What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy? A Plain Answer

Marketing strategy, Plan, and Tactic Are Not the Same Word

Most of what gets called strategy is really a list of tasks. The three words sit at different heights, and mixing them up is why so many marketing meetings go in circles. Marketing strategy is the decision layer. It answers which work you are trying to win, from whom, and with what money. A plan is the calendar layer. It takes those decisions and gives them dates, owners, and a budget line. Tactics are the work itself: the ad, the page, the post, the call script. Here is the same idea inside a plumbing company. The marketing strategy says we make our money on repipes and water heater swaps, we serve homes over thirty years old within twenty minutes of the shop, and we win on same day answers rather than on price. The plan says the repipe page gets written in March, the person who takes calls gets a script in April, and ad money shifts to weekends in May. The tactic is the actual page and the actual ad. Watch what happens when the strategy is missing. Somebody still writes pages and still buys ads, because tactics feel like progress. Nobody can say why those ones. When results go flat, the only move left is to try a different tactic, and the year fills up with tries. A strategy is worth having because it makes some work obviously wrong. That sounds negative. It is the most useful thing a strategy does.

• Marketing strategy: who we serve, what we sell them, how we win
• Plan: dates, owners, and money
• Tactic: the page, the ad, the call script

The Five Decisions a Strategy Makes

Strip away the slides and a marketing strategy answers five questions. First, who is the customer worth having. Not everyone who could buy, but the ones with the jobs you want more of. A dental office might decide that means families within four miles, not single visit whitening customers from across the county. Second, what do you sell them first. Most service businesses have one job that opens the door and leads to more work later. Picking it changes every ad you write. Third, where will you meet them. That is the channel question, and the answer depends on how people buy your kind of work. Emergency work gets found on a phone in the first two minutes. A kitchen remodel gets researched for three weeks. Fourth, what will you say that your competitors are not saying. If your promise is quality work at a fair price, you have no promise, because the shop down the street says the same thing. Real answers sound specific. We answer on Sundays. We give a fixed price before we start. We show up in a marked truck with the tech's photo texted ahead. Fifth, how will you know it is working. That means picking two or three numbers you will look at every month, and saying where they come from. If those five have answers that everyone in your company would repeat the same way, you have a marketing strategy. If two of them are blank, what you have is a budget and a habit.

• Who is worth serving, stated narrowly enough to leave people out
• Which job you sell first
• Which channels you will use, and why those
• The promise your competitors are not making
• The two or three numbers you will judge it by

Why the Stop Doing List Is Half the Job

Ask an owner what their marketing strategy is and you get a list of things they are adding. Ask what they are stopping and the room goes quiet. That silence is why most plans stall. Money and attention are both fixed. Every new channel takes a share of both from something already running. If nothing gets stopped, the new work gets funded by quietly starving the old work, and then neither gets what it needs. Picture a hypothetical landscaping company with two thousand dollars a month to spend. They boost posts, pay for a directory listing, run a small ad campaign, and pay a vendor for monthly search work. Each piece gets about five hundred dollars. In most markets five hundred dollars of ads buys a few dozen clicks, which is not enough to tell you anything. The directory sends two calls a year. The result is four things that cannot be judged and cannot be grown. Put that same money behind one or two channels and you get a real answer within a quarter. The stop list is also where the honesty lives. It usually includes something the owner likes, a vendor somebody is friendly with, or a channel that was a family member's idea. Writing down what you are dropping, with the reason next to it, is what turns a wish list into a decision.

The Six Numbers a Strategy Is Built On

A strategy built on opinion is just a nicer argument. Six numbers turn it into arithmetic, and you can gather all six in an afternoon. Average job value: total revenue for the last ninety days divided by the number of jobs. Take it from invoices, not from memory, because memory rounds up. Close rate: of the people who asked for a quote last month, how many booked. Count them by hand if you have to. Capacity: how many more jobs a week your crews, chairs, or providers can take before something slips. Lead sources: go through the last hundred customers and mark where each one came from. Guesses are allowed as long as you label them as guesses. Repeat and referral share: what part of last year's revenue came from people you had already served. That number decides how much of your budget belongs to keeping customers rather than finding new ones. Seasonality: pull twenty four months of revenue by month and look at the shape of it. Once you have those six, a lot of arguments end on their own. If a job is worth four hundred dollars and you close one quote in three, you can pay about forty dollars for a lead and still make sense of it. If a job is worth eight thousand dollars, a hundred dollar lead is cheap. The same channel is a bargain for one business and a waste for the other, and only your own numbers can say which.

• Average job value, from ninety days of invoices
• Close rate, counted from quotes given
• Spare capacity per week, honestly stated
• Where the last hundred customers came from
• Share of revenue from repeat and referral
• Twenty four months of revenue by month

What Using a Strategy Looks Like in a Normal Week

A strategy that lives in a folder does nothing at all. Here is what it looks like when it is really running. Once a week, somebody spends twenty minutes on three things: how many real leads came in, where they came from, and what got finished from the plan. No report, no meeting, one page. Once a month, the owner and whoever runs marketing look at the two or three numbers the strategy named. They compare each one with the range the plan expected. If a number sits outside that range, they say so out loud and write down what they think caused it. Once a quarter, the plan gets edited. One thing stops, one thing gets funded harder, and the next three months get written in more detail. Twice a year the strategy itself gets questioned. Has the customer changed, has a competitor moved in with real money, has a service line grown into something else. The rhythm matters more than the paperwork. The most common failure is not a wrong decision. It is that nobody opens the document again until renewal season, so a bad assumption gets paid for eleven months in a row. A plain strategy with twenty minutes a week behind it beats a brilliant one nobody reads.

How to Tell a Real Strategy From a List of Tactics

You can test any document, including one you paid for, in about ten minutes. Look for a named customer. If it could describe any company in your trade, it was not written about you. Look for numbers that came out of your own books. Industry averages are a warning sign, because your close rate and your job value are what decide whether a channel makes sense. Look for a stop list. Look for a person's name next to each item, since departments do not do work, people do. Look for a way to be wrong. A real strategy says what result would prove it is off, and by when. Anything that cannot fail is not a strategy, it is a sales document. Then run one more check that costs nothing. Hand the plan to whoever answers your phone and ask what is wrong with it. That person knows why leads do not turn into jobs, and almost nobody asks them. If the document cannot survive that conversation, it will not survive the year. A good plan gets edited in the first month, not defended.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Google Search Central: Do you need an SEO?(opens in a new tab) Google's own note that search changes can take four months to a year to show, which is why a strategy should carry timeframes and ranges instead of promises.
• Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide(opens in a new tab) Google's plain description of the basics a site needs, which is the work most first quarter plans put ahead of anything clever.

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