Knowing your customer is a good place to begin. This includes the target audience and personas, overall market trends, and competitors (both business and organic competition). Understanding customer needs, preferences, and behaviors provides the path to a coherent marketing strategy and execution.

That clear and measurable goals are needed goes without saying. In digital marketing, there are an array of metrics available. Pretty much, anything can be measured from traffic to engagement to conversions to attribution and more. Goals could include raising brand awareness, driving leads, boosting website traffic, stepping up conversions, and strengthening visitor and customer engagement.

There are many ways to slice and dice the target audience based on demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and other attributes. Marketing messages, content, and campaigns can then be personalized to meet the needs of specific audience segments for careful targeting and conversions.

Content is after all king. Creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and engaging content is what it is all about. The content strategy should be executed across multiple channels. This would include blog posts, videos, social media updates, podcasts, white papers, and more. Each content asset would be tailored to meet the needs and interests of the segment.

From organic and paid search to organic and paid social to email to display ads to offline methods, channels are many. Selecting and optimizing the most appropriate channel mix will maximize reach, engagement, and conversions.

SEO is the #1 channel as raising website’s visibility in search engine result pages helps communicate with customers at the moment of need. This requires optimizing website on-page content and structure, off-page incoming links, and technical SEO like raising performance and speed, eliminating 404s, and appropriate use of canonical tags. The goal is to rank on page one in search engine rankings for the chosen keywords.

Paid channels are a nice complement to organic ones. It may be easier to get the search ad on page one of Google than the organic result, for example. Paid organic and paid social channels provide the means to reach new audiences in multiple contexts, thereby helping to get the messaging to stick.

Social media channels are great for strengthening brand visibility and engaging with customers. Educational or entertaining content may work best instead of a direct sales-driven approach. It is all about compelling content that grows followers, fosters relationships, and builds communities.

Email is a great tool to nurture opted-in prospects and turn them into customers. Curated email lists of subscribers can be extremely valuable. Tracking email performance helps boost conversions and customer retention.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” is a famous quote attributed to Peter Drucker. Digital marketing is no exception. Through leading and lagging metrics and Key performance indicators (KPIs), marketers can make data-driven decisions to optimize campaign and finetune marketing strategies.