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Would it be correct to assume a major part of your marketing strategy today is digital? Probably.
Consumers and businesses alike are almost always online and on the go – and you want to be able to reach them and observe their behavior where they spend their time.

But when you’re growing a business, this ever-changing digital landscape can quickly become an overwhelming one. With a number of other responsibilities and tasks that you need to do, how can you also efficiently create, fine-tune, and maintain an agile digital marketing strategy?
We’ve put together this guide about marketing strategies to help you improve your digital presence and grow better.

If you’re a small business and you’re unsure how to jumpstart your strategy, this digital marketing strategy template will help you get there. It includes actionable tips and templates to set you up for success.
Now back to this — are you confused about the difference between a marketing strategy and marketing tactics? We cover that below.

Marketing or not, there are three parts of any strategy:

A diagnosis of your challenge
A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge
A set of targeted actions that are necessary to accomplish the policy

Depending on the scale of your business, your marketing strategy may include several moving parts, each with different goals. With that said, working on your strategy can become daunting at times.
So, if you’re ever feeling overwhelmed about your marketing strategy, refer to these three steps to keep you focused on achieving your objectives.
To provide a better understanding of what they may entail, check out the following list of basic marketing strategies commonly utilized by teams across a range of industries.
Marketing Basics

Publish a blog.
Advertise on specific social media platforms (e.g. Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads).
Offer free educational resources.
Search engine optimize your digital content.
Create a giveaway and/ or contest.
Test different campaign types to determine what works best for your audience.
Organize a webinar.
Produce a podcast.
Create an email campaign.

Now, let’s look at digital marketing strategy.

Similar to marketing strategies versus marketing tactics, “digital marketing strategy” and “digital marketing campaign” are also often interchanged. So, how do they differ?
We cover that in the following sections.
What is a digital marketing campaign?

Digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks and actions within your digital marketing strategy that move you toward a specific end goal.
For instance, if the overarching goal of your digital marketing strategy is to generate more leads through social media, you might run a digital marketing campaign on Twitter. You may share some of your business’s best-performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through the channel.

1. Build your buyer personas.
For any marketing strategy – digital or not – you need to know who you’re marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them.
Organize your audience segments and make your marketing stronger with templates to build your buyer personas.
Buyer personas represent your ideal customer(s) and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business’s target audience.
It’s important to note that this information should be based upon real data whenever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to move in the wrong direction.
To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who align with your target audience.
But what kind of information should you gather for your own buyer persona(s) to inform your digital marketing strategy?
That depends on your business — it’s likely to vary depending on whether you’re B2B or B2C, or whether you sell a high-cost or low-cost product.
Here are some starting points that you can fine-tune and tailor to your particular business.
Quantitative and Demographic Information

Location: Use web analytics tools to easily identify what location your website traffic is coming from.

Age: Depending on your business, this may or may not be relevant information. But if it is, it’s best to gather this data by identifying trends in your existing prospect and contact database.

Income: It’s best to gather sensitive information like personal income through persona research interviews, as people might be unwilling to share these details via online forms.

Job Title: This is something you can get a rough idea of from your existing customer base and is most relevant for B2B companies.

Qualitative and Psychographic Information

Goals: Depending on what challenge your product or service solves, you may already have a good idea of the goals of your buyer persona. Cement your assumptions by speaking to real customers and internal sales and customer service reps.

Challenges: Speak to customers, sales and customer service reps, and any other customer-facing employees to get an idea of the common challenges your audience members face.

Hobbies/Interests: Ask customers and those who align with your target audience about their hobbies and interests. If you’re a fashion brand, for example, it’s helpful to know if large segments of your audience are also interested in fitness and well-being to inform future content and partnerships.

Priorities: Talk to customers and target audience members to find out what’s most important to them in relation to your business. For example, if you’re a B2B software company, knowing your audience values customer support over a competitive price point is very valuable information.

