Any marketer naturally wants to propel their online business. And to do that, the most important thing in your marketing toolkit is a powerful digital marketing strategy. It defines your purpose and direction in business and comes with different components, including your digital marketing plan and digital marketing tactics.
We’ll cover all of the above and more in this article, so you can consider it your personal digital marketing guide on all things strategy. Here’s what you’ll learn:
⭐What is a digital marketing strategy
⭐Digital marketing strategy vs digital marketing plan
⭐Benefits of creating a strategy in digital marketing
⭐Types of digital marketing strategies
⭐Digital marketing tactics for a successful strategy
⭐Digital marketing strategy examples
What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Simply put, a digital marketing strategy is the course of action your brand takes to achieve its marketing objectives, reach the target audience, and build an online presence. This is usually done through a variety of digital marketing channels, from SEO and email to social media and paid ads.
While your strategy is a higher-level amalgam of various components that reflect your business direction and goals, your digital marketing plan is more of a roadmap with precise details on how to follow that direction. So the latter can include action steps, timelines, your marketing calendar, and more.
A successful strategy in digital marketing covers several key areas:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Advertising
Of course, the above list varies by company and can be expanded into other areas, like marketing analytics, affiliate marketing, or marketing automation. But at the most basic level, a lot of digital marketing strategies address those five areas.
Digital Marketing Strategy Benefits for Your Business
So you know what a digital marketing strategy is, but why get into it? Well, without it you risk falling behind your competitors and missing out on different growth opportunities.
Your business needs a digital marketing strategy if you want to better understand where to focus your marketing efforts, how to unite your teams around your company goals, and how to attract the right audience to your product or service. The benefits of implementing a strategy in your digital marketing are quite clear:
🌐Increased online visibility through organic and paid traffic as well as social media.
🤩Customer engagement boost thanks to personalized approach across your channels.
🚀Strong brand recognition and brand awareness when your content marketing is consistent.
😎Competitive edge if you do your research and stay on top of the game with a structured and actionable digital marketing plan.
📈Measurable results with easily trackable channels and smart digital marketing tactics.
5 Types of Digital Marketing Strategies You Can Implement
In order to understand how to create a digital marketing strategy, you need to know what kinds of strategies exist, and which ones can be a good fit for your business needs.
#1 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)🔍
This is an effective digital marketing strategy that allows your website to rank high in search engines. By adding niche-specific keywords and phrases across your content, you can ensure that your site is indexed high, so people are more likely to find it in search results. In a nutshell, SEO works to attract your target audience to your website, generating leads that in turn convert to sales.
Digital marketing tactics for this strategy
- Conduct keyword research for on-page optimization: look for the leading keywords in your niche and optimize the content on your website, blog, and in your SEO-powered flipbooks.
- Do competitor analysis based on SEO metrics to understand the market and how exactly your competitors end up high in search results.
- Understand the search intent of your target audience and create content accordingly.
- Delve into link building for a strong SEO support system.
#2 Content marketing✍️
Are you working on a B2B digital marketing strategy? Ecommerce digital marketing strategy? Or perhaps a SaaS digital marketing strategy? Whatever business line you’re in, you’re definitely creating content.
Any digital marketing guide out there will tell you that your content should be relevant to your target audience, easy to understand, and consistent across all communication channels. Plus, your content strategy for digital marketing includes not only the creation of your content, but also its delivery, which is why you have to establish a strong content distribution strategy.
Content marketing stands out among other digital marketing strategies because it encompasses a multitude of different channels: articles for your blog, email campaigns, marketing videos and tutorials, infographics, short-form texts for your ads or socials. The list goes on and on, so don’t go chasing every single content type you can think of—start small and build your digital marketing plan according to your audience’s interests and your brand’s needs.
Digital marketing tactics for this strategy
- Create quality content for your blog and website to engage your audience. You can use tools like Grammarly or ChatGPT to help you achieve the best results.
- Produce videos for YouTube and your socials. You can also collaborate with video bloggers to create content about your company and share your brand story beyond your own channels.
- Write gated ebooks, whitepapers, and case studies to generate leads with your content. For inspiration, take a look at the example of a gated ebook created with FlippingBook:
A well-chosen strategy in digital marketing helps you establish strong, personalized communication with your target audience and build a loyal community around your brand. And emails are perfect for that—send welcome messages to new subscribers, engage users with an onboarding sequence, bring value with holiday newsletters, ask questions with surveys across your emails. Making email marketing a part of your digital strategy can give you powerful insights into your audience, help you convert leads into clients, and nurture your existing customer base.
Digital marketing tactics for this strategy
- Personalize your email marketing campaigns—for instance, if your audience comes from different regions, you can segment people by their time zones and localize your emails. Adding the recipient's name in some of your messages can also bring a great personal touch to the emails you send.
- Automate your emails based on various triggers. An onboarding email or a welcome sequence can be a good digital marketing strategy example here.
