An efficient digital marketing strategy shortens the distance between organisation and audience, attracting customers to your business and reaching them where, when and how they will be most receptive to your messages. Developing a strong digital marketing strategy sets the route to achieve your goals using the digital channels that are best suited to reaching your audience and achieving your desired outcomes.

Fundamentally, digital strategies are designed to raise brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, generate leads, and drive online sales. To achieve these goals there are multiple tactics in your playbook, including Seach Engine Optimisation, Pay-per-click, content marketing, eCRM and social media. At big group, our specialist teams help business decide, define and deliver the right blend of tactics to achieve your strategic goals.

Digital marketing offers significant advantages over traditional marketing methods in terms of the control, creativity and connectivity of communications when it comes to how to attract customers to your business. Here are the top five reasons why the right digital marketing strategy makes a difference:

1. Effective audience targeting.

Organisations can define their focus to reach global audiences or specific geographic areas, targeting distinct demographics, interests or behavioural patterns to reach new markets. This flexibility of control ensures that marketing budgets work as efficiently as possible to attract new customers to your business.

2. Digital marketing is cost effective.

With minimal up-front costs compared to traditional advertising, a higher proportion of your budget is dedicated to customer contact. Scalable campaigns can be adapted to suit any budget, allowing smaller businesses to compete on a level playing field with corporates, and real-time feedback means that spending can be adjusted or reallocated based on performance to ensure campaigns deliver ROI.

3. Provides detailed insights.

Digital platforms can deliver comprehensive, real-time data that enables live tracking of KPIs such as leads and revenues, leading to better decision making and results.

4. Improves customer relationships.

The ability to use multiple channels brings audience interaction closer to your brand, with personalised messaging defined by customer data facilitating engagement and brand loyalty through channels such as eCRM.

5. Effective brand building.

Digital content delivery promotes increased visibility and brand awareness across social media, building online communities through interaction and engagement from a place of authority and trust.

Developing a successful digital marketing strategy, either from scratch or as part of a review process, means going back to the drawing board to make sure you cover the fundamental strategic approaches. These include the goals, audience, budget, tactics and measurement metrics that need to be defined before starting. When these are aligned, you can start to build a five-step marketing plan to master your market:

1. Goals and objectives

• Define your marketing objectives and how they ladder up to your key business goals
• Make them SMART to track progress and hold yourself to account

2. Talk directly to your audience

• Detailed personas let you know where your target demographic spends time online, what resources they trust, and what pain points they face. By understanding your audience, you can make informed choices about how they can be reached to improve the effectiveness of a chosen marketing campaign.
• Audience segmentation and message personalisation allow you to create relevant content for your customers, leading to increased email open rates, more conversions, and more repeat customers

3. Decide on your marketing budget

Your marketing budget isn’t one fixed figure. With so much flexibility available in how, where, and when you can invest, there are key questions to answer: ‘Where to spend the marketing budget?’, ‘How much marketing budget do we need?’, and ‘How do we decide which channels to focus on?’

• Deciding on a suitable marketing budget is an important step in making sure your strategy delivers. With costs varying significantly across different channels, it’s essential to establish your budget before deciding on the specifics.
• Consider your business objectives and evaluate how multiple channels will work together to maximize efficiency and provide short-term impact with long-term value.
• Factor in your target audience, industry benchmarks, and the competitive landscape. Your marketing budget needs to be flexible enough to adapt to changing market conditions and business needs, and by considering your goals and channels, you can create a focused, impactful strategy that delivers measurable results and a strong return on investment.

4. Choose your marketing tactics

Strategy and tactics can be confused, so what is the difference between a strategy and a tactic? Strategy is the big picture – your overarching marketing plan for achieving pre-set goals. Tactics are the detailed steps you take to achieve these goals and they will always relate to your main objectives. Tactics are flexible, changing with market and industry conditions, and include channel selection and marketing campaigns. It’s always good to audit the channels you use and have used to review their effectiveness and evaluate what to build into your strategy.

Tactics:

• Specific, relatively short-term, and measurable against pre-set KPIs
• Audience aligned and related to your specific marketing personas
• Decided by your budget
• Effective enough to achieve your desired outcomes, e.g. display advertising for brand awareness, content marketing for building trust through thought leadership
• Flexible enough to alter in the face of market changes

Tactics should be scheduled in a Gantt chart or similar project planning framework to ensure that the project is delivered within the planned timeframe.

5. Measurement and control

Measuring and controlling a digital marketing strategy is an active process requiring regular checks against pre-set KPIs to evaluate tactical and strategic performance.

