Starting a new business is an exciting yet challenging time. You have a great idea, product, or service that you want to bring to market, but how exactly do you get the word out? This is where creating a strong digital marketing strategy comes in.

An effective digital marketing strategy will help you connect with your target audience, build brand awareness, generate leads, and ultimately drive sales. While digital marketing includes a wide range of tactics and channels, the key is to develop an integrated strategy that reaches potential customers at multiple touchpoints throughout their buyer's journey.


Set Concrete Goals and KPIs
Before determining specific strategies and tactics, you need to set clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) that align to your overall business objectives. Consider what success looks like for your marketing efforts in both the short-term and long-term.

Some examples of goals include:
  • · Generate 500 new leads in the first 6 months
  • · Increase website traffic by 25% year-over-year
  • · Achieve a 15% conversion rate on landing pages
  • · Grow social media followers by 10% monthly
The KPIs you measure should directly relate to these goals to gauge your progress. KPIs could include metrics like website visits, lead generation, sales revenue, and social media engagement.

Once you know your goals, gaining a strong understanding of your target audience is key. You need to intimately know your ideal customers—their demographic profiles, interests, pain points, and buyer journeys—in order to market to them effectively.

Conduct thorough audience research by exploring:
  • Demographic data - Age, location, gender, income level, education, occupation, etc.
  • Psychographic details - Values, interests, personalities, and lifestyles
  • Behavioral insights - Where they spend time online, content/topics they engage with, stage in buyer's journey
  • Primary motivations and challenges - Main reasons to buy your product and challenges they face
  • Personas and buyer journeys are two useful tools to represent your findings and guide your marketing strategy.

Conducting a full audit of your existing digital assets is important to identify strengths to leverage and areas needing improvement. Assess elements like:
  • Website - Site content, navigation, calls-to-action, page speed, SEO elements, etc.
  • Blog - Content topics, optimization for SEO, formatting, promotion strategy
  • Social media - Accounts, followers, engagement levels, brand voice
  • Email marketing - Signup forms, segmentation, automation flows
  • Advertising - Existing ad accounts, performance data, creatives
  • Conversions - Forms, checkout process, lead generation identify opportunities to better align these assets to your audience's buyer journey and interests. For areas needing improvement, add to your strategy roadmap.

Map Out Your Buyer's Journey
To develop targeted and multi-channel digital strategies, you need to map out your audience's typical buyer's journey from initial awareness to becoming a customer. Outline the key stages and mindsets customers have at each step, such as:
  • Awareness - Learning about the problems they face
  • Consideration - Researching possible solutions
  • Decision - Comparing options and deciding on a solution
  • Purchase - Buying the product
  • Retention - Becoming a repeat customer
Look at the digital and offline touchpoints that influence buyers at each stage and note potential gaps you could fill. Use your map to guide strategies across top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.

Craft Your Brand Messaging

Consistency is key when it comes to brand messaging. You want all marketing content and assets to align with your core brand identity and value proposition.

Key branding elements to define include:

  • Mission statement - Short statement summarizing your purpose and aims
  • Positioning - How you differentiate from competitors
  • Tone and voice - Personality and style of your content
  • Visual identity - Logos, color palette, fonts, etc.

Ensure messaging is tailored to resonate with your audience while being distinctly tied to your brand. Repeat key messages across channels to drive them home.

Select Digital Marketing Channels and Tactics

With your goals, audience insights, assets audit, and buyer's journey map in mind, you can now select channels and strategies to include in your plan. Focus on 2-3 core channels first before expanding.


  • Keyword-optimized website content
  • Blog content strategy to attract and engage visitors
  • Clear calls-to-action to convert visitors
  • Email signup forms and lead capture
  • SEO elements like meta descriptions, tags, XML sitemap, etc
  • On and off-page optimization techniques
  • Content creation aligned to target keywords
  • Local SEO for geographic keywords and listings
  • Link building to earn authoritative backlinks
  • Pay-Per-Click Advertising
  • Google Ads campaigns to get in front of searchers
  • Remarketing campaigns to re-engage website visitors
  • Compelling ad copy, landing pages, and images

Strong business pages on relevant platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn
Sponsored posts and social ads to reach new followers
Engaging organic content to build community and traffic
Hashtag campaigns and user-generated content

  • Welcome and promotional email series
  • Segmented broadcasts and product announcements
  • Lead nurturing sequences with valuable content
  • Retargeting campaigns for recent site visitors
  • Blog, video, and social content to attract and engage
  • SEO-optimized landing pages and conversion forms
  • Guest posting and partnerships to expand reach
  • Incentives for customers to refer friends and family
  • Tools to make sharing and invites easy
  • Rewards for sign ups and purchases

The best approach is to create an integrated strategy that uses multiple channels at different stages. This allows you to maximize exposure and engagement throughout the buyer's journey.

Set Realistic Timelines and Budget

Results take time, so set realistic timeframes for meeting your KPIs based on industry research and benchmarks. Likewise, allocate budget to match your capabilities and meet your goals for spend and ROI.

On average, plan for:
  • 3-6 months to see initial results from SEO and content marketing
  • 2-3 months to build awareness through social media
  • 1-2 months to set up and test paid ads
  • 1 month to implement email marketing automation

Factor in costs for elements like website development, paid ads, content creation, tracking tools, and more. Determine how you will measure return on investment (ROI) for your budget spend.

Track and Optimize

Set up tracking and analytics to monitor performance and gather data-driven insights. Key metrics to track by channel can include:
  • Website - Traffic, conversion rate, time on site, bounce rate
  • SEO - Rankings, organic traffic, click-through-rate
  • Social - Followers, engagement, clicks, conversions
  • Email - Open rate, click rate, list growth
  • Ads - Impressions, CTR, conversions, cost per conversion
Use learnings to continuously test new strategies and optimize efforts for maximum impact. Adapt plans as needed to improve results over time.