Most marketing plans are little more than a list of channels that are masquerading as a strategy.

Opening up a social media account or starting an ad campaign is not the first step in your digital marketing plan; you have already lost.

Strategy is not tactics. A true digital marketing plan focuses on the market, then builds the message, and finally selects the appropriate media.

As many as five billion people have written blog posts or run ads because the internet is filled with lists of things to do to grow their business, but the ways to achieve true growth are mathematical and based upon established models, and you are wasting your money if you don't match your business stage to an established framework.

The Honest Truth About Growing Your Business

Learning how to build a digital marketing strategy from scratch is not an academic exercise; it requires you to identify exactly who your customers are, how to measure their behavior, and how to allocate financial resources to your business.

You can only choose an operational framework (STP, AARRR, etc.) based on your company's size and the stage of growth it is currently in. You cannot create vague or poorly defined goals.

You must create clear, quantifiable metrics for success (for example, reduce your bounce rate by 50% or create 200 qualified B2B leads).

You must budget your money using proven metrics, test small, controlled batches of your ads and use raw analytics data from Google Analytics and Looker to scale only the tactics that generate revenue.

How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy From Scratch Based On Company Size

When creating your digital marketing execution strategy, you cannot choose the platform you use first. You cannot just copy what your competitors are doing.

You must choose a strategic framework that supports your business as you move from idea through launch and then into growth phase.

If you're a sole SaaS founder with an idea and no money, you will need a very different framework than what an established small-medium enterprise (SME) that is trying to more effectively scale through establishing formal processes would require.

The first step to creating a type of business plan is diagnosing your business stage.

Using Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning (STP)

Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning (STP) offers you a way to begin defining your market as you enter an early stage of bringing your offering into the marketplace.

You cannot sell to "everyone." Therefore, the STP will force you to create a very specific marketing segment.

The first step in applying STP is to divide the entire addressable market by company size, type of industry or specific buyer needs.

Next you must determine which segment will be the most likely to convert quickly (i.e., in the early stages).

Finally, when positioning your brand in the marketplace, you should ONLY position against the specific pain points of that one segment.

For early stage companies, the STP model provides extreme focus and prevents an early stage company's limited resources from being spread too thin across multiple marketing channels.

If you do not use STP for marketing, your marketing message will be too broad, you will pay a higher cost per acquisition, and you will burn through your marketing budget without acquiring a single customer.

Using The AARRR Model for Growth

If you have already gotten past the early stage of acquiring customers, your focus will shift entirely.

The AARRR model is designed for growth stage businesses. The acronym stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue, and is based strictly on what your customers do with your product after they make a purchase, rather than where in the business cycle your product is positioned.

Most growth stage companies are software as a service (SaaS) companies and typically sell leads to other businesses.

Even though an AARRR business model may use similar steps in the successful acquisition of customers as earlier stage companies, it is this post-acquisition phase where you will be measuring customer interaction with your SaaS or other service offerings.

You will know where there are breakdowns in your customer acquisition process by looking at the number of customers that do not proceed from activation to retention.

You should be able to identify this drop-off with very little effort if you have started measuring customer drop-off rates between activation and retention.

The model used by a marketing expert is to assist clients in determining how to identify and fix the leaks within their respective sales funnels and not simply throw more and more money at the top of their sales funnels by purchasing ads.

Checking Out Your Competitors With Porter's Five Forces

Market entry is never done in isolation; you are attempting to capture market share from an existing competitor.

Through Porters Five Forces Analysis, you will identify the degree of threat from potential new competitors into your market, the amount of bargaining power that buyers have as well as suppliers have, how much of a threat substitute products may pose, and how competitive the level of rivalry is between competitors in your market.

You will want to conduct this analysis before executing on a large-scale advertising campaign.

For instance, if you conduct the analysis and find the power of buyers in your niche is extremely powerful, you will quickly identify that competing on price will create a situation that will severely hamper your profit margin.

Rather than attempting to outbid the competitors in your market using price, you need to reevaluate your digital marketing strategy and position your company as the best choice for customers because your brand has established a strong level of trust, your company can deliver service rapidly, and/or your company has exclusive features that your bigger competitors do not.

By positioning your company in this manner, you will eliminate the potential of wasting time running generic campaigns in a highly competitive market, especially where you will be consistently outbid by larger competitors.

Setting Performance Goals Based on Income

The goal of "increased brand awareness" cannot be considered a digital marketing plan; rather, it is a hope.

Regardless of the objectives you have in mind for your digital marketing efforts, each action must support a specific and measurable revenue-based goal.

If a metric does not have a direct correlation to a loss of revenue or increased cost efficiency, it is a waste of your time and your resources.

Finding Specific Ways to Measure Success

When figuring out how to build a digital marketing strategy from scratch, it is essential to clearly identify specific measures of success, i.e., the measurements that determine the viability of your business.

Your marketing budget should not be allocated to any metric if it cannot be accurately measured.

Some examples of objectives you can make include: “To decrease my website's bounce rate by 50% in the next three months!” and “To create $25,000 worth of e-commerce sales on my website each quarter!"

You'll want to clearly define the target, a specific date by which you want this objective to be met (the date is your deadline), and a total cost for achieving the goal (maximum acceptable).

A goal of “increase leads by 20%” has no real meaning until you establish a cap on the maximum cost per acquisition.

Define in your campaign how to quantify success, then if the campaign does not achieve its target numbers during the pilot testing phase, you should terminate the campaign immediately and try something different.

Making a Buyer Profile Using AI Tools

Guesswork has always been a costly and inefficient way of finding out what your target audience wants.

