How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy That Works in 2025

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 2025 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.

But that’s why you’re here. You understand that your business needs a digital marketing strategy to get to that next level. You know that with a good digital marketing strategy, your yearly goals will be that much more attainable.

And you’d be right. With proper planning and research, you can have a digital marketing strategy that converts and drives growth in 2025.

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 2025, 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 the main way of reaching an audience nowadays. Without a good strategy, you’re losing thousands of potential customers. They want to know more about your product or service.

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.

In short, yes, your business and in fact any business that wants to thrive online need a digital marketing strategy. There is no way to reach the desired people and entice them to buy your product or service without it.

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.

With a SWOT analysis, you can get a better idea of what your business needs. All while understanding where your competitors stand and what you can do to improve your competitive position.

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

You should know exactly who you’re marketing to if you want your strategy to work. A great way to do this is by implementing customer personas. These are fictional customers you can create to fit your ideal buyer.

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 a customer persona, make sure you are specific and descriptive. You want this customer persona to feel real. A trick some marketers use is to give your customer persona a name and profile picture. This way they can visualize their customer persona a lot easier and use it properly.

You can do it the traditional way and get a stock photo of what your customer persona would look like. Or you can ask AI to create an image based on how you picture that person in your head.

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.

The first step in making your journey map is to know how many marketing channels your potential customer uses on their path. This makes it easier for you to understand what channels and content you want to push and invest in.

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.

While you could focus on all them at once, we highly recommend you pick only 2 or 3 that you can hyperfocus on. This way you can manage everything easier without it taking over all your day.

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.

Make sure you think about what type of content you would be posting on those marketing channels and at what frequency. You want to find the sweet spot where you are on your customers’ minds without annoying them.

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.

There are different KPIs you can use, some of the most popular ones being leads, page views, CTR, conversion rates, and returning visitors.

All this work depends entirely on the type of digital marketing strategy you want to pursue in 2025.

It’s also vital for you to know your ROI and how well your digital marketing strategy is doing. The last thing you want to do is burn all your budget without having anything to show for it.

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?

Simple! Start by making sure you can monitor every piece of content you push out, before it’s published and after it’s out. You want to learn what works and what doesn’t as quickly as possible.

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.

Don’t be afraid to adjust and update your strategy as you see fit. It’s all about testing and doubling down on what works. If your initial idea doesn’t work, then you can easily modify, adjust, and keep trying.

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 2025.

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.