Top 8 Digital Marketing Strategies for Online Growth in 2024
A digital marketing strategy is a plan for how your company will establish an Internet presence through various online channels with the goal to reach and convert your target audience.
Digital marketing strategies include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing, and more.
A marketing strategy is a plan for how your business will reach a specific marketing goal, such as increasing website traffic or online visibility. It’s essentially your game plan for achieving your marketing goals.
In this guide, we’re covering everything you need to know about a digital marketing strategy. Here’s a quick overview of everything we’ll explore:
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What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan for how your company will establish an Internet presence through various online channels. The goal of a marketing strategy is to increase your online visibility to reach more members of your target audience and encourage them to become paying customers.
Marketing strategy vs. marketing tactic
When researching digital marketing, you might hear the terms marketing strategy and marketing tactic. So, what are each of those things, and what’s the difference between them?
A marketing strategy is a detailed, organized plan that outlines how you’ll reach your goals through Internet marketing.
A marketing tactic is a specific action you’ll take to implement your strategy. Common examples of marketing tactics include sending emails to customers and leads, creating blog posts and articles, and launching advertisements.
Marketing strategy vs. marketing campaign
You may also hear the term marketing campaign while your developing your strategy. Let’s dive into how it differs from a digital marketing strategy.
Like we discussed above, your marketing strategy is your game plan that outlines how you’ll reach your target audience online and convert them into customers. It determines your overall marketing and business goals.
A marketing campaign is a promotion that’s designed to help you achieve a specific objective in your strategy rather than your overall goal. Campaigns typically have a start and end date. For example, you may launch a series of ads on Google to generate more traffic over a period of four months.
8 types of digital marketing strategies
Now that you know the answer to the question, “what is a digital marketing strategy,” let’s explore the different types!
SEO is the process of improving your website so that it ranks high in search engine results for keywords and phrases related to your business. The more keywords you rank for — and the higher you rank — the more people will see and become familiar with your website and business.
SEO includes strategies like:
Local SEO:Local SEO focuses on building your presence in local searches, through tactics like targeting location-based keywords and claiming your Google Business Profile.
Technical SEO:Technical SEO helps you optimize the backend of your website, so you can perform well in search results.
Ecommerce SEO: With ecommerce SEO, you focus on optimizing your website to appear and rank queries focused on buying products.
Enterprise SEO: Enterprise SEO is adapted for enterprise businesses — it focuses on helping these companies optimize for highly competitive search queries.
SEO aims to direct more traffic to your website — specifically, traffic made up of people from your target audience. These are consumers who are actively searching for the products and services you offer.
Why use SEO?
When it comes to digital marketing strategies, look at SEO as a requirement. It intercepts every member of your target audience, no matter where they are in your buying funnel. The reason for this is that almost every user begins their search for a new product or service with a search engine.
For example, did you know that 54% of consumers prefer to shop online? In order to shop online, they first need to search for the products or services they want, and they do that in search engines such as Google. With SEO as one of your online marketing strategies, you could turn that search traffic into a fantastic sales opportunity.
2. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
PPC is a paid form of advertising that relies on an auction-based system.
With PPC, you bid on keywords that you want your ads to show up for. Your ads may then trigger when a user’s search includes one of your target keywords. These ads appear at the top of search results, above the organic listings. If a user decides to click on your advertisement, you then pay for that click.
In other words, you don’t pay for ad space — only for the results it drives.
PPC aims to reach searchers with transactional queries — that is, searchers who are ready to buy your products or services. When they click on one of your ads, they’ll arrive at a landing page and see a call-to-action (CTA) to convert. That CTA will encourage them to do something like purchase a product or sign up for an email list.
There are multiple types of PPC ads you can run, including:
Search ads
Display ads
Remarketing ads
Social media ads
Video ads
Shopping ads
Why use PPC?
PPC is one of the most cost-effective paid advertising methods.
For many businesses just getting started with digital marketing or looking for a quick boost, PPC is a useful online marketing strategy. It propels your website to the top of search results, which can help if your company’s organic search result ranking is several pages lower than you’d like.
3. Content marketing
With content marketing, your business focuses on reaching, engaging, and connecting with consumers via informational content. This content — which can include videos, blog posts, infographics, and more — provides value to users by answering questions they have.
For example, if you run a business that sells ski and snowboard supplies, you could write an article about what a beginner needs for their first outing. You could also write articles on how to take care of a snowboard and what accessories can help improve ski performance.
The overall goal of content marketing as a digital marketing strategy is to provide valuable information to your target audience, increase traffic, and generate conversions. From a technical standpoint, content marketing also focuses on optimizing your content for search engines to improve your visibility in search results.
Why use content marketing?
With the ability to connect with audiences throughout the buying funnel, content marketing is a smart digital marketing strategy to use. The best part is that unlike with paid advertising, you don’t have to pay for the traffic your content brings in — you simply earn it through the quality of your content.
