How Should CMOs Develop Their Digital Marketing Strategy?

Written by

Al Sefati

Summary:

Marketing leaders have to maneuver many moving parts in their efforts to develop the most effective big-picture strategy. As you try to develop a winning CMO marketing strategy, here are a few tips we recommend:

  • Start with a clear understanding of your audience
  • Set business goals
  • Conduct a SWOT analysis
  • Choose the appropriate marketing channels
  • Develop a good content strategy
  • Create a smart budget
  • Measure and optimize
  • Work with an experienced digital marketing agency

To learn more about developing a robust digital marketing strategy, check out this post from Clarity Digital.

How Should CMOs Develop Their Digital Marketing Strategy?

As the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), your most essential function is to craft and implement a strategy that raises brand awareness, increases qualified leads, and ultimately facilitates more conversions. That’s a tall order by any standard, especially when you think about all the moving pieces involved with an effective digital marketing strategy.

As you think about developing a digital marketing strategy for the organization you lead, here are a few tried-and-true tips from Clarity Digital.

CMO Marketing Strategy Tips

Start with a Clear Understanding of Your Target Audience

Simply put, you won’t be able to market your products well if you don’t know who you’re marketing to.

Before you do anything else, conduct some research (including surveys, focus groups, keyword research, and more) to understand the needs, values, and pain points of your target audience.

Define Your Business Goals

Your digital marketing strategy should connect to your underlying business goals; in other words, you should be able to draw a straight line from your digital marketing strategy to your annual revenue objectives.

In pursuit of those bottom-line goals, you might also have some intermediate goals: Larger quantities of website traffic, greater brand awareness, and so on.

Conduct a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis denotes your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. To develop an effective digital marketing strategy, you’ll need to make an honest assessment of your brand’s position in relation to all your major competitors.

Identify the Right Marketing Channels

There are many platforms and vehicles to get your marketing message across, but you probably can’t afford to invest in all of them. So where are the best places to allocate your marketing resources?

Based on your audience research, consider whether you’ll have the best odds of reaching your intended buyers via social media platforms, search engines, email marketing, paid ads, or some combination of these methods.

Develop a Content Strategy

Having the right channels is essential, but it means nothing if you’re not using those channels to distribute the right content.

Develop a content strategy that aligns with your business objectives and targets your audience effectively. This could include blog posts, videos, or infographics that speak to the values and pain points you identified previously. Remember that the best content conveys your authority and expertise, but also makes plain your eagerness to help improve your customers’ lives.

Create a Smart Budget

Once you have decided on the channels and types of content you need for your digital marketing efforts, the next step is to determine how you’ll allocate resources between these different vehicles.

As you make your budget, think not just about the bottom-line cost but also about the cost to acquire customers on each platform, plus the average lifetime value of a customer. These data points will help you use your marketing budgets most judiciously.

Always Be Measuring

Even the best CMO marketing strategy is going to require ongoing tweaks and revisions, as you naturally respond to the things that work and the things that come up short.

Use analytics and tracking tools to measure the performance of your digital marketing efforts and optimize them accordingly. Continuously measure and adjust your strategy to improve results.

Choose the Right Digital Marketing Agency

Even a company with a robust in-house marketing team can benefit from the resources, expertise, and automation options provided by a digital marketing agency. We invite you to work with Clarity Digital Agency. We are a performance-based digital marketing agency that works closely with CMOs; in fact, we have a few CMOs on our team! We’re always thrilled to work with other marketing leaders to develop innovative strategies to meet business goals. Contact Clarity Digital whenever you’d like to chat.