Types & how to build one

Digital marketing strategies make your brand more visible on the internet. Today, most businesses invest in digital marketing, but often it’s without a concrete strategy that supports their goals. This dilutes results.

This guide covers the types of digital marketing strategies and how to build one that draws in the right audience.

What is a digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan for how your business will grow visibility and capture your audience on digital channels like social media, the web, and AI platforms. 

“Audience” is the operative word here. Many brands try to follow the latest marketing trends in their industry, or use the latest tools, but forget to prioritize their audience.

A digital marketing strategy that doesn’t center on your audience’s interests, pain points, and jobs-to-be-done won’t be effective.

You might still get site traffic, likes, or followers. But this will come from the wrong audience, so conversions will suffer.

A digital marketing strategy includes campaigns and tactics. Here’s how they’re different:

Digital marketing strategy	Digital marketing campaign	Digital marketing tactic
Long-term plan that supports business priorities.	A targeted execution of a part of the strategy that supports a specific goal. It can span multiple channels.	An action within a marketing campaign on a single channel.

Digital marketing strategies are typically set quarterly or every six months, with monthly performance evaluation. 

Key components of a digital marketing strategy

Your audience is the foundational component of your digital marketing strategy. Without understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP), it’s harder to select the right marketing channels, define goals, and determine your budget.

Here’s how this and other components influence your digital marketing strategy:

• Audience: Who you’re targeting and what they care about. If your primary audience is startup marketers, then you need to understand their challenges and goals to target them. These could be a lack of budget, frequent pivots, wearing many hats at once, etc.
• Goals: The main outcome that all the marketing campaigns and tactics ladder up to. For example, the goal could be to increase product adoption by startup marketers by 20%.
• Channel: The ways you will reach your core audience. Your ICP also influences channel selection. For startup marketers, LinkedIn would be an important channel.
• Budget: How much you’re willing to spend per channel. Also consider whether your investment in each channel will bring compounding long-term results.
• Metric: What you will measure to evaluate if the strategy is working. Consider both leading and lagging indicators.

Let’s say your company offers a software platform that simplifies reporting for marketing teams. Your goal is to increase product signups by 20% in the next quarter. 

You could reach this audience on LinkedIn by promoting a webinar about automating weekly and monthly reporting. Then you’d track webinar sign-ups as a leading indicator and product signups as the lagging indicator.

Why is a digital marketing strategy important?

A digital marketing strategy is table stakes for both B2B and B2C businesses. Without it, you’re nearly invisible in digital channels that customers use to research and find products and services.

Here are a few of the biggest benefits of digital marketing strategy planning:

• Clear direction and focus: Developing a strategy requires audience research, competitive analysis, and goal mapping. You’ll glean important insights to guide your work and prevent random acts of marketing.
• Marketing team success and accountability: Marketers are most successful when they have a strategy to execute. It also keeps them accountable for achieving specific goals.
• Better customer understanding: A digital marketing strategy helps you better understand your business’s target audience. This can lead to successful marketing campaigns that align with customers’ pain points, needs, and preferences.

However, these benefits depend on marketers having access to customer data. HubSpot’s 2026 research found that 12.4% of marketing leaders cite data sharing across teams as a barrier, and 19.5% struggle to adopt truly data-driven strategies.

If you don’t know who your customers are and what challenges they face, you can run into major issues like using messaging that doesn’t resonate with customers. Or poorly targeted marketing campaigns.

Types of digital marketing strategies

The seven types below are the levers a digital marketing strategy pulls to reach your audience: SEO, agentic search optimization, content marketing, paid advertising, social media, email, and influencer marketing. 

They aren’t a checklist to work through. They’re choices you make based on where your audience spends time and what will move them to act. Each one uses a different mix of channels, your website, search engines, social platforms, email, and AI, to put your message in front of your ideal customer profile (ICP) when it matters.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is a strategy that improves your website’s visibility in Google and other search engines. Websites with good SEO rank higher in search results for their target keywords, deliver a good user experience, and build topical authority in their industry.

