Digital marketing strategy
Your marketing strategy should clearly show the steps and actions to ensure potential customers are:
- aware of your business
- aware of your branding
- persuaded to take up your products and services.
Read more about general marketing strategies.
Your digital marketing strategy is a plan that covers your online marketing and advertising activities. These activities should help you to:
- know your audience
- engage with your customers
- retain and manage digital customers.
Know your audience
To effectively target your advertising and marketing efforts, you need to understand who your customers are. This is easier to do when you segment your market. This means separating your current and potential customers into groups according to specific characteristics.
Market segmentation can help you:
- connect with your customers and understand their needs and values
- get the best value from your marketing efforts by focusing your resources on specific audiences
- create compelling messages that speak directly to your target group
- increase customer retention
- reveal gaps in the market and opportunities to create a new niche product or service.
Consider using both traditional and digital market segmentation to analyse your customers.
| Segmentation type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
Demographic | Statistical data, (e.g. age, gender, location, annual income, marital status, education level) | Customers aged 13-15 in Brisbane |
Psychographic | Psychological and emotional factors, (e.g. lifestyle, interests, motivations, values, attitudes) | Women who value health and fitness |
Behavioural | How customers act and behave, (e.g. spending and buying habits) | Customers who leased a luxury vehicle within the last 3 years |
Geographic | Where your customer is located, (e.g. town, state, country, rural or city, specific suburbs) | Customers living in the inner-city suburbs |
| Segmentation type | Description | Example insight |
|---|---|---|
Level of engagement | Divide target market into:
| Design different marketing campaigns, or offer different incentives to suit each group |
Platforms used | Segment your market based on the online platforms they use | Customers' choice of platform may indicate their demographic or psychographic profile |
Most active time | Segment your market by the time of day they are most active (e.g. on social media) | If a younger demographic is more active in the evening, you can post relevant content at the right time |
Online behaviour | Different demographics may have different online behaviour patterns | A younger demographic might click through from social media posts, while an older demographic might prefer websites. Consider creating different landing pages based on online behaviour |
- Define what you want to achieve. Do you want to:
- increase digital marketing?
- reach into new segments?
- better target existing customers?
- build a more consistent online brand?
- Decide on the traditional and digital segmentation categories which will be most relevant to what you want to achieve. Divide your customers into groups accordingly.
- Once you've defined the market segments, you can create digital customer personas (see below) that can help you better understand different customer segments and their behaviours and needs.
A digital customer persona is a detailed description of your target online customers in each market segment. These personas can be based on real people and built using marketing analysis and research data.
You can search online for examples of customer personas and templates for creating personas.
Customer segments often change over time. Update and maintain your digital customer personas to reflect real customers interests and preferences.
Build a persona for each market segment
Build a least 1 persona for every market segment you've identified.
To do this, look at:
- Google Analytics
- your website data
- social media interactions
- other communication with customers.
This can show you:
- what customers have bought in the past
- what questions they've asked
- what they've complained about
- how often they visit your website
- what their interests are
- what their needs are.
For example, a person clicks through from a landing page you created for a specific geographical area and buys items for young children.
Based on this, you know they:
- are using a website
- prefer to access via a landing page
- are in a geographical area that the landing page was shown in.
You can also assume:
- they're most likely an adult between 25–45 years old (due to the age of children they are buying for)
- they're most likely parents.
From this point, you can:
- research parents in the particular area
- look at competitors in the area and their practices
- assess statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics related to income and job types for this area and age range
- develop a profile based on what is known and assumed.
Once you have a basic persona, you can build on this over time to learn about your customers. You could collect information from:
- social media engagement and posts
- check-out surveys
- surveys to get entry to competitions.
Engage with your customers
Once you have taken action to understand your audience, including segmenting your market and creating digital customer personas, you need to engage with your customer base.
Run targeted digital marketing or advertising campaigns
Targeted marketing focuses your marketing efforts on a specific group of people. This allows you to offer the right product to the right person at the right time to maximise your opportunity for a sale.
As part of your digital marketing strategy, develop a targeted online campaign for each market segment you've created.
Targeted digital marketing involves:
- selecting the most relevant online platform
- choosing the right local area to market to
- setting the tone and style to suit each target group
- determining the timing of posts and engagements
- providing pathways to your product that align with the online behaviour of each digital market segment.
Create conversion funnels
A conversion funnel is a marketing tool designed to turn potential customers into actual customers. It's a series of steps that encourage visitors to your site to take the action you'd like them to.
You can use conversion funnels to:
- generate leads more efficiently and effectively
- make your digital marketing strategies more productive
- increase your business profit through more effective marketing.
Stages of conversion funnels
Each stage of the conversion funnel has a different purpose and a different set of tools you can include in your digital marketing strategy.
| Stage | Description | Support tools |
|---|---|---|
1. Awareness |
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2. Interest |
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3. Conversion |
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4. Action |
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5. Retention |
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Retain your digital customers
The final step in the digital marketing strategy is planning how to retain and maintain your online customer base.
Optimise your website
This means improving how your website performs. You could:
- reduce the time it takes for pages to load
- update content
- check links to ensure they're working
- create customised landing pages for your targeted marketing campaigns.
Analyse your data
Digital customers may expect you to offer a personalised service online. Use the customer data you collect to target market segments appropriately and personalise customer enquiries.
Review the results of campaigns
Check if you need to adjust your digital customer personas based on your campaign results.
Ask for customer feedback
Understanding how your customers feel about your business will help inform your products, services and customer experience. You can conduct surveys via email, social media, or directly from your business website.
Also consider...
- Learn about online advertising and marketing.
- Find how to improve your website.
- Read about social media for businesses.
- Learn about managing online communications and customer reviews.
- Check that you're aware of your your legal obligations and protections online.
- Last reviewed: 11 May 2022
- Last updated: 6 Apr 2024