Ask a team to describe its digital marketing strategy and you will often hear a list: a monthly newsletter, some paid social, a refreshed website, perhaps a podcast someone is keen on. Each item may be sensible. The problem is that a list does not tell you which items matter most, what they are meant to achieve together, or what to stop doing when time and budget run short.
A useful strategy is less about adding activity and more about making choices. Below is a straightforward way to build one.
1. Start with a business objective, not a marketing one
"Increase engagement" and "build awareness" are common starting points, but they are hard to act on because they are not connected to anything the business needs. Begin instead with the commercial or organisational goal: opening a new region, filling a specific service line, reducing reliance on a single referral source, or improving the quality of enquiries.
Once the business objective is clear, marketing objectives can be written in support of it. They become more specific and easier to prioritise, because each one can be traced back to a reason.
2. Define the audience in terms of decisions
Demographic descriptions are a start, but they rarely explain behaviour. It is more helpful to understand the decision your audience is trying to make. What prompts them to start looking? What do they need to know before they feel confident? Who else is involved? What would make them hesitate?
Answering these questions usually reveals gaps in your current communication. You may find that you talk a great deal about features while your audience is mainly worried about risk, or that most of your content serves people who are already close to buying.
- Triggers: the events or problems that start the search.
- Questions: what people need answered at each stage.
- Barriers: doubts, costs or effort that slow the decision down.
- Influences: colleagues, reviews, comparison sites or advisers.
3. Be honest about your position
Positioning is simply the space you can credibly occupy in the mind of your audience. It should be distinctive enough to be remembered and true enough to be delivered. Look at how competitors describe themselves, where they spend their attention, and where the audience appears underserved.
The aim is not to invent a clever line. It is to agree on a small number of things you want to be known for, supported by evidence you can actually show.
4. Choose channels for a reason
Channel selection is where many strategies go wrong, because it is tempting to be everywhere. A better approach is to match channels to the role they need to play:
- Search tends to capture people who already know what they are looking for.
- Social platforms can help introduce ideas to people who were not actively searching.
- Email and owned content help maintain relationships over a longer period.
- Your website is where most journeys are confirmed, so it deserves attention in almost every plan.
It is usually better to do a few channels well, with enough budget and creative support to learn something, than to spread effort thinly across many.
5. Turn the strategy into a roadmap
A strategy becomes useful when it shapes the next few months of work. Break it into phases with clear priorities, owners and dependencies. Identify the foundations that need to come first, such as tracking, landing pages or core messaging, before scaling activity that depends on them.
Keep the roadmap short enough to be read and reviewed regularly. A one-page summary that people refer to is more valuable than a long document nobody opens.
6. Decide how you will learn
Finally, agree what information you will use to judge progress, and how often you will review it. Some measures will be direct, such as enquiries or sales. Others will be leading indicators, such as qualified traffic or engagement with key pages. Be clear about the limits of the data available, particularly where privacy choices and platform changes affect what can be tracked.
A strategy is not fixed. The point of measuring is to make better decisions as you go, not to prove that the original plan was right.
A simple test
When your strategy is finished, try explaining it in three sentences: who you are trying to reach, what you want them to understand, and the main ways you will reach them. If that is difficult, the strategy probably needs simplifying before more activity is added.