4. Email marketing
Email marketing is an Internet marketing strategy that involves nurturing leads, building brand loyalty, and promoting your products or services to your audience through email.
Email marketing focuses on retaining existing customers, as well as gaining new ones. It’s an excellent technique for building brand awareness, keeping your company top-of-mind, and encouraging repeat purchases.
The idea is that, while these users may not need your services or products now, they’ll remember your brand when it’s time to make a purchase. That brand awareness encourages them to choose your company when they’re ready to buy.
The main objective of email marketing as a digital marketing initiative is to stay top-of-mind for potential customers, and provide current clients with beneficial information (like relevant industry news) and personalized content (like product coupons) that keep them coming back.
Why use email marketing?
Email marketing offers tons of benefits. That’s why more than 80 percent of companies use email marketing, from manufacturing operations to retail stores to technology businesses.
Another of the biggest email marketing advantages is the fact that it has an average return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every $1 invested. That means that for every dollar you spend on email marketing, you could earn $36 in revenue!
In addition to marketing your company with organic social media posts, you can also display paid social media ads.
Why use social media?
With less than 30 percent of companies using social media as a marketing strategy, there is an immense opportunity for businesses that invest in it. Even better, almost 3.5 billion people use social media, meaning it’s a perfect outlet for reaching your target audience.
6. Voice search optimization
With voice search optimization, your company optimizes existing and new website content for voice search. The intention is to earn your website the featured snippet or position zero spot in Google search results.
Why?
Various voice assistants, from Siri to Amazon Echo, use the featured snippet to respond to voice searches. So, if a user asks, “how do I clean a stinky dishwasher?” Amazon Echo or Siri would reply with the featured snippet.
As search queries differ between voice and text searches, voice search optimization is extremely important. If you’re a local business, this strategy is even more critical, as many users rely on their mobile devices — and voice search — to find restaurants, salons, or hardware stores near them.
Why use voice search optimization?
With more people purchasing smartphones and voice-activated speakers, voice search remains one of the most popular ways to search. As a result, it’s one of the best digital marketing strategies for companies to adopt.
7. Video marketing
With video marketing, your company can increase its reach, grow its revenue, and expand its operations. As with content marketing, your business should focus its video marketing efforts primarily on creating informational content for its target audience.
A few types of marketing videos include:
Instructional videos
Announcement videos
Behind-the-scenes videos
Event videos
And more!
No matter which types of videos you create, you’re working to build brand awareness among your target audience. As with social media, email, and content marketing, this brand awareness can lead to valuable conversions later.
Why use video marketing?
With the ability to improve conversion rates, video marketing is becoming a go-to online marketing strategy. It’s also an excellent addition to email marketing and content marketing, which both benefit from using videos.
8. Account-based marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing (ABM) is one of the best digital marketing strategies for reaching companies you know are a good fit for your business. This business-to-business (B2B) strategy involves promoting your business to high-value accounts to make them clients.
This strategy enables your sales and marketing teams to work together to target specific accounts through personalized and strategized marketing materials.
Why use ABM?
ABM is valuable for increasing your company’s ROI. Since you’re targeting accounts likely to turn into customers, you have a better chance to earn a higher ROI from those clients. It’s also a great strategy for helping you better align your sales and marketing teams, so you can win valuable clients.
How to build a digital marketing strategy
Now that you know the top digital marketing strategies to invest in, you may be wondering how to get started. Just keep reading to find out!
How to Build a Digital Marketing Strategy in 7 Steps
Buyer personas represent the people who are most likely to purchase your products or services. To be more specific, they are hypothetical examples of the people you want to reach with your marketing messages so that you can maximize your sales and revenue.
Expert insights from
Sarah BerryWeb Marketing Consultant at WebFX
“You don’t want to sell to everyone — even big brands like Walmart and Apple don’t. A buyer persona serves as a reminder for who you’re serving, and can include their demographics but also psychographics, like their values, goals, and interests. That can help you create really compelling (and successful) marketing campaigns.”
Creating a buyer persona involves thinking about your target audiences’ interests and needs, as well as other factors such as demographics. For example, maybe you notice that a lot of your customers are women between 50 and 70 who live in Kansas.
Based on that information, you could create a buyer persona named Janet, a 64-year-old woman who lives in Topeka and is interested in buying one of your products. Janet isn’t real, of course, but she matches all the characteristics of your target audience.
Once you’ve created this buyer persona, you can tailor your marketing messages to resonate with their unique interests to encourage them to buy from you. By tailoring your marketing to this persona, you’ll simultaneously be targeting it to the audience you want to reach.
2. Set goals and objectives
The whole point of developing a digital marketing strategy is to reach your goals. That’s why it’s important to set clear goals and objectives that you want to attain with your strategy right away.
Use specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals (also known as S.M.A.R.T. goals) to guide your strategy. Think about your organization’s short- and long-term goals for growth.