The core pillars of SEO include:

• On-page SEO: Focuses on page and content structure
• Off-page SEO: Uses other authoritative websites to build your domain’s authority
• Technical SEO: Optimizes the website’s backend, including page speed and architecture
• Keyword research: Finds search terms you want to prioritize ranking for

SEO is a foundational digital marketing strategy because its return compounds over time. Improve your site’s speed or structure and Google is more likely to rank you higher, which puts your brand in front of more potential customers who can convert. 

SEO also underpins AI search: the same topical authority and content structure that earn rankings shape which sites AI platforms cite. So even as AI search grows, strong SEO does double duty, making you more competitive in traditional search and more visible in AI answers.

Agentic search optimization

Agentic search optimization (ASO) is the process of optimizing your digital presence for AI agents. In agentic search, AI agents answer user queries by autonomously browsing the internet, evaluating options, and then choosing the most relevant ones to present.

ASO is an umbrella term that covers:

• Generative engine optimization (GEO): How your brand appears in a model’s training data and knowledge
• Answer engine optimization (AEO): How AI tools process and cite your content in real time
• LLM optimization (LLMO): Your presence and rankings within large language models

ASO has been hard for marketers because there’s so much conflicting advice and so many one-off tactics that don’t add up to a complete strategy. 

That’s why we built the Brand Orchestration Lifecycle as part of the Brand Visibility framework we unveiled at Adobe Summit. It’s a four-stage system for approaching ASO methodically:

• Foundation: Create a clear brand narrative, define your entities, identify your audience, and find the topics you need to own
• Content: Publish multi-format content assets rooted in that foundation
• Distribution: Activate those assets across channels and surfaces
• Feedback: Use AI visibility signals like citations, sentiment, and rankings to refine your approach

To see how you’re showing up in AI search, Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit benchmarks your brand’s visibility across AI platforms and points you to where to focus next. 

Enter your domain and click “Get started.”

In the “Visibility Overview” dashboard, scroll down to “What’s Next?” This carousel contains actionable strategies to boost your AI visibility, like topic identification and domain optimization.

The “Brand Performance” dashboard provides a breakdown of your brand perception and share of voice compared to your rivals. You can use the AI-generated insights to get ideas for your ASO strategy.

“Key Business Drivers” shows all the factors that support brand growth in your industry. And where each competitor is positioned in each driver.

Use this data to inform how you talk about your brand and products on your website. For example, if you have low or no mentions in a specific business driver category, build a topic cluster for your content strategy where you will talk about it.

Content marketing

Content marketing is the use of written, visual, or audio content to capture your ICP. This type of digital marketing strategy focuses on education first, selling second.

As part of your content marketing strategy, you can publish:

• Blog posts
• Podcasts
• YouTube tutorials
• Interviews with experts
• Case studies
• Whitepapers
• Webinars
• Newsletters

A good content marketing strategy allows you to reach your audience when they’re trying to solve a problem. For example, if you target startup marketers, you could publish a blog post about how startups can build brand visibility on a lean budget.

It speaks to a real pain point startup marketers have, and when the content is genuinely helpful and comprehensive, it positions you as an expert on the topic.

When creating your content marketing strategy, take a multimodal approach to your blog content. This means including videos and images in articles to make them more engaging to your ICP. 

AI can also access multimodal content, so by including it on your website, you’re increasing the likelihood AI cites your page.

Paid advertising

Paid advertising promotes your brand using paid placements on digital platforms. It puts you in front of your audience immediately.

Many brands use SEO and paid ads at the same time. SEO builds long-term, compounding visibility while paid campaigns enable short-term wins.

But to maximize the likelihood of conversions, the ads still need hooks that speak to your audience and persuasive copy.

Here are the main types of paid ads:

• Display advertising places ads on websites and apps
• Search engine advertising (SEM) uses sponsored placements in search results on Google, Bing, etc.
• Social media advertising reaches your audiences on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and other channels

A recent development in the paid advertising space is the emergence of ads on AI platforms. For example, ChatGPT has started rolling out ads in certain territories and introduced cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is the process of building your visibility on social media platforms to attract your audience and build a connection with your brand.

