Digital Marketing
Why creating a strong digital marketing strategy is key to success

Direction is more important than speed. You can go fast facing the wrong way!
SOZO’s Marketing Director explains why creating a clear strategy should always be the first step in your digital marketing journey.
“Growing your brand online generally doesn’t happen by chance. It takes careful planning, implementation and ongoing analysis. Without establishing a clear vision and strategy, your brand growth is almost certainly going to underperform.”
That’s according to Joseph Hirst, SOZO’s Marketing Director.
With over 30 years’ experience in design and marketing, including running his own digital agency for 20 years, Joseph helps clients to align their business goals with digital marketing. Here, he explains what a good digital marketing strategy looks like and why it’s the best way to measure successful online growth.
Do all key stakeholders agree with a clear business vision?
Prior to developing your digital marketing strategy, it’s essential to make sure that all key stakeholders align to a business vision. That vision can be company, service, recognition, objective or financially-based – or a mix of all these driving factors.
You may wish to launch a new service under an existing brand.
- What is the core purpose of that service and who will benefit from it?
- What are your revenue expectations?
- Do you want to be viewed as another brand offering that service, or a market leader with an award-winning level of delivery?
- Have you completed comprehensive market research from all stakeholder perspectives to both justify your service and determine what it will take to succeed?
Or, you may need to consider a total rebrand.
- Do all stakeholders agree if or why the rebrand is needed?
- What are your one, three and five-year plans for the business?
- What values will be aligned to the brand?
Whatever the project, ensuring your vision and team are aligned will lead to a much smoother conversation about the next step… digital marketing strategy!
Why is a strong digital marketing strategy crucial to brand success?
Digital marketing flows across all aspects of business. It can help you paint a complete picture about what you’re looking to achieve, who you’re looking to attract, what your USPs and service specialisms are, and what you wish to gain in relation to enquiries and product sales.
It allows you to focus on key micro goals, allowing you to measure success in line with your broader long-term goal. If you don’t have a strong digital marketing strategy in place, you and your team may struggle to achieve an overall vision.
It’s tempting to get excited about how to take your services and products to market. But, if you haven’t done the groundwork, you’ll end up launching your brand without direction, ultimately wasting time, money and resources. For example, on an implementation level, if a search specialist doesn’t understand your business before they begin their campaign, they may help you achieve page 1 of Google for the wrong search terms.
How has digital marketing strategy changed over the last 2 years?
Over the last 2 years, AI and changing customer expectations have caused an exponential shift in user behaviour. Potential customers are increasingly researching and comparing key information before making final purchasing decisions. Now, it’s less about directing customers straight to their end destination and more about taking customers on a full marketing journey. This starts with brand awareness and involves engaging with the customer at all the relevant points of their buying journey.
In the industry, we call this approach funnel marketing. We are increasingly achieving better results when we develop fully integrated digital marketing strategies with our clients that engage their customers at the top of the funnel, guiding them all the way through to their final transaction.
Top of Funnel
Casting the net wide to capture a vast audience of users who may be interested in your product or service.
Middle Funnel
Delivering valuable content to the audience you have built and nurturing them with the information they need to make a buying decision.
Bottom of Funnel
Providing messaging to those who have shown true purchase intent.
What are some common mistakes people make when creating a digital marketing strategy?
There are a few common mistakes that people make when trying to create their own digital marketing strategy. Looking inwardly, rather than outwardly, is a classic example. It’s so easy to have a ‘we first’ bias; we are the most competitive, we have the best website, we offer the best service. But, you need to turn that around and take an honest look at your brand as a potential client would view it.
Try asking yourself the following questions: Have you built up enough material to demonstrate your authority and expertise to somebody who is discovering your brand for the first time? Is there compelling evidence to show that your brand is trustworthy? If not, there’s work to be done.