By combining all of these details, you’ll be able to create buyer personas that are accurate and highly valuable for your business.
2. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need.
Your marketing goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of your business.
For example, if your business’s goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your marketing team’s goal might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than the previous year to contribute to that success.
Use a high-level marketing plan template to outline your annual marketing strategy, identify top priorities, and more.

Download the Template
Whatever your overarching digital marketing goal is, you must be able to measure the success of your strategy along the way with the right digital marketing tools.
For instance, the Reporting Dashboard in HubSpot brings all of your marketing and sales data into one place, so you can quickly determine what works and what doesn’t to improve your strategy for the future.
3. Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets.
When reviewing your existing digital marketing channels and assets to determine what to incorporate in your strategy, it’s helpful to first consider the big picture — this will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed or confused.
Gather what you have, and categorize each vehicle or asset in a spreadsheet, so you have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.
Owned, Earned, Paid Media Framework
To do this effectively, use the owned, earned, and paid media framework to categorize the digital “vehicles,” assets, or channels you’re already using and decide what’s a good fit for your strategy.
Owned Media
This refers to the digital assets your brand or company owns — whether that’s your website, social media profiles, blog content, or imagery. Owned channels are what your business has complete control over.
This can also include some off-site content you own that isn’t hosted on your website (e.g. a blog you publish on Medium).
Earned Media
Earned media refers to the exposure you earn through word-of-mouth marketing. Whether that’s content you’ve distributed on other websites (e.g. guest posts), PR work you’ve been doing, or the customer experience you’ve delivered. Earned media is the recognition you receive as a result of these efforts.
You can earn media by getting press mentions and positive reviews as well as by people sharing your content via their networks (e.g. social media channels).
Paid Media
Paid media refers to any vehicle or channel you spend money on to catch the attention of your buyer personas.
This includes things like Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (e.g. sponsored posts on other websites), or any other medium through which you pay in exchange for increased visibility.
Since you have a better grasp of what this framework entails, let’s look at an example.
Say you have an owned piece of content on a landing page on your website that’s been created to help you generate leads. You know you want to incorporate different parts of the framework rather than just working with owned, earned, or paid media alone.
To amplify the number of leads the content generates, you make an effort to ensure it’s shareable so your audience can distribute it via their social media profiles. In return, this will increase traffic to your landing page. This is the earned media component.
To support your content’s success, you might post about the content on your Facebook page and pay to have it seen by more people in your target audience.
This is how the three parts of the framework are able to work together — although, it’s not necessary for success. For instance, if your owned and earned media are already both successful, you might not need to invest in paid. So, evaluate the best solution to help you meet your goal, and then incorporate the channels that work best for your business into your digital marketing strategy.
Now you know what’s already being used, you can start to think about what to keep and what to cut.
Keep track of your paid media efforts with this free Paid Media Template.

Download the Template
4. Audit and plan your owned media campaigns.
At the heart of digital marketing is owned media — and it almost always comes in the form of content. That’s because nearly every message your brand broadcasts can be classified as content, whether it’s an About Us site page, product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, or social media posts.
Content helps convert your website visitors into leads and customers while improving your brand’s online presence. And when this content is search engine optimized (SEO), it can boost your search and organic traffic.
Whatever your digital marketing strategy goal is, you’ll want to incorporate owned content. To start, decide what content will help you reach your goals.
If your goal is to generate 50% more leads via the website than last year, your About Us page is most likely not going to be included in your strategy, unless that page has somehow been a lead-generation machine in the past.
Here’s a brief process you can follow to work out what owned content you need to meet your digital marketing strategy goals.
Audit your existing content.
Make a list of your existing owned content, and rank each item according to what has previously performed best in relation to your current goals.
For example, if your goal is lead generation, rank your content according to which pieces generated the most leads over the last year (such as a blog post, ebook, or site page).
The idea here is to figure out what’s currently working, and what’s not so that you can set yourself up for success when planning future content.
Identify gaps in your existing content.
Based on your buyer personas, identify any gaps in the content you have.
For example, if you’re a math tutoring company and know through research that a major challenge for your personas is finding effective ways to study, create some.
By looking at your content audit, you might discover that ebooks hosted on a certain type of landing page convert really well (better than webinars, for example).
In the case of this math tutoring company, you might make the decision to add an ebook about “how to make studying more effective” to your content creation plans.
Create a content creation plan.
Based on your findings and the gaps you’ve identified, make a content creation plan outlining the content that’s necessary to help you hit your goals.
This should include:

