Your Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing Strategy

A digital marketing strategy requires meaningful, personalized engagement with customers down the funnel and across multiple channels. To maximize the value of digital channels and engagement, and their impact on customers’ shifting digital behaviors, marketers need to plan, execute and evaluate the impact of digital marketing efforts holistically.

Multichannel

Multichannel is the marketing practice of using more than one channel to communicate with customers and prospects. Best‑in‑class digital marketers drive business growth by leveraging multichannel to span a multitude of touchpoints with target audiences. 

These include websites, paid and organic social media, search and display advertising, TV, over‑the‑top (OTT) streaming media, digital video, email and mobile marketing (e.g., SMS, push notification, in‑app messaging and consumer messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp), and voice‑enabled endpoints (e.g., smart speakers and smartphone‑based virtual personal assistants).

Personalization

Scaling the delivery of personalized content and experiences is one of marketing’s most important roles in driving effective digital experiences, and it’s imperative to align personalization approaches to overall multichannel marketing objectives. Yet according to Gartner research, 63% of marketers face a moderate or significant challenge in delivering personalized experiences to customers.

The challenge is how to connect a customer’s experience of “rightness” with a digital marketer’s ability to measure, and hopefully optimize, “rightness.” Although 86% of individuals responding to a recent Gartner personalization survey said they are open to some personalized communication from brands, 55% say they’ll stop doing business when a brand communicates in a way they find invasive. A further 40% said they would stop doing business when they perceive a brand’s communication as irrelevant.

With such a fine line and big consequences separating good from bad personalization, it’s no wonder the topic continues to drive digital marketing leaders’ objectives as a critical element of their digital marketing strategy.

The success of a brand’s digital advertising strategy — i.e., display, video, mobile and social ads — relies on appropriate timing, context, content and tone across relevant channels. Paid search, which specifically refers to advertising on search engines and other websites, presents ads based on the content and context of a specific search query.

During times of disruption, digital advertising is often one of the first budgets to come under scrutiny because of its generally higher share of the marketing budget and the intensifying pressure among CMOs to prove marketing ROI and demonstrate performance.

With macroeconomic disruptions, shifts in consumer behavior and a continuously evolving landscape of ad tech, service providers and agencies; content formats and platforms; and data and measurement partners, digital marketing leaders accountable for advertising find themselves on the front lines of change.

In this volatile climate, digital marketing leaders must rethink their media and channel strategy, adapt ad messaging to appeal to ad-avoidant and price-sensitive consumers, and position themselves ahead of the competition. To succeed with this opportunity:

• Take calculated risks. Despite the temptation to slash spend across ad campaigns — or worse, continue with “business as usual” — the most successful organizations take calculated risks in times of economic uncertainty to find new growth opportunities and outsmart competitors. Start by building scenario plans, looking at potential downstream implications of fiscal and geopolitical upheaval.

• Rethink your publisher mix. Concentrate ad efforts on fewer, bigger growth bets. For many brands, that may mean cutting down on the always-on, indirect ad buys and focusing more spend on core ad campaigns through direct purchases.

• Extend the usability of your video ads. Work smarter with the creative assets you have at your disposal. One way to do this is to extend the return on video advertising investments by reusing parts of a single video ad to fit multiple platforms, devices and viewing habits.

Key to any successful digital marketing strategy is the ability to create more relevant experiences. Data about prospects’ and customers’ online behavior and preferences is crucial to this process. However, changing consumer privacy laws and usage regulations are forcing digital marketing leaders to change how they collect, store and use data, while the deprecation of the cookie and restrictions on third-party data are changing how ads are bought, targeted and measured. 

To successfully collect and use first-party customer data, digital marketing leaders must establish a strong data and analytics foundation within their organizations, invest in the appropriate technology and create compelling touchpoints for collecting customer data via owned channels.

Our discussions with digital marketing leaders reveal common struggles they face with customer data collection and use, including:

• Limited access to first-party data

• Poor-quality third-party data

• Collecting an appropriate amount — rather than all — of customer data

• Misalignment on how to best use first-party data

• Uncertainty navigating cookie deprecation and data privacy initiatives

To limit the impact of privacy regulations and other changes, digital marketing leaders need to assess their current state, develop a plan and become the change agent to execute the plan and implement changes. The most successful brands:

• Stay ahead of privacy changes, cookies and third-party data regulation by assigning someone on the team or finding a trusted partner to track the latest developments.

• Collaborate across functions. High-maturity customer data organizations work cross-functionally, and indicate confidence in their returns from data collection efforts.

• Build first-party data assets by homing in on core customers and building direct-buying relationships with strategically important media partners.

Context is vital for establishing a digital marketing strategy that maximizes ROI. In a world where consumers are challenging marketers to meet their needs in the moment, brands need to thoroughly benchmark audience behaviors, peers’ strategies, channel best practices and performance trends to remain competitive. Emerging channels and evolving customer behaviors add to the persistent challenge of questions such as:

• How do we select the most relevant metric types?

• How many metrics should we use?

• How do we connect the dots between digital marketing activities and business performance?

If your organization is wrestling with these questions, you’re not alone. The 2023 Gartner Multichannel Marketing Survey reveals that performance measurement is a difficult exercise for most digital marketing leaders. Eighty percent of all surveyed participants say they struggle to identify a common set of metrics and methods to measure and attribute multichannel marketing’s effectiveness. Difficulty managing internal consensus and aligning KPIs with business outcomes were two reasons cited for this struggle.

Our research suggests that a less siloed, more holistic approach, supported by three or four metric types, can help you better assess marketing’s impact. Eighty-six percent of organizations using a more siloed approach to performance measurement (i.e., that measure individual channel effectiveness) say they struggle to identify a common set of metrics to successfully measure multichannel marketing effectiveness, compared to 67% of organizations using a more holistic approach (i.e., organizations that measure channel effectiveness holistically across all channels). The survey also reveals a sharp contrast in performance between the two.