Digital marketing strategy: How to structure a plan?

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Use our hub pages as a reference to get up-to-speed on all the main digital marketing techniques. They will help you quickly understand how to make the most of the technique through definitions and recommendations on our member resources and blog articles covering strategy, best practices and the latest statistics.

We believe that a digital marketing strategy is essential to take advantage of the growing opportunities from digital marketing, yet even in 2019, many companies don't have a digital marketing strategy.

Our recent Managing Digital marketing research report (a free download) showed that almost half (45%) of companies don't yet have a planned digital marketing strategy:

Does your organization have a clearly-defined digital marketing strategy?

How to structure a digital marketing plan?

An integrated digital strategy will give you a foundation for all the key online marketing activities we recommend in the Smart Insights RACE digital marketing planning framework. This integrates 25 essential multichannel marketing activities covering all parts of the customer lifecycle broken down in these sections:

Plan - Use a data-driven approach to review your current digital marketing effectiveness, customize analytics, set up KPI dashboards and SMART objectives create a strategy of prioritized improvements to how you deploy digital marketing media, technology and data to increase leads and sales
Reach - Build awareness using the 6 key online marketing techniques which will drive visits to your site.
Act - Encourage interactions on your website or social media to help you generate leads for future
Convert - Use retargeting, nurturing and conversion rate optimization to remind and persuade your audience to buy online or offline if phone and face-to-face channels if these are important to you.
Engage - Increase sales from existing customers by improving personalized communications using web, email and social media marketing

This page groups our key recommendations on creating a digital strategy. Register as a member to access our resources that show you how to structure a digital marketing plan.

Top 5 Recommended resources

1. Free download - Digital marketing strategy template - structured around our RACE planning template, it gives you a fast way to create a digital marketing plan.

2. Free report - Managing Digital marketing research report

3. Article - Digital Marketing statistics 2018 - our pick of the top 10 free sources

4. Paid report - Digital marketing healthcheck - a rapid audit of your digital marketing

5. Paid report - Digital strategy guide - 7 Steps to create a successful strategy

Digital marketing strategy: How to structure a plan? quick guide

Digital marketing strategy: How to structure a plan? success factors

An effective digital strategy will help you take the right decisions to make a company successful online. A strategy process model provides a framework that gives a logical sequence to follow to ensure inclusion of all key activities of strategy development and implementation. We recommend the SOSTAC planning approach.

A Digital Marketing Strategy should involve a review to check that all of your capabilities are in place to help your organisation manage all of the digital touchpoints. But which capabilities are important, which do you need to review?

In our Managing Digital Transformation Guide for Paid subscribers we show these in our capability visual:

Digital Marketing Capabilities Model

You can download this visual and others all the main online marketing channel in this free digital marketing templates download.

A successful Digital Strategy should be built on reviewing 7 core capabilities which are strategic approach, performance improvement process, management buy-in, resourcing and structure, data and infrastructure, integrated customer communications and customer experience.

Digital marketing strategy: How to structure a plan? definition

A digital marketing strategy is a channel strategy which means that it should...

Be informed by research into customer channel behaviour and marketplace activity = intermediaries, publishers and competitors
Based on objectives for future online and offline channel contribution %
Define and communicate the differentials of the channel to encourage customers to use it,
BUT, need to manage channel integration

So put another way, digital marketing strategy defines how companies should:

Hit our channel leads & sales targets
Budgets for Acquisition, Conversion, Retention & Growth, Service
Communicate benefits of using this channel “ enhance brand
Prioritise audiences targeted through channel
Prioritise products available through channel

Recommended member resources for Digital marketing strategy: How to structure a plan?

Toolkits on

B2B startup digital marketing plan workbook and case study

Ebooks on Digital marketing strategy

Online training on Digital marketing strategy

Digital marketing e-learning course

Marketing templates on Digital marketing strategy

Related statistics

For the latest on how business create strategies and manage digital marketing, see our Managing Digital Marketing 2015 research or our listing of the top Digital Marketing statistics sources.

Tools & Software

Best websites on Digital marketing strategy: How to structure a plan?

There are surprisingly few quality digital marketing strategy sites since most focus on the strategy. We like to think we're different in our focus on strategy too. These are our top 10 sites to learn more about digital marketing strategy:

1. BCG Perspectives - The Boston Consulting Group of "BCG Matrix" fame has recently improved its articles and research on multichannel marketing and customer insight
2. Econsultancy reports - The Econsultancy blog mainly covers tactics, but there are sound research reports on managing digital channels and ecommerce teams.
3. Figaro Digital. Unusual since it's an offline magazine, but these editorial articles often cover digital strategy and are accessible by industry.
4. Forrester Marketing Blog. Forrester analysts write about developments in technology and consumer behaviour .
5. [email protected]. The Marketing section often covers online marketing issues and cases.
6. Financial Times Connected Business. Monthly articles based on case studies.
Harvard Business Review blog. Quality commentary on the intersection of marketing and technology strategy, but unfortunately, not a well tagged blog.
7. McKinseyQuarterly. Articles regularly cover digital marketing strategy.
8. The Web Strategy blog. A personal blog by Jeremiah Owyang, previously a Forrester analyst, now at Altimeter. Mainly covers social media strategy.

Key techniques for Digital marketing strategy: How to structure a plan?

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