A title
Format
A goal
Promotional channels
Why you’re creating the content
The priority level of the content

This can be a simple spreadsheet, and should also include budget information if you’re planning to outsource the content creation, or a time estimate if you’re producing it yourself.
5. Audit and plan your earned media campaigns.
Evaluating your previous earned media against your current goals can help you get an idea of where to focus your time. Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that’s your goal) and rank each earned media source from most effective to least effective.
You can obtain this information using tools like the Sources reports in HubSpot’s Traffic Analytics tool.

You may find a particular article you contributed to the industry press drove a lot of qualified traffic to your website, which boosted conversions. Or, you may discover LinkedIn is where you see most people sharing content, which increases traffic.
The idea is to build a picture of what types of earned media will help you reach your goals (and what won’t) based on historical data. However, if there’s something new you want to experiment with, don’t rule it out just because it’s never been done before.
6. Audit and plan your paid media campaigns.
This process involves much of the same process: You need to evaluate your existing paid media across each platform (e.g. Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to figure out what’s most likely to help you meet your current goals.
If you’ve spent a lot of money on AdWords and haven’t seen the results you’d hoped for, maybe it’s time to refine your approach, or scrap it altogether and focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results.
Use this free guide for more on how to leverage AdWords for your digital marketing strategy.
By the end of the process, you should have a clear idea of which paid media platforms you want to continue using, and which (if any) you’d like to remove from your strategy.
7. Bring your digital marketing campaign together.
You’ve done the planning and the research, and you now have a solid vision of the elements that will make up your digital marketing strategy.
To review, here’s what you should have solidified so far:

Clear profile(s) of your buyer persona(s)
One or more digital marketing-specific goals
An inventory of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
An audit of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
An owned content creation plan or wish list

Now it’s time to bring all of this together to form a cohesive marketing strategy document. Your strategy document should map out the series of actions you’re going to take to achieve your goals, based on your research up to this point.
Let’s discuss how our digital strategy template can help.
Digital Marketing Strategy Template
While a spreadsheet can be an efficient format for mapping your digital marketing strategy, that approach can quickly become messy and overwhelming.
To plan your strategy for the long-term – typically between six to 12 months out, you need a reliable digital marketing strategy document. But, where to start? With our free digital marketing plan template.
This template will walk you through your business summary and initiatives, help you build your target market and competitor information, and flesh out your marketing strategy — including your budget and specific channels and metrics.

Use this digital strategy template to build out your annual digital marketing strategy and tactics. By planning out these yearly plans, you can overlay when you and your team will be executing each action. For example:

In January, you’ll start a blog that will be continually updated once a week, for the entire year.
In March, you’ll launch a new ebook, accompanied by paid promotion.
In July, you’ll prepare for your biggest business month — what do you hope to have observed at this point that will influence the content you produce to support it?
In September, you’ll focus on earned media in the form of PR to drive additional traffic during the run-up.

This approach provides a structured timeline for your activity which will help communicate plans among colleagues.
Finally, here are some examples of digital marketing campaigns and their strategies to inspire you.

1. Béis: Paid Ad
Travel accessory brand, Béis, recently launched a social media campaign to announce feature updates to one of its products. And they did it in the best way: by showing instead of telling.

In a 34-second clip, the brand showed how their product performed before and how it performs now following some changes to the material.
This is a fantastic campaign as it not only highlights an improvement on a product but it also shows customers that the brand is constantly iterating and improving. Secondly, they make sure to include captions in the video to ensure that it’s accessible without sound.
2. Omsom: Social Media
Asian food brand Omsom leverages its TikTok profile to share behind-the-scenes content, recipes, and culturally relevant content.
In a recent video, the brand’s co-founder shared how it sources one of its key ingredients and how they chose the more difficult route to preserve the integrity of the food.