Also, social commerce features on platforms like Instagram and TikTok let people discover and buy products without leaving the app.

Success on social media requires consistency, authenticity, and staying up to date with trends that drive user engagement.

Keeping up with trends is one of the biggest challenges in social media marketing today, according to HubSpot’s 2026 Social Media Marketing report.

So you need to know exactly who you’re targeting on social media and what they care about.

For example, skincare brand Paula’s Choice uses short clips on Instagram to discuss skin conditions and how its products help. 

The format — person holding a microphone and talking to the camera — is aligned with how many Instagram and TikTok creators produce educational video content for Gen Z and Millennial audiences.

If you’re a small marketing team, prioritize the one or two platforms your audience uses most, rather than spreading yourself thin across many at once.

For instance, B2B brands focus on LinkedIn, because decision-makers use it to follow industry conversations. 

Email marketing

Email marketing targets your audience with promotional, transactional, and informative content. 

One advantage of email over other channels is that it isn’t algorithm-driven. It’s a direct line to your audience, and you can personalize your outreach to keep it relevant and helpful.

The email marketing platforms most marketers use today allow you to set up audience segmentation and automation triggers.

With segmentation, you can categorize subscribers by previous purchases, location, and any other unique characteristics. Then target them with personalized offers.

Automation allows you to send personalized emails after a customer completes an action.

Here’s an example using iHerb. The company sends an automated welcome email with a discount to new users who haven’t opted in to the newsletter yet.

Your email marketing strategy can also benefit from AI personalization. For example, AI can automatically personalize subject lines, email openers, offers, and more to improve an email campaign’s performance.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is the process of collaborating with social media creators who have a strong relationship with your audience.

Influencer partnerships are a different lever compared to your owned channels because you’re getting access to someone else’s following. And in exchange, you pay influencers a flat fee, send gifts, or set up affiliate deals.

The use of promo codes and affiliate links help you tie creator activity directly to sales, while engagement metrics allow you to measure overall campaign visibility.

Collaborations include one-off sponsored posts, ongoing creator partnerships, or user-generated content (UGC) you can repurpose across your own channels.

For example, software platform ServiceNow partnered with Instagram creator Corporate.bro to create a skit that promotes its new features.

This creator has grown to over a million followers by publishing funny videos about working in corporate environments. So there’s a clear overlap between his and ServiceNow’s audience.

Influencers are typically categorized based on their following:

• Nano-influencers: 1K-10K followers/subscribers
• Micro-influencers: 10K-100K followers/subscribers
• Mid-tier influencers: 100K-500K followers/subscribers
• Macro-influencers: 500K-1M followers/subscribers
• Mega-influencers: 1M+ followers/subscribers

When evaluating influencers, go beyond followers and look at user engagement. 

Do their posts get views, comments, and shares? 

Influencers with smaller followings often have higher engagement rates. For example, an eMarketer study found nano-influencers have the highest Instagram engagement rate at 6.23%.

Semrush’s Influencer Analytics tool helps you find the right influencers for your campaigns across social media platforms. You can filter them by audience size, views, pricing, or use the AI search tool to describe what kind of influencer you need.

The tool also has a campaign management feature that lets you track the success of influencer collaborations.

How to build a digital marketing strategy

The seven steps below will help you create a digital marketing strategy:

Step 1: Define your brand

Defining your brand means getting clear on your brand identity and how it’s different from the competition. It’s the foundation of all marketing strategies.

One of the key factors when creating your brand identity is identifying the emotions you want to evoke in your audience.

For example, if you’re a B2B brand targeting enterprise clients, your brand should convey trust, security, and the ability to handle complexity.

Cybersecurity platform WitnessAI does this with reassurance-driven messaging, positioning itself as a confidence layer that lets enterprises adopt AI without sacrificing security.

Brand values are another core aspect of your identity: the beliefs and ideas your company represents.

Visual elements like typography and colors are also important as they leave a lasting impression on your audience. When done well, they make your logo, digital ads, or billboards memorable.

