How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy in 2026

With digital marketing reaching $786.2 billion by 2026, it’s easy to understand how important it is for any business.

Having a digital marketing strategy in 2026 is not a recommendation anymore; it’s mandatory if you want to thrive and grow in your industry.

Without a proper and well-planned digital marketing strategy, you’re basically shooting blind while trying to hit a target.

And that’s the reason you’re here. You know your business needs a strong digital marketing strategy to reach the next level. With the right approach, those yearly goals will start to feel a lot more achievable.

And you’d be right. With proper planning and research, you can have a digital marketing strategy that converts and drives growth in 2026.

In this article, we’ll talk about why you should seriously consider a digital marketing strategy and the effects it will have on your business.

We will also go through the main steps you should take if you want to make your own digital marketing strategy this year.

Let’s jump right into it.

Lost on what to do with your digital marketing strategy? Let us help.

Do You Really Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Having a digital marketing strategy is not something only big companies can do.

In 2026, just about anyone can create and use a digital marketing strategy as long as they understand the amount of work they need to do.

Digital marketing is by far the biggest and most prominent way brands can reach their audience today. Which means that without a digital marketing strategy, you’re missing out on potential customers who are actively looking for a product of service that you offer.

Think of digital marketing as a way to expose your brand to as many people as possible. A digital marketing strategy ensures that your brand reaches the right audience at all times.

With so many ways for people to get distracted online, it’s vital for your brand to stand out to the right people.

Put simply, yes. Any business that want to grow online needs a digital marketing strategy and that is non-negotiable. Without it, you won’t ever reach your ideal audience or convince them to choose your product or service because you have no idea who that audience is.

So we’ve established how vital a digital marketing strategy is for your business; so what now?

Now, we’ll go through all the main steps you want to take if you want to create a successful digital marketing strategy that gets results.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy That Works

1. Do Your Marketing Research

The first step whenever creating a digital marketing strategy is to always do proper marketing research. But what does good marketing research entail?

There are several ways you can do marketing research depending on how much time you want to spend on it.

If you want good and efficient research that provides you with most of the key information you need, then we recommend a SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for:

• Strengths: What your brand is doing that works.

• Weaknesses: What your brand is doing that doesn’t work.
• Opportunities: Any external factors that you can use to put your brand in a better competitive position.
• Threats: Any external factors that could potentially harm your brand and weaken your position.

Using a SWOT analysis helps you understand your business a lot better and shows you its strengths, weaknesses and its most urgent needs. At the same time it highlights how competitors operate, allowing you to plan strategies that improve your position in the market.

Plus, by knowing what your competitors are doing, you can work on ways to differentiate your brand from them so that you can stand out more.

Remember, good research is the cornerstone of an effective digital marketing strategy.

Don’t rush this step if you want your strategy to be as effective as possible.

2. Set Attainable and Measurable Goals

The second step of any good strategy is knowing exactly what you want to achieve with it. How are you going to know if the strategy is working if you have no goals to measure?

Make sure that the goals you are picking are realistic and have a step-by-step process to get there.

Having a goal such as “gain 4 million followers on Instagram by next month” when your account only has 500 followers is a recipe for disaster. Create goals that are ambitious but attainable.

Remember, a digital marketing strategy isn’t a miracle solution; it’s an organized plan that helps pave your way towards success.

When picking goals, you want to always use SMART objectives. This way you can assure that your goals are easy to track and measure.

But what is SMART?

SMART stands for:

• Specific: Does the objective you picked unlock specific opportunities for your brand?

• Measurable: Is it easy to keep track of? What are the key metrics that you will use to measure it?
• Actionable: Is it a goal that you can work toward right now? Will it create a positive impact on your brand?
• Relevant: Does this objective align with what you’re planning to achieve with your marketing strategy?
• Time-Bound: Do you have a deadline or timeframe in which you want to achieve said objective?
  

With SMART objectives, you can create very detailed and specific objectives that are attainable and easier to manage.

Make sure you spend a good amount of time thinking about what your objectives should be and how to align them with the research you did beforehand. A good digital marketing strategy starts from its foundations.

3. Learn More About Your Audience

Your strategy can only be effective if you know who your audience is. Customers personas help you with this by offering a fictional and detailed representation of your ideal customers and what drives their decisions.

When creating a customer persona, you want to be as detailed as possible. Every small detail matters.

When creating your customer persona, you should take into account these certain parameters:

• Demographics: Common information such as age, gender, income, location, and marital status go here.

• Defining Trait: Is there something that makes them stand out from the crowd? Do they have some sort of tick or annoyance about something? Make sure to be descriptive here.
• Frustration: What are the things that frustrate them on a daily basis? It could be something your product could fix or something that your brand could offer.
• Goals: What are they trying to achieve in life and/or work? Does your product or service get them closer to said goal?
• Preferred Channels: What channels do they usually use to find products or services? This can be social media (specify which), email, or even websites.

When creating your customer persona, ensure that you’re being as detailed and realistic as possible. The more lifelike they seem, the easier it will be for you to picture them as a real person. Some marketers even go a step further by giving their customer personas a name and a profile picture. This helps teams visualize the person they are marketing to effectively.

Your customer persona image can come from a stock photo, but you have a more modern option nowadays. Ask AI to create an image that reflects the exact person you have in mind. To make it easier, show your customer persona to the AI assistant so they understand a bit better.

Don’t have time to work on your digital marketing strategy? We can help.

4. Understand Your Customer Journey

Knowing what your potential customer has to go through to interact with your brand and then buy a product or service is important.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a second. How complicated is it for you to get from point A (learning about your brand) to point B (buying X product)?

Your goal here is to make sure that the process is as simple and intuitive as possible. You don’t want to make your potential customers jump through hoops before they can buy your product or service.

We suggest you create a customer journey map so you can see what areas you could work on to make everything seamless.

Start your journey map by figuring out how many marketing channels your ideal customer uses along their path. This insight helps you decide where to allocate your budget and what content to prioritize.

Let’s go through a quick example of what a customer journey map looks like.

1. You see a Blacksmith agency ad online.

2. You research and find their LinkedIn page and follow them.
3. You check their website.
4. You give your contact information for a free website audit.
5. The feedback given was useful and interesting.
6. You schedule a call so they can walk you through their custom website services.
7. You like the service and accept to pay for it.
8. You get your custom website done.
9. You enjoy it so much that you leave a positive review on their website.
   

This is what a customer journey would generally look like. We can see what made the customer consider the agency and how long it took for them to purchase its services.

With a customer journey map, your digital marketing strategy goals will be easier to achieve.

5. Pick the Perfect Marketing Channels

So you have your customer journey, your customer persona, and you know your goals; what now?

Now we get to pick which channels you will focus most of your digital marketing efforts on.

Although it’s possible to work on all channels at once, we strongly recommend narrowing your focus to either two or three. This approach makes everything easier to manage and keeps your daily workflow from becoming overwhelming .

We can’t tell you exactly which ones you should focus on since every business is different.

If your customer persona is on social media all day, then try to pinpoint which social media they would be on the most and focus on that one the most.

Think carefully about what content fits each channel and how regularly you should be posting. You want to find the sweetspot where your audience remembers your brand and product but never feels like they’re getting bombarded.

6. Set All of Your KPIs and ROIs

Having your quarterly and yearly KPIs ensures that you always have a big goal to meet by a certain deadline.

While we have already set objectives for your digital marketing strategy, these KPIs can be a bit broader.

“Gaining 20% more conversions before the end of the year” is a good example.

You have several KPIs to choose from. Popular ones include leads, page views, CTR, conversion rates, and number of visitors who return to your site

All this work depends entirely on the type of digital marketing strategy you want to pursue in 2026.

Knowing your ROI is vital if you want to evaluate your digital marketing success. If you’re not tracking it, you risk draining your budget without seeing any results at all.

With a good mix of KPIs and ROIs, you can be in the know about how your whole digital marketing strategy project is doing.

7. Execute Your Digital Marketing Strategy

You finally have everything ready, and it’s time to execute and work on your well-planned digital marketing strategy.

So where do you begin?

Start by setting up a way to monitor all of your content throughout its entire lifecycle. Track it before publishing and after it’s live so you can easily identify what is performing well and what needs improvement.

Use apps like Jira and Asana to stay organized. They help you track your content creators and digital marketers as they work on the projects.

Feel free to evolve and change your strategy whenever needed. Remember, digital marketing is all about experimentation. Keep what is working and tweak what isn’t. If your original plan misses the mark, you can continue adapting and improving.

Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy With Blacksmith

Reading all the steps needed to get a digital marketing strategy working might seem daunting.

Don’t worry, here at Blacksmith, we understand how important digital marketing strategies are for any brand looking to grow.

As a full-service digital marketing agency, we’ll make sure your brand is up-to-date and has a digital marketing strategy that still works in 2026.

We’ll do all the heavy lifting while you focus on other important aspects of your business.

Best of all, we show you the process from start to finish.

This way, you can ask for changes if needed.

Still unsure if a digital marketing strategy is what your brand needs? Click here to schedule a call with us so we can give you a glimpse of how much more you could sell with a proper digital marketing strategy.