@weareomsom
here’s why we choose to make our lives harder as food founders! #business #sourcing
♬ original sound – Omsom

Here’s what Omsom did right: They highlighted their brand’s values while still building excitement around the product.
Sharing behind-the-scenes content is a great way to connect with your audience and share details that will simultaneously highlight your mission and/or values.
3. The General: Paid Advertising
After reports that consumers thought the brand was untrustworthy due to its low-budget ads, The General decided to revamp its entire marketing strategy.
In a commercial featuring basketball superstar, Shaq, the brand addressed the elephant in the room and introduced a new-and-improved look.

In addition, they also emphasize their credibility by mentioning how long they’ve been in business and how many people they’ve helped.
By addressing negative perceptions head-on, brands can not only change how consumers view them but also show that they are in tune with their target audience.
Grow Better With Marketing Strategies That Improve Your Digital Presence
Your strategy document will be very individual to your business, which is why it’s almost impossible for us to create a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy template.
Remember, the purpose of your strategy document is to map out the actions you’re going to take to achieve your goal over a period of time — as long as it communicates that, then you’ve nailed the basics of creating a digital strategy.
If you’re eager to build a truly effective strategy to help grow your business, check out our free collection of content marketing templates below.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Have you ever sat down at your desk first thing in the morning and spent a good 45 minutes browsing social media or getting lost in your inbox because you can’t focus on what you need to do? At the end of the day, you feel as if you’ve wasted 8 hours of your life that you’ll never get back.
On the other hand, have you ever sat down, opened your calendar app or a to-do list, and jumped right into work, knocking out task after task in a matter of minutes? When you shut your computer at the end of the day, you feel accomplished and know that you’ve done everything possible to move towards your professional goals.
What’s the difference between these two scenarios? A plan. Having your day (or week, or project) mapped out with a concrete action plan will help you feel more focused and accomplished in less time. When it comes to marketing, an action plan could mean the difference between a campaign that sizzles and a campaign that fizzles.
Now that you know there’s a way to ensure more days end with the satisfaction of work done well, let’s take a closer look at what these plans actually are and how they can benefit you.
What is an action plan?
An action plan is a proposed strategy for whatever you want to accomplish. It’s a clear, detailed list of all the steps you need to take to reach your goal, along with a proposed timeline of when you’ll complete each step or task.
Perhaps you’ve heard of action plans in the past, but never tried to create one of your own, Or maybe, this is a brand new concept to you and you’re pretty sure you just heard a choir of angels in the background.
What is the purpose of an action plan?
Action plans are designed to help you reach your goals faster. By breaking down projects into smaller steps, you can ensure that you:

Meet your goal in a timely fashion
Don’t skip a step
Communicate effectively with team members
Set reasonable expectations for what you can accomplish in a specific period of time

While they will vary in complexity, action plans are good for small projects, large projects, projects that you complete on your own, and projects that involve other team members or individuals outside of your organization.
Convinced you need action plans in your life? Good. Let’s take a look at the steps necessary to implement them.
How to Write an Action Plan
Action plans can be as simple or complex as they need to be. However, before you start writing out the steps to reach your goal, you’ll need to identify something very important… your goal, of course!
What is it that you’d like to accomplish? Is there a new campaign you need to prepare before a specific launch date? Maybe you’re teaming up with another business or a nonprofit for cross-promotion. Perhaps you’re looking to increase brand awareness through various channels.
Whatever your goals, get very clear on what it is you want, why it’s important, and when you need it done. You may wish to create a SMART Action Plan by incorporating SMART goals into it. SMART stands for: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. This framework helps you determine if your goals are realistic, identify what actions are needed to reach your goals, and defines what success looks like.

Once you’ve determined what you want to accomplish and when it will need to be done, it’s time to start devising your plan. Follow these easy steps to create your plan of action.

