A lot of digital marketing strategies are really just lists of channels. SEO, Google Ads, LinkedIn, email, content, social media, video. Someone puts all of these into a PowerPoint presentation, adds a few objectives and KPIs, and suddenly it becomes a "digital marketing strategy."
That's not really a strategy. That’s just a channel plan!
A good digital marketing strategy should start with the business, the customer and the problem you're trying to solve. The channels come later.
I've spent the past decade working in marketing across companies including Microsoft, Apple, Dovetail and Smokeball. One thing I've learned is that the best marketing strategies aren't necessarily the most complicated. They're the ones that make it clear who you're trying to reach, what you want them to believe, what you want them to do, and how marketing is going to help the business grow.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan for using digital channels, content, data and technology to achieve a company's marketing and business objectives. It provides direction for how a business will attract, engage, convert and retain customers through digital experiences.
Digital marketing can include search engine optimisation, paid search, social media, LinkedIn, content marketing, email marketing, digital advertising, video, websites, marketing automation and, increasingly, AI search and generative engine optimisation (GEO).
But a digital marketing strategy is bigger than the channels themselves. The strategy should explain why you're using those channels, who you're targeting, what you're saying, what you want people to do and how you'll measure whether the investment is working.
Without that thinking, it's very easy to end up doing marketing for the sake of doing marketing. You can publish more content, run more campaigns and generate more traffic without necessarily getting closer to your business goals.
Digital marketing strategy vs digital marketing plan
These terms are often used interchangeably, but I think there's a useful distinction. Your strategy is the thinking behind your marketing. Your plan is how you turn that thinking into action.
For example, your strategy might be to increase awareness and demand among mid-sized B2B technology companies by establishing your brand as a credible alternative to the market leaders. Your marketing plan might then include two LinkedIn posts per week, a quarterly research report, LinkedIn advertising, SEO content and an account-based marketing campaign targeting 50 companies.
The strategy explains the direction and priorities. The plan explains what you're actually going to do, when you're going to do it and who is responsible for delivering it.
You need both, but the strategy should come first.
Why digital marketing needs a strategy
The number of digital channels available to marketers has exploded. That's a huge opportunity, but it also creates a problem. There are more ways than ever to reach customers, but there are also more ways than ever to waste money.
A company can spend thousands of dollars on Google Ads without having a clear positioning strategy. It can publish hundreds of blog posts without generating meaningful traffic or pipeline. It can post on LinkedIn every day without building an audience that actually cares about what it has to say. It can generate thousands of leads that sales doesn't want.
These aren't necessarily channel problems. They're strategy problems.
A digital marketing strategy gives you a framework for deciding where to invest, what to prioritise and what not to do. It helps you connect individual marketing activities to a larger business objective rather than treating every channel as a separate project.
How to build a digital marketing strategy
There isn't one perfect framework that works for every company. A B2B SaaS company selling to enterprise organisations will have very different requirements from an ecommerce brand or a local professional services business.
However, most effective digital marketing strategies need to answer a similar set of questions. Before choosing channels or creating campaigns, I recommend working through the following areas.
1. Start with your business objectives
The first question shouldn't be "Which channels should we use?" It should be "What does the business need to achieve?"
Perhaps the company needs to generate more pipeline, increase revenue, enter a new market, launch a product, improve customer acquisition, build brand awareness, increase retention or reduce customer acquisition costs.
Your marketing objectives should support those business objectives. "Increase LinkedIn engagement" might be a useful channel metric, but it isn't necessarily a meaningful business objective. "Increase awareness among our target buyers" is closer. "Generate $5 million in qualified pipeline from our target market" gives the marketing team an even clearer commercial outcome to work towards.
The more clearly you define the desired outcome, the easier it becomes to decide what marketing should actually do.
2. Understand your target audience
You can't build an effective digital marketing strategy without understanding who you're trying to reach. For B2B companies, that means going beyond basic demographics such as job title, industry and company size.
You need to understand who the buyer is, who influences the decision, what problem they're trying to solve and what triggers them to start looking for a solution. You also need to understand what alternatives they're considering, what objections they have, where they research and what would make them trust your company.
This information should influence almost every part of your strategy, from your positioning and messaging to your channel selection and content strategy.
If you don't understand your customer, it's very difficult to create marketing that feels relevant to them.
3. Define your positioning
Positioning is one of the most important parts of your digital marketing strategy because it determines why someone should pay attention to you instead of the alternatives.
A common mistake is to use generic corporate language that could describe almost any company. Phrases such as "innovative," "scalable," "customer-centric" and "industry-leading" don't give potential customers much reason to choose you because your competitors can say exactly the same thing.
Good positioning makes it clear who you help, what you help them achieve and why you're different.
