15 Priorities for Building a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, building a strong marketing strategy is crucial for business success. This article presents key priorities for crafting an effective digital marketing approach, backed by insights from industry experts. By focusing on these essential elements, businesses can create a robust strategy that drives growth and delivers measurable results.
- Focus on Revenue-Driving Strategies
- Build Around Customer Understanding
- Dominate One Channel with Unfair Advantage
- Leverage Data for Targeted Campaigns
- Develop a Cohesive Audience-Led Ecosystem
- Create Content Alongside Your Team
- Prioritize Clean Data and Owned Channels
- Align Marketing Goals with Business Growth
- Balance Quick Wins and Long-Term Investments
- Build a Real-Time Customer Feedback Loop
- Implement a Strong Suppression Strategy
- Optimize Content for Search Intent
- Stay Current with Effective Marketing Tactics
- Showcase Your Company's Unique Qualities
- Design Messaging to Match Emotional States
Focus on Revenue-Driving Strategies
Start by cutting anything that doesn't clearly contribute to revenue. Many digital strategies are packed with channels, tools, and reports that look impressive but don't actually move the needle. If a campaign or platform isn't tied to pipeline growth or customer acquisition—either directly or through a clear pattern—it's time to pause or simplify. A strong strategy starts with focus, not volume.
Then, prioritize speed to insight. The edge in digital isn't just about being creative—it's about how fast a team can test, learn, and adjust. Build systems that allow small experiments to launch quickly, gather data fast, and shape the next move. The faster those feedback loops run, the better the decisions. This means cutting bottlenecks, streamlining approvals, and being comfortable with killing ideas early when they're not working.
Also, focus deeply on distribution. Great content without reach doesn't accomplish much. Whether it's an email list, SEO, paid social, or community-led channels, owning how and where you reach people matters. Without a repeatable engine to get content in front of the right audience, even the best creative quickly fades. Choose one or two core channels and double down on growing them into long-term assets that bring CAC down over time.
Digital marketing doesn't need to be everywhere. It needs to be accountable, fast-moving, and built on owned attention.
Build Around Customer Understanding
If I could give one key piece of advice to any CMO building a digital marketing strategy, it would be this: Start with a deep understanding of your customer and build everything around that.
Too often, strategies are built around channels, tools, or trends, but the most effective digital marketing strategies are built around people. That means investing time and resources into truly understanding your audience: their needs, behaviors, pain points, and decision-making journeys.
Once you have that clarity, your top priority should be to create a seamless, personalized customer experience across every digital touchpoint. Whether it's your website, email campaigns, paid media, or social content, everything should feel connected, relevant, and valuable to the person on the other end.
AI and automation can help scale this, but they only work well when they're grounded in real customer insight. So before you invest in the latest tech or launch a new campaign, ask yourself: Does this help us serve our customers better? Does it make their experience smoother, more helpful, or more human?
Dominate One Channel with Unfair Advantage
Stop trying to do everything. Double down on one unfair advantage, whether it's your proprietary data, a niche community, or a content format you own (e.g., a podcast, newsletter, or viral video style). Most brands fail by diluting their efforts across every platform. Win by dominating a single channel where your audience lives, then expand. For example, Liquid Death didn't win by outspending Coke on ads; they built a cult following through subversive storytelling. Your strategy should be uniquely yours, not a checklist from a LinkedIn post.
Leverage Data for Targeted Campaigns
For CMOs building a strong digital marketing strategy, my key advice is to prioritize data-driven audience understanding. At X Agency, we've seen the most success when strategies start with deep insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points.
The top priority should be leveraging first-party data and analytics to create hyper-targeted campaigns. Use tools like Google Analytics, CRM platforms, and social listening on X to map customer journeys and identify high-value segments. For a B2B client, we analyzed X Platform conversations and website data to pinpoint decision-makers' pain points, then tailored LinkedIn content and SEO to address them. This increased lead quality by 20% and conversions by 12% in three months.
Avoid chasing trends without data backing. Instead, focus on channels and tactics that align with your audience's habits. Test and iterate using A/B testing and attribution models to refine ROI. A clear data foundation ensures scalability and relevance, preventing wasted budgets on misaligned efforts.
Takeaway: Ground every decision in audience insights. A strategy built on data-driven targeting outperforms broad, trend-driven approaches, fostering sustainable growth and brand loyalty.
Develop a Cohesive Audience-Led Ecosystem
My key advice to CMOs building a strong digital marketing strategy: Don't start with tactics, start with clarity. A well-defined brand voice, audience understanding, and content purpose should guide everything else. Without that foundation, you'll waste time chasing trends and channels that don't move the needle.
Your top priority should be building a digital ecosystem that's cohesive and audience-led. That means ensuring your website, email marketing, social media, SEO, and paid media all work together to tell a consistent story. Strong strategies don't just generate clicks; they build trust, deepen engagement, and make it easy for people to choose you.
Thank you for taking the time to read my pitch. Feel free to send over any additional questions. If you decide to quote me in your story, please cite me accordingly: "Jasmin Diaz, Digital Marketing Specialist", with a proper link. Website link: https://www.digitallove.studio/
Create Content Alongside Your Team
I built our social team by first getting in the trenches and creating content myself—writing copy, editing clips, testing posts, and showing up as another creator on the team, not just a CMO.
