Enterprise Marketing Strategy & Digital Marketing Strategy Guide

There is no question: the core of any modern enterprise marketing strategy must be digital. Consumers and businesses alike are online virtually around the clock, and the real challenge for companies is figuring out how to reach them — and when and where their behaviors are most likely to convert.

As you grow your business, you’ll quickly find that the ever-shifting digital landscape is becoming the defining arena for competition. Marketers today juggle countless responsibilities — so how do you efficiently build, adapt, and sustain a flexible digital marketing strategy?

Knight has put together this comprehensive marketing strategy guide to help you sharpen your company’s digital presence and achieve stronger, more sustainable growth.

What Is a Marketing Strategy?

Before implementing any marketing strategy, it is worth clarifying the distinction between a marketing strategy and a digital marketing strategy. A marketing strategy is a focused, goal-oriented plan that maps out how your company will achieve a specific marketing objective — or a set of objectives. It takes into account what your business is already doing well and identifies what is missing from your current approach, so you can develop a realistic path toward your goals.

The Building Blocks of an Enterprise Marketing Strategy — See Also: 5 Steps to Creating an Outstanding Marketing Plan

As mentioned above, a strategy is a set of focused, actionable steps designed to help you reach a defined goal. Whether or not it is marketing-related, any strategy consists of three core components:

1. Analyze the challenge you are facing
2. Develop a plan to address that challenge
3. Define the actions needed to execute that plan

Depending on the size of your organization, your marketing strategy may encompass several workstreams, each with its own distinct objectives. That said, execution is often where strategies stall. If that resonates with you, the following three-step framework can help you stay focused on delivering results.

To illustrate what this looks like in practice, here are the foundational marketing strategy steps that apply across most industries.

Core Marketing Tactics

• Launch a company blog
• Run paid advertising on relevant social media platforms (e.g., WeChat, Zhihu, Douyin, Toutiao)
• Offer free educational resources to help customers better understand your industry or product
• Optimize digital content for search engines (SEO)
• Run an interactive campaign such as a giveaway or a follow-to-win contest
• A/B test different ad formats and creative to determine what resonates best with your audience
• Host a webinar or online workshop
• Build and launch an email marketing campaign

With these fundamentals in mind, let us now explore how a digital marketing strategy differs from a general marketing strategy.

Digital Marketing Strategy — Avoid Common Pitfalls: 17 Social Media Marketing Myths in 2020

A digital marketing strategy is a plan that leverages carefully selected online channels — including paid media, earned media, and owned media — to help your business achieve specific digital goals. So, how do you actually build one?

1. Build Your Buyer Personas

Every marketing strategy — digital or otherwise — starts with knowing who you are marketing to. The most effective digital strategies are built on detailed, well-researched buyer personas, and creating them is your first step.

By segmenting your audience and grouping them into personas, then combining those insights with marketing templates, your campaigns become more targeted and powerful.

A buyer persona typically represents your ideal customer type and is built through research, surveys, and interviews with real people.

One critical note: your data should be grounded in reality as much as possible. Personas built on assumptions can send your strategy in entirely the wrong direction.

To build comprehensive, accurate personas, your research should span multiple customer types — leads, prospects, and existing customers. Where possible, also speak with people who match your target profile but are not yet in your database.

So what information should you actually collect for your personas to inform your digital marketing strategy?

It depends on your business model. The data points that matter for B2B differ from those for B2C, and your average deal size and sales cycle length also shape what you need. Below are some foundational categories to start with, which you can refine based on your specific business context.

Quantitative and Demographic Information

• Location: Web analytics tools make it straightforward to identify where your site traffic is coming from.
• Age: This will depend on your business. Even in a B2B context, tracking age ranges helps you identify behavioral trends when analyzed alongside data from existing leads and contacts.
• Income: This type of sensitive data is best gathered through direct customer interviews or in casual, low-pressure conversations — most people are reluctant to share this information on a web form.
• Job Title: You can often gather this from your existing customer records. It is particularly important for B2B companies.

Qualitative and Psychographic Information

• Goals: You likely already have a sense of what your customers are trying to achieve based on the problems your product or service solves. Validate your assumptions by talking to real users as well as your internal sales and customer success teams.
• Challenges: Talk to customers, sales reps, customer service representatives, and any other customer-facing staff to surface the common pain points your customers share.
• Interests and Hobbies: Ask customers or audience members whose profiles align with your business. For instance, if you are a fashion brand and you discover that a large portion of your audience is also interested in health and wellness, that insight can inform both your content strategy and potential partnership opportunities.
• Priorities: Engage with customers and prospects to understand what they truly value. For example, as a B2B software company, we have found that delivering real business impact matters far more to our customers than having the lowest price.

With these details, you should be able to construct accurate, high-value buyer personas that meaningfully inform your marketing decisions.

2. Define Your Goals and the Digital Marketing Tools You Will Need

Your marketing goals should always tie directly back to your company’s broader business objectives.