That positioning should then appear consistently across your website, advertising, content, sales materials, social channels and other customer touchpoints. Your customers shouldn't have to figure out what your company does every time they encounter your brand.
4. Map the customer journey
Customers don't always go from seeing an advertisement to buying a product five minutes later, particularly in B2B.
A potential customer might discover a problem, research possible solutions, compare different approaches, discover individual vendors, talk to colleagues, read reviews, speak with sales and then spend weeks or months evaluating their options.
Different digital channels can play different roles throughout that journey. LinkedIn might help create awareness and familiarity, while SEO can capture people actively researching a problem. Content can educate potential buyers, paid search can capture high-intent demand, email can nurture prospects who aren't ready to buy, and case studies can provide evidence during the evaluation stage.
The goal isn't to make every channel do everything. It's to understand the role each channel plays and make those channels work together.
5. Choose the right digital marketing channels
Only after you've established your objectives, audience, positioning and customer journey should you start deciding which channels to use.
Search is useful when there is existing demand for the problem or category you're targeting. SEO can help capture organic search traffic over time, while paid search can give you faster access to high-intent searches. But ranking first for a keyword isn't particularly valuable if the people searching for it aren't potential customers.
Social media can help brands build awareness, relationships and communities. For B2B companies, LinkedIn can be particularly useful because of the concentration of professional audiences on the platform. However, simply having a company page or posting regularly isn't a strategy. You still need something useful, interesting or distinctive to say.
Content marketing can educate potential customers before they're ready to speak with sales. That might include articles, research reports, guides, case studies, videos, podcasts, newsletters or webinars. The best content isn't necessarily the content that generates the most traffic. It's content that attracts the right audience and helps them understand a problem, evaluate their options or develop a preference for your company.
Paid media can help you reach specific audiences quickly and at scale, but it can also become an expensive way to discover that your positioning doesn't work. Before increasing your advertising budget, make sure you understand who you're targeting, what you're offering, why they should care and what happens after they click.
Email marketing remains valuable because it gives you a direct way to communicate with people who have already given you permission to reach them. Depending on the business, email can support lead nurturing, customer education, newsletters, product launches and retention.
AI search is another increasingly important consideration. People are using AI tools to research companies, products, services and problems, which means marketers need to think beyond traditional search rankings. It's no longer only about asking, "How do we rank for this keyword?" It's also about asking, "How does AI understand our brand, expertise and relevance?"
That's where GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, comes into the picture. For B2B companies, GEO involves thinking about your website, content, expertise, brand mentions and broader digital presence as part of how your company is discovered and understood by AI-powered search experiences.
Don't choose channels because your competitors use them
One of the easiest traps in digital marketing is copying what your competitors are doing.
Your competitor is running LinkedIn Ads, so you run LinkedIn Ads. They launch a podcast, so you launch a podcast. They publish three blog posts every week, so suddenly your content team is expected to publish three blog posts every week too.
That's not strategy. That's following.
The right channel mix depends on your audience, buying journey, resources and objectives. Sometimes the right answer is LinkedIn. Sometimes it's Google. Sometimes it's events, content, partnerships or email. Sometimes it's a combination of several channels.
And sometimes the right answer is not doing something because it isn't worth the investment.
Strategy isn't just about deciding what you should do. It's also about deciding what you shouldn't do.
Build your content around the customer
One of the easiest ways to improve your digital marketing is to stop asking, "What should we post?"
Instead, ask, "What does our customer need to know?"
That question tends to lead to much better content ideas. If your audience has a problem, answer it. If they're comparing solutions, help them understand the differences. If they're trying to build a business case internally, give them the information they need. If they're worried about implementation, address those concerns. If they're trying to understand what the future looks like, give them a useful point of view.
This approach is particularly valuable for B2B marketing because customers often spend significant time researching before they ever speak to a salesperson.
It's also where SEO and GEO increasingly overlap. Useful, specific content gives search engines and AI systems more information about your expertise, the topics you understand and the problems your business can solve.
Brand and demand generation should work together
B2B marketers often talk about brand and performance as though they're competing approaches. I don't think that's particularly useful.
Demand capture helps you reach people who are already looking for a solution. Demand generation helps create awareness and preference before someone is ready to buy. Brand makes your company easier to remember and recognise. Content helps educate potential customers. Paid media can amplify your message, while sales helps convert qualified opportunities into customers.
These activities don't need to compete with each other. They're different parts of the same system.
The important thing is understanding what each activity is supposed to achieve and how it contributes to the overall customer journey.
How should you measure digital marketing?
There are hundreds of metrics you could track, but you don't need to track all of them. The right metrics depend on what you're trying to achieve.
You might track reach, website traffic, search visibility, engagement, conversion rate, cost per lead, marketing qualified leads, pipeline, customer acquisition cost, revenue, return on ad spend or customer lifetime value.
