The four stages of digital marketing strategy and how they affect your business

There are four key stages that guide a digital marketer and tells him/her if they are on track or not.

He who fails to plan plans to fail. This is very very true with digital marketing.

Why plan?

Of course, when you plan anything you intend to do, every activity leading up to the final act would follow a certain pattern and until it reaches its climax, everything you add or subtract in the process constitute planning.

For a digital marketer, there are four things to consider in a marketing strategy namely:

  • Plan
  • Act
  • Observe
  • Reflect


Your plan is the layout of what you want to do and how to go about it. It is, however, important to note that a digital marketing strategy is influenced by the set objectives of the marketing effort. Your objective could be to increase online sales from ten a month to 20 a month or increase social media following from 0 to 100 per month. It could be to grow website traffic by 20 percent in one month.

Whatever the goal is, ensure that it is measurable-what digital marketing scholars term SMART.

Specific- Be very specific about what you want to achieve. Don't cram many goals or even dreams and expectations at a time. If it helps, list out all the things you hope to achieve within say the first year of starting your business and then prioritise them, and pick one by one. Example, Get five clients
Measurable- Set objectives you can measure. For instance, If your first specific goal is to get five clients in one month, it becomes measurable after one month when you begin to assess if you were able to achieve it or not.
Achievable- Every step flows into the other. A specific and measurable goal is often times achievable and if not, you can at least tell where you went wrong.
Realistic- Set realistic goals. It's good to dream big but at this point, if you really want to see your dreams come through, you have to start by setting goals that are within limits of achieving them in the time frame you've set.
Timed- A timed goal keeps you focused and as a matter of fact, reminds you that time waits for no one.

These would help you identify whether your marketing efforts paid off or not.

So, if your objective is to grow website traffic by 20% in two months, your plan could entail activities like, increasing or improving website content, improving the visual appeal of your website, and enhancing website visibility on search sites. (These are examples).

Acting upon your plan is the real deal. This is where you go in and get your hands dirty and really do the work. So, you've set out to increase website traffic with a plan to increase website content. Act entails, developing a content strategy or roadmap, and actually creating those contents that would be used on your site to attract audience or traffic. Content range from blogs, to articles, to videos, infographics, images, slideshows, etc.

The key is identifying the type of content that interests your target customers.
How do you identify these content? By monitoring contents that get the most views, and engagements.

If you plan to improve the visual appeal of your site, then you know you will be needing the services of a web or graphic designer or developer.

Planning helps you identify also, the resources and manpower to be deployed to a marketing campaign.
Here is a sample


Why do you need to observe your actions? This is to enable you identify what strategy is working and which isn't, to measure the effectiveness of your marketing effort. This is very important because it helps to minimise cost and most importantly, prevent waste of resources including time, funds, energy.
How do you observe?

If your activities involve boosting visibility of your website on search engines like Google or bing, you must have deployed search engine optimisation techniques or even conducted some paid search adverts.

You must observe the performance of that advert, measure and compare the traffic status of your website before and during the ad campaign. This way you can assess if money spent on adverts was well spent or not.

You may be wondering how to get this information or data. The simple stats of your website will do but they don't give detailed data or reports like say, Google Analytics. And if you really are not the type that likes to deal with data or does not understand digital analytics, you can hire a freelance digital marketer (like me*😀*) or an agency. Lol.

More importantly, your plan at the beginning would have let you know if you would need to hire one.


You definitely must reflect on your effort to see what really paid off and what needs to be axed. Reflecting helps you re-strategise and improve on areas that need improvement.

You can always contact me for a free consultation with your questions and I'm always willing to help.



  1. Very insightful , thanks for sharing.

    1. Thanks for visiting Fela. Glad you found it "insightful"


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