Step 2: Research your target audience

Researching your target audience will help you choose the right digital marketing strategies for your brand.

If you don’t understand your buyers, then you won’t know what they care about, the channels they use, or how they speak about their problems. And your strategy will fall flat.

During audience research, you need to collect different types of data:

• Demographic data: Age, location, career, education
• Psychographic data: Interests, pain points, jobs-to-be-done, lifestyle habits
• Firmographic data (for B2B brands): Company size, industry, revenue, location

Semrush’s Traffic & Market Toolkit includes an Audience Profile section for researching any group of domains. Its Demographics dashboard shows audience insights like age, sex, and geographic distribution.

The “Socioeconomics” dashboard dives deeper into data like household size, income level, and education of the audience of the brands you’re analyzing.

You can also gather audience insights by doing interviews, joining online communities they participate in, or running surveys. Research reports by reputable industry sources are another great place to get started.

Step 3: Analyze your competition

Competitor analysis is a process that looks at your rivals’ brand positioning, market perception, and search and AI visibility.

Here’s a breakdown of each:

Brand positioning	Market perception	Search visibility	AI visibility
Analyze each competitor’s website to understand product positioning, value props, pricing, etc.	Find customer reviews, check news publications, and dig into social media platforms to see how others talk about their solutions.	Check if your competitors are visible in Google and other search engines, especially for non-branded search terms.	Assess whether AI platforms cite and mention your competitors for key prompts.

Semrush can help you measure search and AI visibility.

First, paste your competitor’s domain into Organic Rankings, click “Search”, then go to “Positions.”

This tab shows all the keywords the competitor’s website ranks for in search, including branded and non-branded terms. Note the number of search positions, their search volume, and estimated traffic.

To identify non-branded search terms a competitor ranks for, go to “Advanced filters” and set it to exclude keywords containing the company’s name.

Go through the filtered list to find the competitor’s top rankings. Check if those keywords align with topics relevant to your audience. If yes, you should plan to capture those rankings if you haven’t already.

Semrush’s Competitor Research report, part of the AI Visibility Toolkit, finds the prompts where your rivals are visible but you aren’t.

Start by adding your domain and up to four competitors. Click “Run competitor analysis.”

The AI Visibility graph shows your visibility score relative to your competitors. To the right, “Competitor Insights” surfaces key topics where AI platforms mention your rivals with actionable tips.

Scroll down to “Topics & Prompts” to get a closer look at the topics where your competitors are visible in AI search and how you compare. Click the arrow to expand the topic and see the performance for each prompt.

Like with the previous step, find prompts that are highly relevant to your target audience and check if your brand shows up in AI responses. 

For more tips on growing your AI presence, check out our comprehensive guide to AI visibility.

Step 4: Set SMART goals

SMART goals stand for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives for your digital marketing strategy.

Here’s an example of a SMART goal:

“Increase AI referral traffic to the blog by 10% over the next six months by publishing 10 new articles per month and updating existing content.”

This goal is:

• Specific (targeting an increase in AI referral traffic)
• Measurable (quantifying the target with a 10% increase)
• Achievable (possible to accomplish through consistent content creation and refreshes)
• Relevant (focused on improving the website’s AI reach) 
• Time-bound (setting a deadline of six months to accomplish the goal)

This way, the marketing team is clear on performance expectations and can align their activities accordingly.

Step 5: Audit your existing content assets

If you’re not starting from scratch, audit your existing content to evaluate its performance, audience alignment, and improvement opportunities.

Consider both the content on your website and third-party platforms like YouTube. 

When going through your content assets, put yourself in your audience’s shoes and ask if they’d consider the content helpful. Any assets that target the wrong personas or are no longer relevant to your brand are candidates for content pruning.

This is especially important for AI visibility. 

For example, you might have outdated content on your website that targets startup founders. But if your company has pivoted to enterprise buyers, an AI platform could still cite the old content and position you incorrectly.

Follow our seven-step content audit process (with free template included) to get started.

