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What is digital marketing strategy? These channels include paid, earned, and owned media, and can all support a common campaign around a particular line of business. What Is a Digital Marketing Campaign? Your digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you toward meeting that goal. It's a digital marketing campaign that shows people exactly how much each item in the photo costs, helping Wayfair generate buyers right from its Instagram account. But what good is a travel-based brand without a travel-based digital marketing campaign to go with it? Check out the company's website here. How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy Build your buyer personas. Whatever your goal, you're going to need to use owned content to form your digital marketing strategy. Here's what you should have so far: Clear profile(s) of your buyer persona(s) One or more 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.
There’s no question that, in the modern landscape, a big part of your marketing strategy is digital. Consumers and businesses alike are almost always online — and you want to be able to reach them and observe their behavior where they spend the most time.
But when you’re growing a business, it seems like this ever-evolving landscape can quickly become overwhelming. There’s already enough to do — how are you also supposed to create, fine-tune, and maintain an agile digital marketing strategy?
We’ve compiled a list of seven digital marketing strategies that marketers can adapt to help their teams and businesses grow, as well as a crash course on the meaning of digital strategy and marketing campaigns. Then, grab your free collection of digital content marketing templates at the end of this post.
What is digital marketing strategy?
Your digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that help you achieve your company goals through carefully selected online marketing channels. These channels include paid, earned, and owned media, and can all support a common campaign around a particular line of business.
The term “strategy” might seem intimidating, but building an effective digital strategy doesn’t need to be difficult.
In simple terms, a strategy is just a plan of action to achieve a desired goal, or multiple goals. For example, your overarching goal might be to generate 25% more leads via your website this year than you drove last year.
Depending on the scale of your business, your digital marketing strategy might involve multiple digital strategies — each with different goals — and a lot of moving parts. But coming back to this simple way of thinking about strategy can help you stay focused on meeting those objectives.
Despite our simplification of the term “strategy,” there’s no doubt it can be difficult to get started actually building one. Let’s see what a digital marketing campaign looks like, and then, we’ll jump into those seven building blocks to help you create an effective digital marketing strategy to set up your business for online success.
What Is a Digital Marketing Campaign?
It’s easy to confuse your digital strategy with your digital marketing campaigns, but here’s how to distinguish the two.
As we’ve already outlined, your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to help you achieve your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you toward meeting that goal.
For example, you might decide to run a campaign sharing some of your best-performing gated content on Twitter, to generate more leads through that channel. That campaign is part of your strategy to generate more leads.
Here a few other well-known examples of digital marketing campaigns and the strategies they employ.
Digital Marketing Campaign Examples
- GoPro
- Delta Airlines
- Geico
- Wayfair
- Mastercard
- ETF Securities
- Red Bull
1. GoPro
Digital strategy: Earned media, user-made video
GoPro is famous for its incredible point-of-view style action 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 its YouTube channel wasn’t made by GoPro, but rather by its most loyal users.
By populating its YouTube channel with user-made video content, GoPro has encouraged an entire fanbase of outdoorspeople to take amazing footage of their adventures and post it online — often with credit back to GoPro. This ongoing digital marketing campaign has championed the use of video to spread the word about the GoPro product line — and a lot of the content is created by the customers themselves.
Check out the video below, which GoPro republished, awarding the video’s original shooter with being one of the best videos in its category.
2. Delta Air lines
Digital strategy: Owned media, Twitter stories
You wouldn’t think of an airline as a leader in creative digital marketing, but don’t underestimate the stories they can tell on social media (emphasis on “stories”).
Delta Air Lines is a prolific user of social media, specifically on its Twitter handle. The brand uses this account to engage potential passengers in a variety of ways that are both timely and emotionally stimulating. Last month, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the company began sharing personal stories from Delta employees directly through the company’s Twitter feed. Here’s the beginning of one story’s thread, below.
In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we’re sharing the stories of the survivors and fighters of our Delta family.
Amanda Ross, a Customer Care Supervisor, has been a Delta employee for 13 years and is actively fighting breast cancer. Read about her battle below. pic.twitter.com/WSp6ZyBw36
3. Geico
Digital strategy: Paid media, YouTube Preroll ads
All you need to hear is the word “Geico” to remember you can save 15% or more on your car insurance. But even a company with such a memorable tagline can risk annoying its buyers if its marketing campaign is too longwinded.
That’s why Geico launched a series of preroll ads on YouTube that admit to the ad’s brevity in the videos themselves.
Preroll ads are a form of paid content on YouTube wherein you pay YouTube to roll 15- to 20-second ads ahead of videos that have the same audience as the advertiser. 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 itself for taking up your time in the first place. In this way, its YouTube preroll commercials are actually entertaining. Check out one of them below.
4. Wayfair
Digital strategy: Owned media, Instagram tags
Wayfair, a home furnishings and decor merchant, has a truly innovative Instagram strategy. Let’s just say its photos aren’t just photos.
Instagram gives companies an opportunity to show their followers a more intimate side of the brand, lifting the curtain on the business to show off the employees and events that make the organization what it is. For Wayfair, however, Instagram isn’t just a culture play — it’s a purchase page.
Using Instagram’s product tags, Wayfair has taken some of its prettiest home interior shots on Instagram, and tagged them with product and price labels. It’s a digital marketing campaign that shows people exactly how much each item in the photo costs, helping Wayfair generate buyers right from its Instagram account. Check out an example, below.
5. Mastercard
Digital strategy: Owned media, Travel blog
Mastercard bases its brand on the stories and adventures that cardholders go on. 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, gives readers a travel resource to go along with the credit cards that help pay for these readers’ destinations. It’s a pretty good idea, as it allows the company to better align itself not just with the things its customers buy, but with the places its customers go. Check out the blog here.
6. ETF Securities
Digital strategy: Paid media, LinkedIn Sponsored Content
ETF Securities is a small, asset management service based in Australia catering to wealth managers and investors in Europe. Because the service they provide is so complex, the company found where its customers hung out the most — LinkedIn — and sponsored paid content on this platform that drives more interest in investments and helps customers make smarter financial decisions.
With this digital campaign, ETF Securities saw 95% year-over-year growth in its LinkedIn followers.
7. Red Bull
Digital strategy: Owned media, Lifestyle news
Red Bull has become more well known for its sponsorship of extreme sports than the energy drink it sells. It’s a natural fit for the types of people the drink appeals to. But instead of creating digital content on the energy drink industry, Red Bull captures its audience with articles and videos all about the latest happenings in the extreme sports community.
In this digital marketing campaign, Red Bull teaches us that what you sell isn’t always the ideal content strategy. Rather, it’s the lifestyle that your customers live. Check out the company’s website here.
It’s important to note that even if a campaign runs over the course of a couple of years, it doesn’t make it a strategy — it’s a tactic that sits alongside other campaigns to support a larger marketing strategy. For example, ETF Securities (cited above) hosted a campaign to increase its followers on LinkedIn, using the digital strategy of sponsored content (a form of paid media). This one strategic campaign might be one small part of a larger digital marketing strategy that serves to generate more leads for one of its products or business lines.
Now that we’ve gotten to grips with the basics of digital strategy and digital marketing campaigns, let’s dig into how to build your strategy.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
- Build your buyer personas.
- Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need.
- Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets.
- Audit and plan your owned media campaigns.
- Audit and plan your earned media campaigns.
- Audit and plan your paid media campaigns.
- Bring it all together.
1. Build your buyer personas.
For any marketing strategy — offline or online — you need to know who you’re marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first…
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