A 5-Step Guide to Developing a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

Devina Wang
Marketing in the Age of Digital
3 min readAug 7, 2023

In this era of information explosion, as digital marketing practitioners, we must master big data technology in order to better understand user needs and behaviors for accurate marketing. So, how do you use big data to analyze user behavior and turn it into marketing strategies?

understand your audience

“When you try to appeal to everyone, you end up resonating with no one.”

That quotation reiterates a worn-out marketing maxim. But it’s worth mentioning again because, according to CoSchedule, only 35% of marketers conduct annual audience research.

For any marketing strategy, you first need to know who you are marketing to. So the first step is to create a detailed customer profile, and the following information needs to be gathered:
Quantitative and demographic information: e.g. geographic location, age, income, job title, etc.
Qualitative and psychographic information: e.g. goals, challenges, interests, priorities, etc.
With this information, it is possible to understand who the brand’s customers are, what they want, what problems they face, and how they will make decisions.

Determine goals and required digital marketing tools

Marketing goals should always be tied to the basic objectives of the business. But no matter what the overall digital marketing goals are, there need to be strategic steps and matching digital marketing tools that can measure and accomplish them.

Sprout, a social media management platform, assists companies in centralizing the organization of their content schedule and assets. Sprout presently provides services to more than 30,000 clients worldwide, which enables you to perfectly time the publication and scheduling of your content across a variety of channels based on the times at which your followers are engaged. In addition, a real-time grasp of brand communication trends and marketing direction will assist in improving future marketing strategies.

Review and plan your paid media campaigns

You need to evaluate your existing cross-platform paid media (e.g., Tiktok streams, Instagram KOLs, etc.) to find out the points that are most likely to help you achieve your current goals. If you’re spending a lot of money on influencers and not seeing the results you expect, it’s time to improve your approach or simply abandon it and focus on a paid platform that produces better results.

According to a Nielsen study, 92% of customers prefer recommendations to advertisements. So, digital marketing strategy is about creating and distributing content through digital media channels and utilizing various strategies across paid, owned digital channels to promote the content in order to achieve the marketing goals of the organization.

How important is SEO in the world of marketing?

The value of search engines is to provide users with convenient, fast, and accurate content. If a website wants to rank higher, it needs to serve its users and provide them with accurate and quality content. The SEO optimization method is the best means to meet the user’s search habits and attract customers.

DataBox’s poll of B2B marketing experts and business owners found that 81.2 percent of them said SEO produced higher-quality leads than pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Studying your competitors

Being proactive rather than reactive when analyzing competitors is essential to the success of your company. By observing and analyzing the competitors, we can quickly access the dynamics of competitors, but we also understand the industry dynamics, the market pattern, which, on their own, helps to improve our understanding of the industry in depth.

https://www.bdc.ca/en/articles-tools/marketing-sales-export/marketing/how-evaluate-competition

--

--