• Real-time analytics allow continuous monitoring for quick campaign adjustment.
• Multi-channel approaches ensure comprehensive performance reviews across all digital platforms.
• Data-driven decision-making is crucial for optimising strategies and effective resource management.
• Benchmarking against industry standards and competitors provides valuable context.
• Leveraging AI and machine learning can enhance analysis capabilities, while adaptive strategies and advanced attribution models help maximize marketing impact.

5 key types of digital marketing strategies
To achieve your overarching marketing goals, there are a number of digital marketing strategies that can be employed. The particular emphasis placed on each of these in terms of budget, activity levels and tactics deployed can (and does) vary as market conditions and channel importance in your marketing mix change. The five key strategies that give organisations the most control and influence over how they reach their marketing goals are SEO, Content Marketing, PPC, CRM and social media:

• SEO – Improves a website’s visibility for unpaid traffic to find it through key word search by adjusting content, page structure and multiple other factors.
• Content Marketing – Creating specific content such as blogs, articles, videos and social posts for a pre-determined audience in order to attract their attention online.
• PPC – Pay per Click advertising is where businesses create adverts that drive traffic to their website and only pay the advertising platform when they are clicked on.
• CRM – Customer Relationship Management is designed to improve a businesses’ relationship with current and prospective clients by detailed management of every interaction with them.
• Social Media Marketing – Creating content that resonates with the interests of consumers to build brand awareness and promote products & services.

These strategies work within a longer time frame, and benefit from constant monitoring and adjustment to ensure they are working effectively and efficiently towards overall business goals. Blending these key strategies to get the best out of them all is where organisations can greatly benefit from the experience, skills and independent analysis of the Performance Team at big group.

When the strategy is agreed and the budget and distribution of effort has been decided, the next step is to make the operation of your key digital marketing channels as efficient and effective as possible. After all: the car is only as good as the driver.

To really deliver on the promise of performance, ongoing best practices make a huge difference. Implementing the following key features into your overall digital marketing strategy will ensure you make the most of the constantly evolving digital landscape in order to achieve peak levels of efficiency:

Data driven decision making

The best decisions come from the best information, so we leverage analytics tools across platforms to track key metrics, gather insights and collate our findings to make informed decisions that improve campaign performance.

Test, test, test

Testing ‘small batch’ creative messaging is critical for turning assumptions into certainty, improving user experience (UX), reducing budget wastage, and improving conversion. A/B testing, multivariate testing, and UX testing are three examples that can help improve engagement with your audience and drive ROI.

Mobile optimisation

With multiple devices and screen sizes in regular use, it’s important to ensure your website and emails have responsive design built in, with navigation and display optimised for all device types.
Fast loading times and low latency are key factors in keeping your mobile audience engaged and reducing bounce rates, and efficient mobile optimisation is key to achieving this.

Embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI)

With AI becoming more and more prevalent, it is essential to be able to integrate AI tools into your business to improve efficiency, enhance customer service and create personalised interactions.

AI tools can be used to transform large data sets into manageable segments to gain useable insights that may have otherwise been overlooked due to their volume. By adopting an AI-powered approach, big data becomes a flexible tool for decision making.

Data compliance

As data increasingly defines campaign success, data compliance is essential to include in a digital strategy. By ensuring adherence to legal and regulatory standards and safeguarding sensitive information, a robust Data Compliance process builds audience and user trust.

By maintaining data integrity and security, businesses can mitigate risks, avoid penalties, and demonstrate ethical practices.

Marketing automation

Utilising marketing automation tools to streamline tasks and automate your workflow saves time on both repetitive and scheduled tasks, and nurtures leads by keeping up the conversation with targeted, personalised messaging. By using Marketing Automation, businesses can strengthen connections with audiences to consistently build an engaged community.

Content distribution can be optimised by scheduling posts and newsletters at key times to maximise reach and engagement.

In summary, the digital ecosystem is organic, dynamic, and constantly evolving. Driving efficiencies needs an awareness of your own internally shifting goals and the major changes in the outside world (tariffs, anybody?) Keeping a constant hand on the tiller to alter direction and make the most of the prevailing trade winds means that organisations can be proactive and not reactive in order to derive the highest return possible from your digital marketing strategy.

The importance of a digital marketing strategy in today’s business world cannot be underestimated. With rapid developments in how, where, and when potential users consume content, developing a strategic approach enhanced by intelligent tactical awareness and delivery is key to delivering an efficient and engaging programme.
From AI enhanced tools to the human intelligence to understand what works and why, the range of ways to improve your digital marketing strategy is constantly growing. At big group, our specialist teams work together to create, control and combine a wealth of knowledge and technical abilities to develop and deliver world-leading digital marketing approaches that work for you.

Contact us to find out more about how we can guide your digital marketing strategy to the next level of performance and beyond.