As you learn how to build a digital marketing strategy from scratch, you can create better, more accurate buyer personas using data and AI-generated text.

You need to provide your CRM data, call notes from your sales team, and the support tickets from your customers to the AI tools ChatGPT-4o, Gemini, or Claude 3.5.

Use those tools to determine what are the most frequently mentioned complaints, objections, and typographical errors in the buyer persona you are trying to develop.

After you have gathered all of this information, you can utilize your new data to generate highly targeted buyer personas in the time it takes to read these sentences.

The intent for using the AI is not to generate a fictitious buyer persona but to compile the buyer persona data based on actual behavioral trends created from your previous marketing efforts and match that data with your actual customers' needs.

Checking Your Audience Data Using Social Media

AI provides you with an initial data point, and platform data confirms the data you received from the AI.

Use platform-based advertising platforms like Facebook Audience Insights and search engine-based advertising platforms like Google Search Console to cross-reference the AI-based generated buyer persona against organic search volume and the actions taken by users who perform those organic searches.

If your persona research indicates that "enterprise security" is a significant concern for buyers, but your Search Console shows they are only clicking on "fast implementation" articles, your messaging is incorrect.

You must continually revise your understanding of your audience based on their actual search queries and actual click-through rates.

How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy From Scratch: The Steps

The first step in how to build a digital marketing strategy from scratch is sequencing your actions correctly. If you do not, you could waste thousands of dollars on marketing execution mistakes.

First, think about the audience logically, and then think about the channels to use for marketing, and finally how much budget to allocate to each.

Matching Your Message to the Right Media

Do not allow the media platform to dictate your business' message.

Before selecting a media platform to publish your core message, you should first develop your core message fully.

For instance, if you sell high-ticket B2B software, your core message is based on logical reasoning, case study information, and business cases with a return on investment analysis.

Therefore, this type of message is best suited for professional articles, technical white papers, and very targeted email campaigns.

On the other hand, if your message is created for fast-paced consumer video platforms, then a different type of media may better serve your message needs.

Figuring Out Your Starting Budget

The biggest reason why most businesses fail is that they spend their entire marketing budget on one channel and go into panic mode when that channel stops performing.

Therefore, the logical starting point for the budget allocation of an established SME would be a 40/30/20/10 split.

Forty percent of the budget will be allocated to the creation of long-term, sustainable assets (e.g., SEO and content) and 30 percent of the budget to social media advertisements for a quicker influx of traffic to the top of the marketing funnel.

20% of your resources should be allocated toward email marketing and conversion optimization to convert the leads you've already purchased.

The remaining 10% should be reserved as a contingency fund to experiment with new approaches, or as an opportunity to invest more resources in approaches that have been unexpectedly successful.

This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, but it gives you a clear and quantifiable way to allocate your investment dollars instead of relying on guesswork.

The Truth About Making Money Back From Paid Ads

You might often hear that you can expect 200-800% return on investment from your paid advertising efforts, however, you should not build your business around this unfounded claim with no supporting evidence.

Paid advertising tends to bring in revenue quickly, but it also creates a "rented house" mentality, whereby you have no control over the traffic that you receive after your advertising payment stops.

Businesses that use organic search and technical SEO tend to provide more stability and long-term value than those who rely on an all-paid advertising campaign.

You should first leverage your paid campaign to quickly test messaging and determine what actually converts, and then utilize that messaging to create a permanent SEO asset that will continue to drive free traffic over time.

Therefore, use your paid media to create immediate cash flow, and then transition to using organic media to build wealth.

How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy From Scratch: Measuring Results

Having a strategy without technological resources or tools in place to accurately measure its success is useless.

Before launching any campaign, you should set up your tracking tools and resources.

If you launch your campaign without these tools, you will never be able to accurately determine the total amount of dollars wasted.

Setting Up Your Core Tracking Tools

Data is our only immutable truth about digital marketing.

You must correctly set up and maintain Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

These tools tell you where your traffic comes from, which pages keep your visitors engaged and which ones lose them.

If you're running several campaigns on different platforms, you need a central dashboard.

By connecting all your data sources to Looker Studio, you can create one unified view of your entire operation.

This will enable you to see your paid ad efforts and show you the true channel that provides the lowest cost per lead for your audience.

Planning Your Step-By-Step Launch

You can't have everything done in one month.

A lean team should stagger their execution. Weeks 1-2 should solely focus on conducting audience research and tracking code updates, including using CRM integrations.

Weeks 3-4 will focus on creating your core content and implementing smaller hyper-controlled pilot ad campaigns.

By 2 months in, you should evaluate the initial data results, eliminate any underperforming pilot ads and increase your overall budget to those specific keywords and target audiences which resulted in generating actual verifiable leads.

Test Small and Grow the Winners

You should never launch a pilot campaign and consume your entire quarterly budget on an untested idea.

Launch pilot campaigns with strict spending caps in mind. You may want to run your tests for approximately 5 days before scaling.

If the cost-per-click is too high or if the landing page conversion rate fails, immediately shut the pilot down.

Learn from the failure event, create a better headline and run a new, small test before opening up and scaling your budget aggressively for that pilot when you see a pilot consistently hitting your desired target metrics.

Making Your Numbers Work For You

Stop wishing for success through viral exposure.

You need to emulate highly controlled company-wide experiments with a well-defined plan using sound statistical principles.

When all of these elements are in place, every dollar you spend through your campaigns will either yield you a direct customer or will yield you unassailable data to gauge future campaign efforts.

Demand rigorous numbers from each campaign and eliminate anything that performs below expectations ruthlessly.