagram.
5. Mastercard: Owned Media Travel Blog
Mastercard bases its brand on the stories and adventures that cardholders
experience. But what good is a travel-based brand without a travel-based
digital marketing campaign to go with it?

Priceless Cities, Mastercard's travel blog, is a resource that customers pair with
the credit cards that help them pay for their trips.

This campaign allows the company to better align with the things their
customers invest in as well as the places their customers travel to.
6. ETF Securities: Paid Media LinkedIn Sponsored Content
ETF Securities is a small, asset management service that caters to wealth
managers and investors in Europe.

The company learned their customers spend the most time on LinkedIn,
interacting with sponsored, paid content on the platform.

By investing their time here, ETF Securities has driven more interest in
investments and has been able to help their customers make smarter financial
decisions. With this digital campaign, ETF Securities saw 95% year-over-year
growth in LinkedIn followers.
 Red Bull: Owned Media Lifestyle News

Red Bull has become well-known for the sponsorship of extreme sports, not
just the energy drink they sell.

Instead of creating digital content related to the energy drink, Red Bull
captures its audience with articles and videos about the latest happenings in
the extreme sports community.

In one of their digital marketing campaigns, Red Bull proved what you sell isn't
always the focus ideal for a content strategy. Rather, it can be significantly
more valuable to tailor a campaign to the lifestyle your customers live, or want
to be associated with.