Another common oversight that may be aligned with a ‘we first’ approach is not conducting the correct market research. You need to know who your competitors are online and what your ideal customer looks like. Profiling your clients by service and product means you can target your content to the right audience. This will boost overall engagement and create opportunities for growth.
Again, it’s tempting to say ‘we’re going to market this service’ and ‘we’re going to communicate it using this tone of voice’. But, if you don’t conduct your research, your understanding of the market landscape may be lacking and you may not understand how to succeed amongst the competition.
Once you’ve gathered this information, take some time to analyse your USPs. You should be honest when choosing your USPs and ask yourself if they are actually unique. Sometimes, you can only offer the same as your competitors, so your USP may just be providing the same services but with a focus on quality or delivery.
Where do you feel the future of digital marketing is heading?
Further changes are on the horizon which will affect how we approach digital marketing. We predict that AI-driven results within SERPS (Google Search Engine Result Pages) will continue to influence digital marketing. This is already happening with Microsoft Copilot and Google SGE (Search Generative Experience), which essentially sees Chat GPT/Gemini embedded into a search browser, providing generative AI within the results.
With all these exciting new developments, strategy is more important than ever before. Through thousands of data points collecting customer signals, Google understands and predicts user behaviour that will help you target your audience. However, you still need a clear strategy in place to establish who that audience is, what their persona, location and requirements are, and how best to interact with them.
Another key shift in the future of digital marketing is privacy changes. We are already seeing the impact of the death of third party cookies in popular browsers such as Google Chrome. This is being compounded by regulatory changes within the European Economic Area (EEA) which mandates that large data organisations such as Google, Meta and Amazon are now responsible for data processed by their users.
All these changes point to an increasingly privacy-first internet, which ultimately means that much of the data, tracking and optimisation visibility achieved by marketers over the past 10 years or so is changing. Digital marketers are now receiving less platform and analytics data, instead shifting over to first party data strategies and new forms of measuring performance.
A key early example of this is Meta’s decision to radically change targeting within their advertising platform. Historically, advertisers could choose from a seemingly never ending list of user behaviours and interests to niche down to specific audience subsets. Vast amounts of this targeting is being phased out over the next 6 – 12 months from the time of writing.
To bridge the gap, Meta is now pushing its own AI targeting algorithm ‘Advantage+’, which can be directed by signal data such as your existing customer, lookalike or broader demographic data. The effectiveness of this data remains unclear, with early indications showing mixed results depending on the advertiser, market, audience signal and spend levels.
Why do you think SOZO excels at creating digital marketing strategies?
Here at SOZO, we have the knowledge and expertise to help brands grow from start-up to successful £5m+ turnover ecommerce sites. We offer a complete 360 degree approach to digital marketing. Individual client requirements are considered throughout the digital marketing journey, beginning from the creation of your brand, through to website design and build, before finally launching to market. This approach also allows us to create synergy between our core marketing channels, such as SEO, paid search marketing, paid social media and email automation.
Our digital marketing team also excels at offering attribution and performance measurement. By analysing this data, we can see which digital marketing channels are performing well or not, allowing us to determine what each customer’s long-term journey looks like. This then allows us to validate our strategy and informs client spend.
What digital marketing results have you seen from SOZO clients?
We create fully integrated digital marketing strategies for every SOZO client; it’s all part of the conversation. Clients may approach us because they are not achieving any meaningful results, so we always take it back to strategy. It’s essential to keep challenging if we’re heading in the right direction. If we’re not, it’s our job to help clients get back on track.
Check out our case studies and discover how our digital marketing strategies have helped clients grow their businesses.
Level Up Your Digital Marketing Strategy with SOZO
Having a clear vision is the first step to producing a successful digital marketing strategy, which is necessary for achieving brand awareness and growth. With so many new developments in the digital marketing space, it can be difficult to keep up with the changes and determine which path you should be taking.
If you’re looking to create a show-stopping digital marketing strategy, please email joseph@sozodesign.co.uk to discuss your requirements.
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