For example, you might set a goal to drive $300,000 in revenue this year. You can set objectives to reach that goal, such as driving more traffic to your website, increasing product sales, and more.
3. Audit your existing digital channels
Before you implement any new Internet marketing strategies, it’s a good idea to audit your existing digital channels, such as your website, social media accounts, content, and email campaigns.
Conducting an audit involves assessing your current results and campaigns to determine what you can improve and what’s working well for you. You can then use these insights to inform your overall strategy.
For example, you might notice that most of your website traffic is coming from search results on Google. As a result, you may want to invest more into an SEO strategy in the future to drive even more traffic to your site.
4. Establish a marketing budget
It’s important to ensure that your marketing strategy doesn’t break the bank and fits within your company’s overall financial goals.
Establish a realistic budget for your strategy so you know how much you can invest in different campaigns.
You may also want to create multiple budgets for your strategy. For example, you may want to determine one budget for your advertising spend, and another for your SEO.
5. Decide which digital marketing strategies you want to invest in
Now that you’ve established a budget, you can decide which online marketing strategies you want to invest in. For most businesses, it’s a good idea to invest in as many of them as you can. However, as we noted a moment ago, you may be limited by your budget. In that case, you’ll want to figure out which strategies offer your business the most value.
Expert insights from
Sarah BerryWeb Marketing Consultant at WebFX
“When choosing which marketing strategies will get your time, energy, and budget, consider an omnichannel approach to maximize your business’s visibility throughout the buyer journey (it takes multiple touchpoints for users to convert). A common combination is using SEO and PPC to reach, nurture, and convert users.”
You want to make sure the strategies you choose will help you achieve your wider business goals, so when you’re deciding on your strategies, be sure to keep those goals in mind. Also, think about where your target audience is the most likely to be found. Is there a specific social media platform they tend to visit? Do you get a lot of traffic from Google search results?
Ultimately, be sure to focus on the techniques that offer the most value for your business and industry, rather than just leaping for the trendiest strategies.
6. Plan out your strategies
Guide your marketing strategy to success by taking the time to plan it out. If you’re using paid advertising, spend some time determining your ad spend. If you’re publishing content, build out your content calendar.
Additionally, you’ll want to determine who on your team will work on which marketing strategies and what their roles will be. That partly depends on how large your marketing team is — if you even have one. If you lack a marketing team, or if it’s too small to handle all of your chosen strategies, you may want to consider partnering with a professional marketing agency.
7. Monitor and report
Finally, your campaigns don’t end once you launch them. In fact, the work is just beginning. Going forward, you’ll want to closely monitor and measure the performance of your strategies by tracking key metrics.
Measuring the success of your Internet strategies helps you understand how you can improve them moving forward so you can earn a higher ROI. For example, you might notice that your social media ads perform better than your PPC ads.
Based on that information, you might invest more in social media ads and less in your PPC ads to drive even more sales and revenue for your business and ensure you aren’t wasting your budget on campaigns that don’t help your company grow. Alternatively, you might take some time to optimize your PPC campaigns to help them perform better.
Get answers to common questions about online marketing strategies here!
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is the practice of promoting your business through online channels like search, social media, paid advertising, and email.
What is the most effective digital marketing strategy?
The most effective digital marketing strategy will depend on your unique business, industry, and target market.
However, many companies see success with SEO. That’s because today, a lot of people use search engines like Google to discover local businesses near them, find answers to their questions, and research products and services.
An SEO strategy is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your company online, drive more traffic to your website, and earn sales and revenue.
What is a digital marketing campaign?
A digital marketing campaign is a promotion that’s designed to help you achieve a specific objective in your strategy rather than your overall goal. Campaigns typically have a start and end date.
What is a digital marketing tactic?
A marketing tactic is a specific action you’ll take to implement your strategy. Common examples of marketing tactics include sending emails to customers and leads, creating blog posts and articles, and launching advertisements.
Our digital marketing campaigns impact the metrics that improve your bottom line.
WebFX has driven the following results for clients:
$6 billion
In client revenue
24 million
Leads for our clients
7.14 million
Client phone calls
Are you ready to start using digital marketing strategies?
Digital marketing is one of the best ways to reach new customers and achieve your business goals. Plus, it offers a variety of strategies, from video to email to social, to reach your unique goals. Whether you’re looking to increase sales, revenue, awareness, or loyalty, digital marketing is the way to go.
The success of your strategy, however, depends on the development and execution of them. That’s why many businesses partner with WebFX, a full-service digital strategy agency that provides custom, results-driven end-to-end marketing solutions. We have locations all around the world, including New York City, Tampa, Baltimore, and much more.
Start choosing and building your personalized strategy by contacting our award-winning marketing agency today! Contact us online or give us a ring at 888-601-5359 to get a free quote for your next digital marketing strategy.