Step 6: Choose your channels and allocate budget

Your choice of marketing channels depends on your audience, goals, budget, market position, and the size of your marketing team.

Here are two examples using hypothetical companies.

Fast-growing B2C startup

A B2C series A startup with a one-person marketing team is under pressure to capture customers in a saturated market. They have a considerable budget but also need to show ROI quickly. 

The startup builds a digital marketing strategy that focuses on paid ads, blogs targeting commercial keywords, and influencer partnerships. The paid ads and commercial blog content drive new users with 60% budget allocation, while influencer partnerships help them reach a new audience.

B2B SaaS company

A software company needs to build brand awareness. They only work with large organizations and sign contracts worth millions of dollars. They rely on their sales team to generate revenue, but need marketing to build trust and visibility.

The company’s digital marketing strategy focuses entirely on content: insightful research reports and blogs. The sales team distributes the research reports with prospects, while the blogs get traffic from buyers who want to learn more about the latest trends and solutions in their industry.

Step 7: Measure, optimize, and iterate

To measure the success of your digital marketing strategy, you need analytics tools to collect user data. 

This includes tools like:

• Google Analytics for website and/or app traffic
• Semrush for search and AI visibility tracking
• Semrush Social Toolkit for social media scheduling and analytics
• ActiveCampaign for email analytics

You also need to set up conversion tracking on your website so you can see which pages and channels drive the most revenue. 

Get the conversion tracking in place before launching your marketing strategy to avoid missing important data.

Once the data starts rolling in, combine the insights from each tool into a cohesive story. 

For instance, a blog post might have a 10% signup rate from organic channels despite low overall traffic. You could pull data from Semrush and Google Search Console to see the keywords it ranks for, their search volumes, and if any indicate high purchasing intent.

To optimize your digital marketing strategy for better results, run A/B tests and analyze the performance data on a monthly basis. Use the insights to iterate on new campaigns, taking note of any hooks, formats, or topics that perform better than others.

How digital marketing channels work together

Using multiple digital marketing channels creates a cycle where visibility on one channel strengthens performance on another.

Marketing channels are grouped into the following categories:

• Owned channels: Owned by your company. Include websites, email, social media profiles, etc.
• Earned or shared channels: Belong to a third party that promotes your brand
• Paid channels: You pay to promote your content. Includes ads on social media, search engines, music streaming platforms, etc.

Here’s an example of how they work together.

SEO builds your website’s topical authority and drives organic traffic from search and AI platforms. Once on your website, a percentage of visitors sign up for your email list, which gives you a direct way to nurture them toward a purchase. 

At the same time, paid ads bring in new, high-intent visitors who may not have found you organically yet.

Social media allows you to reach a wider audience and build brand recognition. This has a downstream effect on search because people who’ve seen your brand on social are more likely to click your result in Google, which improves your organic click-through rate.

Digital marketing strategy example: The Ordinary

The Ordinary’s digital marketing strategy is built on ingredient transparency. It’s aimed at skincare enthusiasts who research products, understand formulations, and prioritize quality and efficacy over brand names or marketing hype.

Every channel reinforces this message. 

The brand’s blog publishes content that covers formulations, skincare tips, and ingredients. This helps capture new customers who are beginning to research these concepts.

On social media, The Ordinary posts about product launches, campaigns, and skincare advice. 

Much of the skincare advice takes a myth-busting approach, and exposes common misconceptions:

The brand also uses influencer partnerships to spread the word about new products. For example, creator HydrationCEO published a reel walking viewers through The Ordinary’s reformulated hyaluronic acid.

Continually refine your digital marketing strategy

Marketing teams are busier than ever, because AI lets them do more on every channel, from blogs to videos to paid campaigns, and the pressure to show results is high.

A positive side to this is you have more data to work with. You can see quickly which pages convert better or which topics drive more traffic to your site. Use the insights to refine your digital marketing strategy monthly, and revisit the approach quarterly.

Semrush helps your business get discovered in both search and AI, and build digital marketing strategies on audience data instead of guesswork. Sign up today to get started.