For example, if your business goal is to grow online revenue by 20%, your marketing team might set a goal of generating 50% more leads through the website compared to the previous year. Whatever your overarching digital marketing goals are, you need the right strategic steps and tools to measure progress and drive results.

For instance, Knight centralizes all of your marketing and sales data in a single reporting view, making it easy to identify what is working and what is not — so you can continuously refine your strategy.

3. Audit Your Existing Digital Channels and Assets

When reviewing your current digital marketing channels and assets to inform strategic decisions, start by taking stock of everything you have. Catalog each resource and organize it in a spreadsheet, categorizing each asset by type: owned media, earned media, or paid media.

• Owned Media

These are digital assets that your brand or company fully controls — your website, social media profiles, blog content, imagery, and so on. This is the channel where you have complete authority over the message.

• Earned Media

Earned media refers to exposure gained through word-of-mouth or third-party endorsement. This includes guest posts you have published on other sites, PR coverage you have secured, and the reputation you have earned through delivering excellent customer experiences. It also encompasses positive reviews, and content that customers or fans share through their own networks and social channels.

• Paid Media

Paid media refers to any channel or platform where you pay to reach your target audience.

This includes Baidu SEM, paid social media posts, native advertising (such as sponsored content on third-party websites), and any other media requiring investment to drive traffic or brand visibility. Here is a concrete example:

Suppose you have a piece of gated content on your landing page that you are using to generate leads. To maximize lead generation, you want that content to reach as wide an audience as possible — which means making it easy to share so your existing audience can distribute it through their own networks. In addition to organic promotion, you might also consider paid amplification to extend reach beyond your existing followers. The key is to evaluate which combination of owned, earned, and paid channels fits your business best, then deliberately incorporate those into your digital strategy.

4. Audit and Plan Your Owned Media Activities

Content sits at the heart of digital marketing, and it is the primary vehicle for owned media. Almost every piece of communication your brand puts out can be classified as content — whether it is an About Us page, product descriptions, blog articles, e-books, infographics, podcasts, or social media posts.

Strong content converts website visitors into leads and customers while increasing your brand’s online visibility. When that content is properly optimized for search engines (SEO), it also drives sustainable organic traffic growth.

Whatever your digital marketing goals are, owned content must be a core component of your strategy.

Start by identifying which existing content can actually move you toward your goals.

If you are aiming to generate 50% more leads from the website this year, your “About Us” or “Careers” page probably should not be a focus of your strategy — unless those pages have historically been strong lead drivers for your business.

Knight recommends the following framework to help you align your content inventory with your digital marketing goals:

Audit Your Existing Content

Create an inventory of all your existing marketing content and rank each piece based on how well it has contributed to your current goals in the past. Which content generated the most leads last year? For example, if lead generation is your primary objective, rank your blog posts, e-books, and landing pages by how many leads each produced over the past 12 months. This exercise clarifies what is working and what needs to be retired, so you can better align your current content with near-term marketing objectives.

Identify the Gaps Between Your Content and Your Goals

Based on your buyer personas, determine what content is missing for each audience segment. For example, if you run a math tutoring company and your research reveals that customers struggle to find effective study methods, and you have no content addressing that challenge, now is the time to create some.

As you review your content inventory, you may also discover unexpected wins — such as an e-book on a specific landing page that converts exceptionally well compared to webinars. In that case, it would make sense to invest in producing more e-book content in a similar format.

Build a Content Creation Plan

Based on the gap between where you are and where you want to be, develop a structured content creation plan. We recommend including the following elements for each piece:

• Title
• Format
• Goal
• Promotion channels
• Rationale for creating the content
• Priority level

A simple spreadsheet works well for this — just make sure to include budget information as well, regardless of whether you plan to produce content in-house or outsource it.

5. Revisit Your Goals and Match Them to the Right Digital Marketing Tools

Evaluating your earned media against your current marketing goals helps you understand where to focus more of your time and attention. Trace where your traffic and leads are actually coming from, and rank each free media source from most effective to least. You might discover that a single article you published on an industry platform drove significant traffic to your website and boosted conversions. Or you might find that a piece of content shared on your WeChat Official Account went viral and meaningfully increased your reach.

Let historical performance data guide your decisions about which earned channels to double down on for future content and campaigns. That said, do not let past data hold you back from experimenting with promising new ideas that you have not tried before. (Key traffic and lead source dimensions to track: direct traffic / SEO / email / referral / events / social media / paid media / SEM)

6. Audit and Plan Your Paid Media Activities

This step mirrors the process you followed for owned and earned media: evaluate your current paid media investments across platforms (e.g., Baidu SEM, WeChat Moments Ads, LinkedIn) and determine which ones are most likely to help you hit your current goals.

If you have been spending heavily on Baidu SEM but are not seeing the returns you expected, it is time to either revamp your approach on that platform or reallocate your budget to a paid channel that is delivering stronger results.

By the end of this stage, you should have a clear picture of which paid media platforms deserve continued investment — and which ones to cut from your strategy.

Continue reading: How to Successfully Execute an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy