Introduction to Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

Knowing why you need a digital marketing strategy is as important as needing Google Maps in a new city, for achieving long-term success for your business.

With the dynamic landscape of digital marketing in Nepal, you need to implement a well-structured digital marketing strategy to engage with the right audience, stay competitive and drive consistent growth.

There’s no denying–whether you’re an SME or an established brand, you need a strategic plan to reach your potential customers in a way they would love.

Just check out these astonishing figures of digital channel usage in Nepal:

It is clear that your target audience spends the majority of their time browsing on search engines and scrolling through social media to find information, products or services. This truly justifies the reason why you need a digital marketing strategy.

An effective digital marketing strategy offers a detailed roadmap to achieve your digital marketing goals. Proper use of digital marketing tools and techniques can help you identify key digital marketing metrics and decide what channels to use to reach your target audience.

Our clients have seen tremendous growth when we helped them implement structured digital marketing strategy plans. Reaching the right customers at the right time ensures every penny our client spends on marketing is well-placed.

Let’s jot down all the reasons why you need a digital marketing strategy and how you can create one for your business. But first, let’s dive deep to understand what a digital marketing strategy is.

What is Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a detailed plan to reach your target market in the most effective way. For instance:

You want to reach out to potential customers who are searching on Google. What should you do? 

✓ Optimize your website for higher Google rankings and click-through rates

✓ Find relevant keywords people search

✓ Create content around those keywords

✓ Grow the website’s authority with backlinks, and 

✓ Create a seamless user experience

✓ Repeat

This digital marketing strategy is popularly known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Similarly, you want to reach out to people scrolling through TikTok and other social media channels. What should you do?

✓ Analyse your audience

✓ Identify their pain points

✓ Jot down content post types and content formats

✓ Create a monthly plan

✓ Post with a strategy

✓ Create scroll-stopping reels to hold their attention.

✓ Repeat

This strategy is well known as Social Media Marketing (SMM), or Reels marketing. 

Similarly, there are several other types of digital marketing strategies based on where your target audience is spending their time. But before discussing them, let’s first understand why you need a digital marketing strategy.

Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy: The Benefits

Picture this: you are sailing in the digital world with ideas competing for the same target group. Your competitors are already out there, making noise for attention and claiming potential customers.

Without the proper online marketing strategy, you are on a ship without a map or direction while the rest are busy sailing with your valuables. 

Working with top digital marketing companies in Nepal can make this easier, as they offer expert digital marketing strategy services tailored to your business needs.

Let’s understand why you need a digital marketing strategy for your business. 

Reason 1: You can Reach the Right People at the Right Time

Digital marketing is about reaching the right audiences when they need you the most.

When crafting an effective digital marketing campaign strategy, you can leverage multiple channels to reach the audiences at the exactly right time.

For example: When a user searches for products or services like “best hotel in Kathmandu” in search engines, SEO strategy helps your website rank at the top of the search engine result page (SERP). 

That means your business is discoverable to the right audience when their interest peaks, bringing organic traffic to your site and increasing conversion.

However, you have to create high-quality content/blog posts that answer your audience’s questions which not only improves SEO but also helps you build trust and credibility with them.

You can also utilize a social media marketing strategy to reach social feeds on platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Tiktok.

As people live on social platforms, you can create fun and engaging content for your target customers to put more eyeballs on your brand.

eLance utilized the SMM strategy to increase our client’s engagement by 1000%.

Likewise, using PPC, you can display your ads in search engines where audiences actively search for products or services related to your industry.

It gives you the power to target audiences based on their ages, geographical areas as well as interests.

Other methods include content marketing, email marketing and influencer marketing, among others that help your business show up to potential customers.

Together, they create a holistic digital marketing strategy that ensures you reach the right audiences when they are ready to engage.

Reason 2: Your Brand Becomes Impossible to Ignore

Have you ever wondered how businesses seem to show up all over the place? 

Creating a memorable brand that stands out requires consistency and strategic content delivery.

For example: Creating a proper social media calendar and posting consistently on those platforms helps you to stay in front of your audiences.

A content calendar is crucial to align your every post, video or story with your brand’s voice.

While creating videos, educational or promotional, use hooks that grab your audience’s attention within 3 seconds.

Another way is sending regular email newsletters, promotions or updates to your audiences as it helps reinforce your brand identity.

Additionally, posting high-quality and relevant blog posts on your website increases your search engine ranking.

Be it SEO, content marketing or social media strategy, you can align all these digital channels under one strategy to ensure your brand messages are consistent.

When the business focuses on being consistent, the brand becomes instantly recognizable and fosters trust with audiences. 

This cultivation of trust leads to brand loyalty, and in due time, the brand develops into an unforgettable one.

Reason 3: You can Get Real-Time Insights

One of the most significant benefits of digital marketing is that you can see what is working right away.

Businesses can view the key digital marketing metrics of their marketing campaign performance in real-time using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

You can see the number of people visiting your website, what pages they visit and from which keywords.

Social media platforms report back engagement almost immediately. 

Meta Business Suite helps give insights into post reach, cost per click, cost per message, cost per lead generation and so on.

Email marketing platforms report on open rates and click-through rates as soon as an email is sent.

You can use this instantaneous feedback and modify your strategy right at the moment, whether modifying PPC ads or modifying your writing, so you can improve and get better results consistently

If something isn’t working, you can adjust it on the spot. 

With real-time insights, you can think strategically to keep your business ahead of the competition.

These metrics can be difficult to understand for first-timers.

So, getting help from digital marketing agencies such as eLance is a good idea as they let you stay in control and make you aware of where you stand.

Reason 4: You can Build Loyal Customers

Strategy is not only about getting new customers but about keeping them. 

Email marketing, SEO and social media services allow businesses to stay connected with their audience. 

These allow you to share promotions, updates and valuable content with your customers.

You can personalize the content/messages that resonate with your audiences and build good relationships with them.

The loyal customers stick around if they feel valued.

This way, they will return to spend with your business again, which is why you need a digital marketing strategy. 

Reason 5: You Get Value for Money

Digital marketing is cheaper compared to traditional marketing. 

You need digital marketing strategy plan to make your investment effective.

With the right tools, it makes forecasting and assessment for your budgets where you can channel the budget to the most rewarding campaigns.

For instance, pay-per-click ads offer you control over your expenditure while still generating immediate traffic.

SEO strategy helps bring organic traffic without even the need to run advertisements.

Social media campaigns also provide a good chance to reach out to a reasonably low-priced audience.

A clear SEO and social media strategy guarantees being the talk of the audience.

Different Types of Digital Marketing Strategies to Consider

To succeed in the digital world, you need a digital marketing strategy that is relevant to the audience or goes hand in hand with business goals.

Below are 5 digital marketing strategies that will help you build and grow your business/brand.

Strategy 1: Search Engine Optimization Strategy

SEO provides a brief of what needs to be done to your website to make it visible in search engines (Google/Bing).

It helps your brands climb higher on the search engine result page.

SEO service helps your website get organic traffic.

An excellent SEO strategy includes:

• Conducting an SEO audit to identify and fix errors (broken links, meta tags and site speed). 
• Studying search terms or keywords that are trending in your niche and finding who your competitors are.
• Refining meta titles, descriptions and headings as well as creating internal links to improve the user experience.
• Crafting high-quality content rich with keywords that satisfy the user’s intents and answer their questions.
• Generating monthly website performance reports (traffic, rankings, backlinks and leads) and using these data to make informed decisions.

By doing so, you will have improved visibility, credibility and consistent traffic without running any ads.

eLance digital media follows this procedure with additional steps to help your website rank higher on search result pages.

Strategy 2: Social Media Marketing Strategy

Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn are great social media platforms to engage with customers.

These platforms allow businesses to interact with customers and advertise their products, developing their brand identity.

An SMM strategy consists of:

• Developing a content calendar for Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and other platforms you want to be active in.
• Including different content types (educational, promotional, client testimonial and reels) to post on the social media channels. 
• Leveraging trending topics and sounds to maximize reach.
• Adjust strategy based on data insights (e.g. best-performing content types).

A consistent presence on social media fosters customers’ trust and loyalty.

Strategy 3: Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising

Pay Per Click is a paid strategy that provides instant visibility for businesses.

The advertising appears as search or display ads when people search for relevant keywords, instantly driving traffic to your website.

Businesses can get quick results making it a good approach.

Unlike organic methods, PPC lets you target a specific demographic in a highly localized area.

A good PPC ads strategy can be:

• Establish your primary objective and segment campaigns by unique industry or audience group.
• Do in-depth keyword research and craft an engaging ad copy personalized to high-intent users.
• Implement firm tracking, then spend most of the budget on effective campaigns and leave some for A/B testing.
• Continuously monitor important metrics and improve bids, keywords, and creatives to improve results.

It is an effective way of achieving short-term marketing achievements at a low cost.

Strategy 4: Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing involves the creation of high-quality content about topics your potential customers are searching for.

The best content marketing ensures your content talks about your reader’s interests and needs.

Follow these steps to create the best content marketing strategy:

• Decide who you are speaking to and what you intend to achieve with every piece of content (such as brand awareness or lead generation).
• Research the relevant subject and keywords that resonate with your audience.
• Create content like blogs, videos or infographics rich in content value, which you share on social media or through e-mails.
• Monitor your performance using conversion metrics (view count, shares and conversion rate), and adjust your topics and formats going forward.

By sharing valuable content, you position yourself as an industry leader, gaining trust and loyalty. 

Strategy 5: Influencer Marketing Strategy

Partnering with an influencer is a powerful way to boost your business.

The influencer has followers who trust them.

Those followers are audiences that you may not have reached with advertisements.

However, you should consider the influencer’s personality that aligns with your brand values and marketing goals.

This way, you gain more visibility and can build your brand credibility using an influencer marketing service, resulting in more sales. 

While selecting a digital marketing agency in Nepal, go for agencies that offer holistic digital marketing strategies.

Tailored Digital Marketing Strategies for Specific Industries

Every business/brand is unique in its own way.

This means what may work for one business might not work for the other one.

Instead, a tailored digital marketing strategy helps brands address their problems, objectives and audiences.

Let’s look at a different customizable approach for various niches.

Digital Marketing Strategy for Travel Agency

Imagine a travel agency that helps focus on adventure tours. They need to connect with people who love to travel and explore new places.

Incorporating a strong digital marketing strategy helps show their offers to people who love to travel and explore new places.

Digital marketing strategy examples for travel agencies can be:

1. Search Engine Optimization: When the audience searches for “affordable tour in Nepal” or “best travel agency in Nepal”, your website is shown at the top of search engines. This is achieved when the company optimizes its website with high-quality content and fixes issues.

2. Social Media Marketing: Travel agencies can leverage social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok to connect with their audiences. They can share amazing photos and client testimonials, capturing the excitement of adventurers. Conducting live videos and timely posts during peak seasons can help connect with the right audience at the right time.

3. PPC Advertising: Travel companies can run targeted ads to show up on social media feeds and search engines, helping get quick reach and bookings. 

Hotel Digital Marketing Strategy

The hotel industry thrives on the visibility and the experiences it provides to its customers.

The hotel’s digital marketing strategy should focus on:

1. SMM:  Hotels can use social media strategy to share guest experiences and engaging posts, including seasonal promotions. Additionally, sharing a virtual tour video of the hotel on stories and highlighting facilities helps the audience get familiar with your business.

2. Content Marketing: These businesses can post engaging blogs travel tips and things to do nearby, helping boost their authority in that area. Posting detailed information about amenities helps increase organic traffic. 

3. Email Marketing: Hotels can use personalized email campaigns offering exclusive deals or loyalty programs to their previous clients. This program keeps the clients coming back. Not only that you can polish your approaches with real-time analytics. 

Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Small businesses face difficulty, especially when they compete with big brands.

A creative marketing strategy can help them grow even with limited resources.

1. Local SEO: Small businesses can use local SEO to build their visibility in the local area. Doing so helps them get found when customers search for products or services in nearby locations.

2. Social Media Strategy: Using Facebook & Instagram and posting engaging as well as educating content enables small businesses to find their target audiences and engage with them. They can build loyal followers by posting regular posts including behind-the-scenes and customer testimonials.

3. Cost-effective PPC: Even if you are low on budget, you can PPC ads on Facebook or Google which allow you to target your potential customers. These channels offer a “pay when someone clicks” model with data-backed insights, ensuring your investment is spent effectively.

Digital Marketing Strategies for Luxury Brands

Luxury brands, as the name suggests, provide premium products and services to their customers. 

Luxury brands should focus on:

1. SEO and Influencer Marketing: Premium brands can rank higher for niche keywords like “Luxury watches” or “luxury fashion accessories” with an effective SEO strategy. Tell about the story of your brand and the product behind it. Moreover, you can collaborate with a high-profile influencer to showcase your products and get instant visibility.

2. Personalized Social Media Campaigns: Instagram is the most popular to find luxury brands. Share elegant images of your products regularly and host exclusive events to attract the right customers.

3. Omnichannel Advertising: Connecting all your approaches such as PPC, Social media and SEO helps your brand maintain a consistent presence. Doing so helps the potential customers encounter and engage with your brand at every touchpoint.

How to Build a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Whether you are a business owner or a marketing enthusiast, with the above pointers, you must have already understood why you need a digital marketing strategy. 

Think of internet marketing strategy as a recipe, you need the right ingredients mixed correctly to see the best results.

Let’s see the digital marketing strategy process to create an effective strategy.

Step 1: Understand your Audiences

The first step is to know who you are selling your products to, your customers.

You need to focus on who you are selling to, as a product can’t appeal to everyone.

You should know your audiences:

• Who are your customers? (age, location and interests)
• What is their problem and needs?
• Where can you find them? (Tiktok, Google, Youtube)

Step 2: Define your Marketing Goals

Before starting anything you need to set goals.

So, what do you want to achieve with marketing?

It might be:

• Increase brand awareness.
• Growth in website traffic.
• Get more sales.

The strategy should have clear and measurable goals.

Step 3: Choose the Right Digital Channels

Not every platform is a suitable fit for every company. 

The right strategy should focus on the best digital channels for reaching the right customers.

Here are some digital channels and what they are best for:

SEO: This channel ranks your website higher on search engines such as Google.

Social media marketing: Establishes connections on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Email marketing: Keeps customers engaged with promotions and updates.

Pay-per-click  (PPC): Brings in instantaneous traffic via paid ads.

This helps businesses save money and get better results.

Step 4: Use the Right Tools and Techniques

With the help of the right tools, digital marketing gets easier.

You can automate tasks, track progress and shape performance with digital marketing tools and techniques.

Google Analytics: Monitors visitors to the site and their performance.

SEO tools: Helps your website rank higher in search engines.

Social media management tools: Schedules posts and keeps track of engagement.

Email automation tools: Sends customized emails at the right moment to the right customers.

These tools save time, provide efficiency and deliver better-performing campaigns.

Step 5: Implement and Monitor Marketing Campaigns 

Once all is in place, it’s time to start your digital marketing campaign.

But, marketing is not only about launching but also about tracking and monitoring.

Monitor in real-time: This would include analytics on what’s working and what’s not.

Analyze social media: See which posts get the most engagement.

Refine PPC ads: Adjust ad spending for optimal results.

Any approach that modifies and adjusts itself is always better performing than one that is static. 

Digital Marketing Strategy Mistakes to Avoid 

While creating marketing strategies, mistakes are bound to happen.

And those mistakes could be fatal, leading to the failure of businesses/brands.

Below, we have mentioned the common mistakes in digital marketing strategy and solutions to them.

Mistake 1: Ignoring your Target Audience 

Some businesses try to cover all types of audiences.

For instance, a coffee shop posts generic promotions across all channels without considering their audiences are busy employees or students. 

Those types of generic content don’t resonate with anyone, especially your potential customers.  

When you ignore your audiences, your brand’s message gets lost.

And that leads to your business receiving less engagement and poor conversion rates.

Businesses need to profile the right target customer and send the right messages at the right time.

Solution:

• Collect the data about demographics, their interest and online behavior through surveys, social media insights or tools like Google Analytics and segment your audiences based on those data.

• Create personalized content and ads that speak directly to your target customer’s needs.

• Track key engagement metrics such as click-through rates and conversion rates to see what type of message resonates with your audiences. And polish your marketing strategy accordingly.

Mistake 2: Not Setting Clear Objectives

Many businesses begin their marketing journey without setting clear goals (brand awareness, increased followers or sales).

They will launch ads, post on social media or do SEO without defining what the success of their marketing effort looks like. 

At the end of a quarter, they have no idea if their efforts increased brand awareness, sales or simply clicks.

An absence of clear objectives makes it nearly impossible, to measure results, leading to efforts being wasted.

Solution:

• Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable and relevant. For example: you can aim for a 20% increase in conversions or a 15% increase in website traffic.

• Keep track of metrics that will help you measure your marketing success (CTR, engagement rates or sales figures).

Mistake 3: Choosing the Wrong Digital Channels

A b2b business invests heavily in Instagram ads thinking all channels are as effective as others.

However, if their potential audience uses search engines or Pinterest, then they fail to capture meaningful leads.

Not choosing the right digital channel means you will not reach the right audiences.

Solution:

• Choose the digital channel where your audiences spend most of their time. For example, if your target customers are business people, use LinkedIn rather than Instagram.

• Run small campaigns to check and compare the metrics on different channels. Then you can allocate more budget for the ones that deliver the best engagement.

• If you are unsure of the process, consider working with a digital marketing agency in Nepal like eLance to help your brand select the right channel.

Mistake 4: Ignoring SEO and Web Optimization

A business website that does not take SEO advantages will not be ranked in search engines.

Imagine a beautifully designed website that offers an amazing product but loads very slowly.

The poor performance will lead to visitors leaving your site quickly and Google penalizing your site.

If your website is not optimized for speed and mobile friendliness with quality content, then you will miss organic traffic and valuable leads.

Solution:

• Use tools like SEMrush to identify technical errors in your website like broken links, indexing errors or slow loading time.

• Make your website optimized with fast speed, mobile-friendly and easy navigation.

• Regularly update your site with content such as articles, infographics and blogs to make it fresh.

Mistake 5: Not Utilizing Data and Analytics

Marketing without tracking performance is like driving blind. 

Think of a business running a marketing campaign but never checking the performance data.

They will continue to drain their budget without knowing the click-through rate and how many clicks lead to sales.

Without data insights, they’ve wasted resources on campaigns that don’t produce the desired results.

Solution:

• Use Google Analytics and other analytics platforms to monitor key metrics of digital marketing such as website traffic, conversion rates and customer behavior.

• Review your brand’s data regularly and identify the pattern of what’s working. Implement this information in your marketing campaigns such as twerking ad copy and experimenting with new content styles.

Mistake 6: Not Updating Strategies

Trends in digital marketing and consumer behavior keep evolving.

Businesses forget about that and keep using the same marketing tactics they used a year ago.

Sticking to outdated strategies makes your brand look stale.

If you don’t adopt an innovative solution, your competitors will, resulting in a decline in customer engagement and sales of your brand.

Solution:

• Follow industry experts and attend webinars to keep updated about digital marketing trends and techniques. 

• Experiment with new ad formats, channels and content styles. You can also try A/B testing to see what works best with your audiences.

• If a funny video or music is trending on Instagram and Tiktok, you can use that sound in your own video to boost your brand reach.

Mistake 7: Disregarding Content Quality

Imagine reading a blog article that has poor grammar, lack of visuals and outdated information.

Such content not only discourages users from engaging but also destroys your brand credibility. 

Brands that don’t focus on creating SEO-optimized and relevant content lose trust and authority.

Solution:

• Focus on creating a content plan that is rich with valuable and informative materials (blogs, articles and videos). Use relevant information and show the latest data.

• Create content that is entertaining by including good storytelling techniques, good visuals and a clear call to action.

• Remain informed about the new trends and keep your digital channel profiles fresh by consistently updating them with relevant content.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is a world that is growing every day. 

“Why you need a digital marketing strategy?” is a question that constantly pops up. 

Getting into the digital marketing game keeps you one step ahead of the competition. 

In the absence of a strategy, marketing becomes a wasted effort.

A structured plan makes sure that every action has its meaning.

A strong strategy builds brand awareness, connecting you with an audience who wants your product, thus boosting conversion rates and sales.

With the right digital channels, businesses can reach more. 

SEO will help to stay on page one of the search engine while social media marketing builds engagement. 

Tracking results is easier with real-time analytics to enable timely adjustments and improvements for their campaigns. 

This brings down the cost of marketing while improving its power.

So, there is no question about whether you need a digital marketing strategy.

Don’t delay, create your digital marketing strategy and ensure your success in the online world!

If you want to up your marketing game, then eLance will help you achieve your goals.

FAQ