Especially on small teams, you can't afford to be hands-off. And frankly, I don't think you should be as a leader in social on any team. Creating alongside the team builds trust, makes the work better, keeps your content brain sharp, and ensures you're connected to what's actually happening on the platforms.
One of the best things you can do as a leader? Create. The people who win on social are the ones who understand it deeply. And the only way to understand it is to do the work.
Prioritize Clean Data and Owned Channels
Focus on fixing your inputs. Most teams waste time chasing trends without addressing the fundamentals. If your customer data is incomplete, if your CRM is cluttered, or if your analytics aren't tied to revenue, you're making decisions blind. Before launching anything new, get your data clean, structured, and connected across platforms. Every digital channel pulls from that core. If the inputs are wrong, the outputs will be worse.
Your top priority should be building systems that give you control over your traffic and conversions. That means investing in owned channels, tightening your retargeting loops, and cutting underperforming spend quickly. At EcoATM, we scaled more efficiently once we stopped spreading our budget evenly and started weighting toward what we knew was working - high-converting creative, tested landing pages, and local promotions that drove kiosk traffic. Don't depend on brand sentiment or soft metrics. Build a stack that gives you answers daily and lets you act immediately.
A strong digital strategy starts with boring work like tagging properly, scoring leads, and fixing broken flows. Most marketers skip it. The ones who don't win faster.
Align Marketing Goals with Business Growth
Build your strategy around measurable momentum, not just reach.
Too many digital strategies chase vanity metrics—impressions, clicks, social interactions—without a clear connection to business growth.
Tightly align marketing goals with revenue-driving activities like:
• Full-funnel visibility
• Clear attribution
• Message-market fit
Balance Quick Wins and Long-Term Investments
One critical piece of advice for any CMO developing a digital strategy: know the payback window for each channel and build a marketing mix that delivers both fast wins and long-term leverage. In today's climate, where CMOs face heightened scrutiny from CEOs and boards, quick wins help validate the team's direction and earn trust. Meanwhile, strategic bets like SEO or generative AI content must be insulated with proper timelines and expectations so they have the room to deliver transformative results over time.
Build a Real-Time Customer Feedback Loop
If I had to give one piece of advice to a CMO building a strong digital marketing strategy, it would be this: obsess over your customer's behavior, not just your brand. Far too often, I've seen smart marketers get caught up chasing shiny tools or trends while ignoring the way their actual audience interacts with content, platforms, and competitors. At Spectup, we had a client in the D2C space who was burning money on influencer campaigns because "everyone else was doing it," but they hadn't noticed their buyers were converting better via comparison review sites and Reddit threads. Once we shifted their budget toward those real touchpoints, their CAC dropped by 38% in two quarters.
So, the top priority? Building a feedback loop that blends data with human insight—tracking behavior obsessively, testing messaging relentlessly, and adjusting in real time. No strategy lives in a vacuum. I always tell clients: the best digital strategies are living organisms. The minute you stop listening, they start dying.
Implement a Strong Suppression Strategy
The one thing I always do first, and most CMOs miss, is build a suppression strategy.
I don't just focus on who to target. I focus hard on who not to target. People who just bought. People who bounced. People who already said no. I make sure they're blocked from seeing ads, getting emails, or being retargeted.
Why? Because irrelevant marketing is expensive. It burns budget and trust. I've seen campaigns perform 2-3x better just by tightening suppression rules.
So if you want a strong digital strategy, start there. Don't just plan your targeting, plan your "do not target" list first. That's how you protect performance before you even spend.
Optimize Content for Search Intent
Start with comprehensive keyword research to understand your audience's search intent—this forms the foundation of everything. Your top priority should be creating content that genuinely serves user needs while being technically optimized for search engines. Focus on building topical authority through consistent, high-quality content that addresses every stage of the customer journey. Don't chase vanity metrics; track conversions and revenue attribution from organic search. Most CMOs overlook technical SEO audits, but site speed and mobile optimization directly impact both rankings and user experience. That's how Scale By SEO keeps your brand visible.
Stay Current with Effective Marketing Tactics
Ensure that the strategy you're implementing or signing off on is current and up to date. Marketing is dynamic; what worked yesterday might no longer work today. There's nothing worse than allocating your resources towards marketing strategies that will not produce the desired results simply because the tactics are no longer effective. The same principle applies to foresight and considering how things might change 6-12 months from now. Your marketing budget is finite, so always consider the best use for it in terms of the impact it will have on your organization, as well as the potential for return on investment (ROI).
Showcase Your Company's Unique Qualities
The best piece of marketing advice I've heard: "Be yourself. Everyone else is taken."
Many CMOs chase trends, copy their competition, or try to pose as something they're not. The smarter approach is to determine what makes your company truly unique (whether that's your unique experience, data, or perspective) and build your digital marketing strategy around that.
Design Messaging to Match Emotional States
We've learned a lot building Aitherapy and growing through organic digital strategies. One key piece of advice? Start with emotional clarity about who you're speaking to.
Too many digital marketing strategies focus on features or trends instead of feelings. But especially in wellness and mental health, people don't convert because something is "cool"; they convert because it feels right.
At Aitherapy, our top-performing content doesn't just describe what we do; it mirrors the inner dialogue our users are already having. So for CMOs, the top priority should be understanding your users' emotional states at each moment of their journey. Then, design your messaging and funnels to meet them there with empathy, not just optimization.
Digital marketing is no longer about being the loudest. It's about being the most resonant.