The important thing is not to confuse activity with impact.
Ten thousand website visitors sounds impressive, unless they're the wrong people. A million impressions sounds impressive, unless nobody remembers your brand. A thousand leads sounds impressive, unless sales doesn't want any of them.
For B2B marketing, I generally care much more about whether marketing is contributing to qualified pipeline and revenue than whether the marketing dashboard looks busy.
That doesn't mean metrics such as traffic, engagement or impressions are useless. They can be useful indicators of performance. But you need to understand how those metrics connect to the outcomes the business actually cares about.
Create a measurement framework
Your digital marketing strategy should define how you'll know whether it's working.
A simple way to structure this is to work from business outcomes down to channel and campaign metrics.
For example, the business goal might be to increase new customer revenue. The marketing goal could then be to generate more qualified pipeline. Channel goals might include increasing relevant website traffic, generating engagement from target accounts and capturing high-intent searches. Campaign metrics could include click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per lead and engagement, while the business metrics would ultimately include pipeline, revenue, customer acquisition cost and return on investment.
This structure helps prevent a common problem where marketing teams optimise for a metric that has very little connection to the business.
Don't forget offline marketing
Digital marketing doesn't exist in a vacuum.
A prospect might see your LinkedIn ad, meet your company at an event, hear about you from a colleague, search for your brand on Google and then visit your website. Another prospect might encounter your brand through a sales conversation before ever seeing one of your digital campaigns.
Which channel gets the credit?
Probably not one.
That's why I don't think a digital marketing strategy should mean a digital-only marketing strategy. Your customers don't experience your company in neat marketing channels. They experience your brand across a collection of interactions.
The job of marketing is to make those experiences work together.
Where AI fits into a digital marketing strategy
AI is changing how marketers work. It can help with research, ideation, content creation, data analysis, personalisation, campaign development, customer insights and marketing automation.
But I don't think the answer is to simply "use AI everywhere."
The better question is where AI can make your marketing better, faster or more useful.
AI can help you produce more content, but that doesn't mean you need more content. It can help you create 50 advertising variations, but that doesn't mean you have 50 good ideas. It can generate a marketing plan in seconds, but that doesn't mean it understands your customers, category or competitive environment better than you do.
The best use of AI is often to augment human thinking rather than replace it. The strategy still needs human judgement, particularly when it comes to positioning, customer insight, creative ideas and deciding what the business should actually do.
A simple digital marketing strategy template
If you're building a digital marketing strategy from scratch, start by answering these ten questions:
What is the business objective? What does the business need to achieve?
Who is the target audience? Who are you trying to reach, and who influences the purchase decision?
What customer problem are you solving? What is motivating your audience to look for a solution?
What is your positioning? Why should someone choose you instead of the alternatives?
What does the customer journey look like? How do people discover, evaluate and eventually buy from you?
Which channels should you use? Where can you reach your audience effectively?
What content do they need? What information will help them solve problems and make decisions?
What action do you want them to take? What does conversion look like at different stages of the journey?
How will you measure success? Which metrics connect your marketing activity to business outcomes?
How will you optimise? What will you change based on what you learn?
That's enough to build a strong starting point.
You don't need a 100-page strategy document that nobody reads. In fact, if nobody on the marketing team can explain your digital marketing strategy in a few minutes, I'd question whether it's actually a strategy.
My take
The biggest mistake in digital marketing isn't necessarily choosing the wrong channel. It's starting with the channel in the first place.
Don't start with LinkedIn. Don't start with SEO. Don't start with Google Ads. Start with the customer, the business problem and what you're actually trying to achieve.
Then work backwards.
The best digital marketing strategy isn't necessarily the one with the most channels or the biggest marketing calendar. It's the one where every channel has a clear job, every activity supports a customer need and the overall strategy connects back to the business.
Strategy first. Channels second. Execution third.
That's how digital marketing becomes more than a collection of disconnected activities. It becomes a system for helping the business grow.
Digital Marketing Strategy FAQs
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan for using digital channels, content, data and technology to achieve specific marketing and business objectives. It defines who you want to reach, what you want to achieve, how you will reach your audience, what you want them to do and how you'll measure success. A digital marketing strategy can include channels such as SEO, paid search, social media, LinkedIn, content marketing, email, digital advertising, video and AI search. The important distinction is that the strategy comes before the channels. You should choose channels based on your audience, objectives and customer journey rather than simply copying what competitors are doing.
Why is a digital marketing strategy important?
A digital marketing strategy helps businesses prioritise their marketing investments and connect individual activities to broader business goals. Without a strategy, teams can end up producing content, running advertising campaigns or posting on social media without knowing how those activities contribute to growth. A clear strategy also makes it easier to decide what not to do. Instead of trying to be present on every digital channel, you can focus your resources on the channels and activities most relevant to your customers and objectives.