Use a template or tool to capture your action plan and share it with anyone who needs to be involved. (You’ll find some options in the next section)
Brainstorm. Consider all the steps that need to get done to complete your project. You may find it helpful to start with larger aspects of the project and then break those down into smaller tasks. No task is too small to be listed (let’s be honest, checking things off a to-do list feels amazing).
Delegate and assign responsibilities to team members. You don’t have to go it alone! Hopefully, you have a trustworthy team standing by to help complete tasks and inch you closer and closer to the finish line. This also allows you to identify what resources you need to achieve the goal.
Schedule due dates. If your project needs to be done by a specific day (which it should or it could stretch on indefinitely), then each task will have its own due date. Keep in mind that some tasks can be worked on at the same time, while others will require that a previous task has been finished before you can start the new one.
Set up alerts to keep yourself (and your team) on track. It’s very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind and forget about a larger project looming in the distance. Use your scheduled due dates to set up reminders and pencil in time to work on specific tasks.
Track your progress and check in with your team. Your action plan may have looked top-notch when you wrote it, but as you work through it, you may discover that things need to change. If you see that you’re falling behind in the tasks, it may be time to re-evaluate and potentially tweak your action plan.
Celebrate. Completing a project is often cause for celebration, but don’t forget to review what worked and what didn’t for a smoother project next time.

Leadership action plans will not only help you achieve your goals, but will also help your team be clear on what they need to do, and feel accomplished once they’ve done it. They will also serve to identify any weak links in your organization.
Action plan Formats may differ depending on the needs of our specific project, however, as long as you include the goal, the steps, the people involved, and the due dates, you’ll have a solid plan to work with.
Action Plan Templates
When you’re ready to create an action plan, there’s no need to start from scratch. There are a number of templates and examples available that will provide the framework you need to devise your marketing strategy.
Below, is an action plan example for a 30-60-90 Day onboarding plan. This can always be tweaked to onboard individuals into a marketing position, or to create a marketing plan for your organization.

A marketing action plan may be as simple as this template:

Image Source
You can also use Hubspot’s Marketing Plan Generator to guide you along the way.
No matter how you do it, an action plan may take a little bit of time to create, however, you’ll save time, energy, and resources when you have a clear plan of action for your next project or campaign.

What do you use spreadsheets for? If you’re anything like me, you likely use them to collect data, track campaign or blog post analytics, or keep track of weekly assignments.
But have you ever thought about using spreadsheets to make a calendar? If not, let me tell you why Google Sheets is the perfect tool for your content calendar.

If you often work on campaigns for a few different clients, creating individual calendars in Google Sheets could be uniquely useful for ensuring the client understands when certain content will go live. Alternatively, perhaps you need to create an internal Google Sheet calendar for your team to keep track of upcoming projects.
Making a calendar in a tool that’s commonly used for spreadsheets sounds a little intimidating, but don’t worry, the process is actually pretty intuitive. And with the help of some tips, you can easily make a functional calendar that you can sync your schedule with.
Below, we’ll go over how to make a calendar in Google Sheets and include some tips that’ll help you elevate the design. At the end, your calendar will look something like this:
Open up Google Sheets and get ready to create your very own calendar. 📅
1. Open a new spreadsheet and choose your month.
First, open a new spreadsheet. 
Then, choose your month. For this example, I decided to do January 2022, so I filled that into the first cell. What’s great about Google Sheets is that it automatically recognizes dates, so typing in a month, followed by the year in YYYY format will tell Google that you’re going to be working with dates.
2. Begin to format your calendar.
Next, format your calendar. I selected the text, January 2022, in Column A, Row 1. I highlighted seven columns (A-G), and clicked Merge to make that cell span across the entire column. You can find this button to the right of the Fill tool.