- Experiment with content and subject lines to see what drives the best results.
#4 Social media marketing📱
This may work better for a B2C rather than a B2B digital marketing strategy, simply because most social media are a train we hop on in our spare time, looking for memes and other distractions from the routine. But of course, this doesn’t mean that the social media door is shut for you if you’re in B2B. Staying on-trend across different social channels with reels and hashtags, posting company updates, and connecting with your target audience online will support your brand positioning and increase brand awareness.
Consider varying your digital marketing tactics for every social medium. You can be fun and relatable on Instagram, chatty on X, insightful on LinkedIn, and visually stunning on Pinterest. Ryanair offers a good digital marketing strategy example—the company approaches each social channel differently, but with a recognizable touch of humor everywhere.
Ryanair on X:
Ryanair on Facebook:
Digital marketing tactics for this strategy
- Publish content consistently across your mediums.
- Keep an eye on the ever-changing social media algorithms and trends, so you can adjust your digital marketing strategy accordingly.
- Collaborate with influencers and turn to user-generated content when possible.
#5 Advertising💰
Paid advertising is the bread and butter for many marketers. All you have to do is pick a platform for your ads, assign a budget, and launch the ads you’ve created into the world—across search engines or social networks. On some platforms, ads are text-only, while others come with graphics to attract and engage potential buyers. This digital marketing strategy can bring in quick results when done right. However, you do need to continuously analyze how your ads are performing and reevaluate your strategy to get the most of it.
Digital marketing tactics for this strategy
- Run targeted ads on Google, Bing, and other search engines.
- Run targeted ads on social media, too.
- A/B test your texts and visuals to make sure your ads perform well.
Inspiring Digital Marketing Strategy Examples
With a clear grasp of what a digital marketing strategy is and what different types of strategies exist, we can take a look at successful examples from real businesses. Will one of these brands inspire you to create your own digital marketing plan?
Adobe: B2B Digital Marketing Strategy Example
Adobe is a multi-product brand, so it makes sense for it to know how to create a digital marketing strategy that’s multi-layered. The company uses several digital marketing tactics, often a different set for each of its products, inspiring many other brands to follow suit.
Content marketing, SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, and social media—Adobe deploys all of these digital marketing strategies, and then some. With these tools at its disposal, the company targets potential leads and engages their loyal customers. If you’d like to do the same, be mindful of the tactics that fit your specific product or service as well as the resources you’re willing to invest in your digital marketing strategy. Remember that there’s no need to try all at once—move at the pace that makes sense for your business.
Clearly, Adobe’s results are nothing short of astounding: over the 40+ years on the market, the company has become a B2B giant, reaching millions of subscribers worldwide.
Nike: Ecommerce Digital Marketing Strategy Example
When you think of Nike, ecommerce is hardly the first thing that comes to mind. But guess what? They just did it (yes, we had to go there). Anyway, Nike’s ecommerce digital marketing strategy is customer-focused and omnichannel. The company’s efforts spread across app and website shopping experiences, online click-and-collect orders, and exclusive member perks and loyalty rewards.
Of course, big brands like Nike use various digital marketing tactics in their strategies, including collaborations with influencers, stunning visuals in content marketing, and personalized recommendations to drive in-app purchases. Smaller brands can do that too, but perhaps on a smaller scale—attracting local influencers, creating visuals in Canva, and following up with shoppers personally instead of automating the communication.
Nike’s results speak for themselves here: we see strong brand loyalty, continuous direct-to-consumer growth, and deep customer engagement due to athlete and influencer partnerships.
Zoom: SaaS digital marketing strategy example
Did you first discover remote work during the pandemic? If yes, then chances are you’ve used Zoom or at least heard of it. Zoom is one of the leading video conferencing platforms today, and the company has its efficient SaaS digital marketing strategy to thank for it, among other factors. The strategy includes SEO with high-intent keywords, paid advertising, and content covering relevant topics, such as remote work and simple business communication on the web.
Results? Millions of organic visitors every month and top positions in search results. Plus, the company continues to expand its services, offering new solutions and features for strong customer retention.
Airbnb: B2C Digital Marketing Strategy Example
To wrap things up here, let’s turn to beachside studios, mountain chalets, and big city apartments—Airbnb. The company’s content strategy for digital marketing comes with amazing visuals, videos, and lots of user-generated content from travelers and hosts. The brand also relies on SEO across local blog posts and travel brochures showcasing accommodations on offer.
What Airbnb gets as a result is high organic traffic, brand loyalty, and an emotional connection with its audience that many companies strive for. No wonder it’s one of the most famous brands in the travel accommodation industry.
Building Your Own Digital Marketing Strategy
With this digital marketing guide and the examples above, you can set up a digital marketing strategy that helps your business outperform the competition. Take it one step at a time using the digital marketing tactics and channels described, and reap the benefits with loyal customers and increased conversions.