What are the main components of a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy typically includes business objectives, target audience, customer insights, positioning and messaging, customer journey, channel strategy, content strategy, conversion strategy, measurement and optimisation.
For B2B companies, it can also include demand generation, demand capture, account-based marketing, sales and marketing alignment, lead nurturing and pipeline measurement.
What is the difference between a digital marketing strategy and a digital marketing plan?
A digital marketing strategy defines the overall direction and priorities of your marketing. A digital marketing plan turns that strategy into specific activities, campaigns, timelines, budgets and responsibilities. For example, your strategy might be to increase demand among a specific B2B audience. Your plan could then include SEO content, LinkedIn advertising, webinars and an account-based marketing campaign designed to reach that audience. The strategy explains why and where you're going. The plan explains what you're going to do to get there.
What digital marketing channels should a business use?
There isn't one channel mix that works for every business. The right channels depend on your target audience, customer journey, objectives, budget and resources. Common digital marketing channels include SEO, paid search, social media, LinkedIn, content marketing, email marketing, digital advertising, video and AI search. A B2B company might rely heavily on LinkedIn, content and search, while an ecommerce company could place more emphasis on paid search, social advertising, email and organic search.
The goal isn't to use as many channels as possible. It's to use the channels that have a clear role in helping you achieve your objectives.
How do you create a digital marketing strategy?
Start by defining the business objective, then identify your target audience and understand the problem you're trying to solve for them. From there, establish your positioning, map the customer journey, select the most relevant channels, develop your content and conversion strategy, and define how you'll measure performance.
Finally, build a process for reviewing results and optimising the strategy. Digital marketing strategies shouldn't be static documents that get created once a year and forgotten. They should evolve as you learn more about your customers and the market.
What is a digital marketing strategy for B2B companies?
A B2B digital marketing strategy is designed to reach and influence business buyers throughout a typically longer and more complex buying journey. It may combine brand building, demand generation, demand capture, content marketing, SEO, LinkedIn, paid media, email, events and sales enablement.
Because B2B purchases can involve multiple decision-makers, the strategy needs to account for more than just generating leads. Building awareness, creating preference, educating buyers and generating qualified pipeline can all play important roles.
How does SEO fit into a digital marketing strategy?
SEO helps a business become more visible when potential customers search for information, problems, products or services related to the business. It can support both awareness and demand capture by attracting relevant organic traffic to a website.
SEO should be treated as part of the broader digital marketing strategy rather than a standalone activity. The topics you target should reflect your customers' questions, problems and search behaviour, while the content should provide genuinely useful information rather than simply targeting keywords.
What is GEO in digital marketing?
GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, refers to optimising a brand's digital presence so it has a better chance of being discovered, understood and represented accurately in AI-powered search and answer experiences. GEO extends some traditional SEO principles but also places greater emphasis on factors such as clear expertise, useful content, brand mentions, authoritative sources and consistent information across the web. For businesses, the goal isn't simply to rank for a keyword. It's also to make sure AI systems can understand what the company does, who it serves, what it is known for and why it is relevant to a particular question.
What is the difference between SEO and GEO?
SEO primarily focuses on improving visibility in traditional search engines, while GEO focuses on visibility and representation within generative AI and AI-powered search experiences. There is significant overlap between the two. High-quality content, clear website structure, topical expertise and authoritative information can support both SEO and GEO. However, GEO also requires marketers to think about how a brand is understood and mentioned across the wider web, not just where its website ranks for individual keywords.
How can AI be used in digital marketing?
AI can support many parts of digital marketing, including research, content ideation, analysis, personalisation, campaign development, automation and customer research. However, AI should generally be used to augment marketing expertise rather than replace it. AI can help marketers work faster, but human judgement is still important for positioning, strategy, creative thinking, customer insight and deciding which opportunities are worth pursuing.
How do you measure the success of a digital marketing strategy?
The right metrics depend on the business objective. Common digital marketing metrics include website traffic, search visibility, reach, engagement, conversion rate, cost per lead, marketing qualified leads, pipeline, customer acquisition cost, revenue and return on ad spend.
For B2B businesses, it is particularly important to understand how marketing activity connects to qualified pipeline and revenue. Traffic and engagement can be useful indicators, but they shouldn't automatically be treated as evidence of business impact.
How often should a digital marketing strategy be reviewed?
A digital marketing strategy should be reviewed regularly rather than only once a year. A more detailed strategic review might happen quarterly, while campaign and channel performance can be monitored much more frequently. The exact cadence depends on the business and market. The important thing is to create a feedback loop where performance data, customer insights and changes in the market inform future marketing decisions.