Here, I also center-aligned my text using the tool next to Merge. Then, I increased the font size and bolded the month.
3. Use a formula to fill in the days of the week.
Next, fill in the days of the week in each column (A-G). You can do this manually but I decided to use a formula. Sheets has a function that lets you type in formulas to complete certain actions at once.
To fill in days of the week, in the cell where you want your first weekday to be, type: =TEXT(1, “DDDD”). What this tells Google is that your number will be replaced by a date or time and the format you’re using is weekdays.
Highlight the number 1 in the formula and replace it with: COLUMN(). Then, press enter and select your first day. You’re going to copy the formula in Sunday’s cell by dragging the selector to the end of your row, (A-G), and pressing enter again.
Pressing enter should automatically fill in the rest of the week. Remember, if this doesn’t work for you, you can always fill in the days manually.
Pressing enter should automatically fill in the rest of the week. Remember, if this doesn’t work for you, you can always fill in the days manually.
4. Fill in the numbers.
Excellent! You have your days of the week. Now we’re going to fill in the numerical values. Before this step, I took the time to add color to the days row and changed the font to one I liked a little more.
For the numerical values, we’ll simply identify the first day of the month and click and drag to fill in the rest.
How?
Place the number 1 on the box right underneath the first day of the month, then click and drag horizontally. Depending on the day of the week, you may need to follow this process using the second day of the month so you can click and drag horizontally.

5. Fill in the rest of the numbers.
Note: In this step, I filled in the calendar numbers every other row to help with my formatting later.
Now that you’ve filled out your first row, it’s time to fill in the rest. Manually insert the next number under “Sunday,” then click and drag horizontally to fill in the rest.

Repeat the process for the next rows. You’ll insert the first number manually, then click and drag down the row. Here’s what that looks like for the next row in January.

Note: Make sure to end the month on the right number! For January, that would be the 31st.

6. Reformat your calendar if necessary.
Everything is starting to look like a calendar, right? At this stage, I reformatted things to clean up the look of my calendar a little.
Remember those extra rows in between the numbered rows? I expanded those rows to create boxes underneath the numbers. To do this, I simply dragged the rows down to make those cells bigger.
Here are some additional formatting tips:

Select the empty rows underneath your numbers and center them using the center text alignment tool.
Select your entire calendar and vertically align all elements so that they’re in the center of their cells. To do this, use the vertical alignment tool.

Bold your day numbers.
If desired, lightly shade your numbered rows.
If desired, gray out the Saturday and Sunday columns so that your workdays stand out.

7. Add design elements to professionalize the look.
Finally, you can add in some fun design elements to personalize the look and feel of your calendar. If it’s for a client or upcoming project, you’ll want to incorporate the necessary launch days here.
For this step, I added in a few fun images, included a few hypothetical calendar events, and played with font sizes.
8. Repeat the process from February to December.
It’s time to repeat for the month of February to December. Simply duplicate your January calendar once you’ve designed it how you want it to look. To do this, right-click the sheet’s tab and select Duplicate from the menu.
To fill in the numbers, you’ll only need to know the beginning day, then click and drag to fill in the rest of the rows. Here are the first days for every month for the year 2022:

January: Saturday

February: Tuesday

March: Tuesday

April: Friday

May: Sunday

June: Wednesday

July: Friday

August: Monday

September: Thursday

October: Saturday

November: Tuesday

December: Thursday

Next, you’ll want to know how many days you’ll need to fill in. Here are the number of days you’ll need for each month:

January: 31

February: 28 or 29

March: 31

April: 30

May: 31

June: 30

July: 31

August: 31

September: 30

October: 31

November: 30

December: 31

And then, you’re done!
It’s handy to use Sheets because you can open your calendar right on your browser. You can also keep track of your schedule in a place that’s separate from your phone.
Alternatively, you can create important business documents such as social and editorial calendars. Below, I share a template that’s perfect for the task.
Google Sheets Calendar Template
Here’s an editorial calendar template for all of your editorial planning needs. This template helps you lay out a strong editorial strategy on a daily basis.
Featured Resource: Free Editorial Calendar Templates

Download the Free Templates
Use a Google Sheets Calendar to Organize Your Tasks
If you’re handy with Sheets and want to give it a shot, create a Google Sheets calendar. It’s a great option if you need to create a clean calendar to track an internal marketing campaign, organize a client’s upcoming projects, or share an event calendar with key stakeholders. But if you don’t want to create one from scratch, use our editorial calendar template to jumpstart your planning and organization efforts immediately.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.