Digital Marketing Strategy and Planning
From business goal to channel choice
A digital marketing plan is a chain of logic: business objective → marketing objective → audience insight → strategy → tactics → measurement. Begin with a situation analysis covering internal capabilities, competitor positioning, customer research, and a SWOT summary. Then apply segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP). Build personas around jobs-to-be-done rather than demographics alone, and map each persona across the customer journey: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and advocacy. Set SMART objectives with a baseline, target, timeframe, and owner. Choose KPIs tied to revenue or mission outcomes - qualified leads, conversion rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), and retention - and treat reach, impressions, and follower counts as diagnostic metrics only. Write the measurement plan before launch: tracking taxonomy, UTM conventions, attribution model, reporting cadence, and a test-and-learn backlog.
Traps candidates fall for
- Confusing tactics with strategy: running Instagram ads is not an objective.
- Choosing KPIs after launch, or reporting only vanity metrics.
- Assuming last-click attribution tells the whole story; upper-funnel work is systematically undervalued.
- Spreading budget thinly across every channel instead of concentrating where audience and economics work.
- Ignoring LTV:CAC; a channel can look expensive on first purchase and still be profitable.
Worked rule of thumb
Compress the strategy into one sentence: For [audience] who [need], we will [positioning] through [channels], measured by [primary KPI]. Example: a B2B software firm targeting operations managers sets a goal of 40 marketing-qualified leads monthly at CAC under $600. It allocates 70% of budget to search and LinkedIn, 20% to content syndication, and 10% to experiments, reviewing monthly against pipeline rather than clicks.