A digital marketing strategy sets out how you’ll use online channels to reach customers and achieve your business goals.
In Shopify’s Q4 2025 survey of store owners,* marketing (37%) and finding customers (36%) topped the list of first-year challenges. If you face the same challenges, a strategy gives you a plan for reaching customers instead of a set of one-off tactics.
This guide explains the main digital marketing strategy frameworks, gives you a free plan template, and walks through six steps to build your strategy, with examples from real brands.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan for using digital channels and platforms––including search engines, email, social media, and online advertising––to reach customers and achieve business goals. An effective digital strategy integrates clear goals, a defined target audience, channel- or platform-specific plans, and a system for tracking results.
Your broader marketing strategy guides positioning, pricing, and promotion across online and offline touchpoints. Your digital marketing strategy details how online activity specifically supports the broader plan. Digital marketing tactics are the defined actions that fulfill the digital strategy, for example, running Instagram ads to introduce your products to new shoppers.
What are owned, earned, and paid media in a digital marketing strategy?
Owned, earned, and paid media are three types of media your digital marketing strategy can combine:
- Owned media: Content you publish and manage, such as your blog, product pages, and emails. Organic social posts also fit here.
- Earned media: Published coverage about your business that you didn’t pay for, for example, a magazine profile, inclusion in an editorial gift guide, or a customer review.
- Paid media: Placements you pay for, including search ads, social media ads, and sponsored creator content.
Hero Packaging , for example, used Google Ads (paid) to send shoppers searching for sustainable packaging to a landing page (owned). Their free-sample offer attracted 1,000 sign-ups in a week , building an email list before launch.
The main digital marketing strategy frameworks
The frameworks below can help you structure your digital marketing strategy and measure its progress.
| Framework | How it works | How to apply it to your store |
|---|---|---|
| RACE | Stands for reach, act, convert, and engage, with goals and metrics for each stage. | Plan how you’ll attract visitors, encourage actions like email sign-ups, convert purchases, and earn repeat orders. Track each step to identify where performance needs attention. |
| AIDA | A staged approach that describes the customer journey from awareness through to interest, desire, and action. | Organize a landing page or campaign to catch shoppers’ attention, explain a product’s relevance, and provide a clear call to action. |
| Inbound marketing | Publish content to build an audience around a specific topic, then sell them related products. For example, Epic Gardening built a blog before selling raised beds . | Answer shoppers’ buying questions with searchable guides and follow up on purchases with relevant emails and tutorials. |
| Growth hacking | Generate, prioritize, and test ideas, then apply your findings. | Test a specific hypothesis, such as whether a product demonstration increases add-to-cart rates . Define success before launching the experiment. |
| The marketing funnel model | Map marketing across attention, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. | Match activity to customer needs: e.g., publish comparison guides before purchase, replenishment reminders after, and send referral codes to satisfied customers. |
Your best approach depends on your business goals; you can also combine frameworks. For supplement-drink brand Morning Recovery , that meant integrating funnel planning with growth-hacking experiments.
The brand tested sending visitors directly to their store versus sending them to a Business Insider article first. Founder Sisun Lee said that even though it added a step to their funnel, the article-first route converted better overall: shoppers needed reassurance before buying.
Your digital marketing plan template
Shopify’s free marketing plan template includes prompts and examples for defining your audience, comparing competitors, and setting quarterly budgets and goals. For each channel, you can map content to a funnel stage, list the tools you’ll need, and set a measurable target.
You also get a quarterly results tracker and space to record what worked and what needs changing.
How to create a digital marketing strategy in 6 steps
- Define and understand your target audience
- Set your marketing goals
- Establish your budget and tech stack
- Select marketing tactics to attract, nurture, and convert customers
- Focus on your differentiators
- Define a way to track results
A successful digital marketing strategy begins with understanding your audience, setting goals, establishing your budget, choosing your tactics, clarifying your differentiators, and deciding how you’ll measure results.
1. Define and understand your target audience
Find out what prompts people to buy, where they research products, and what makes them hesitate. Those answers should guide your channel choices and messaging.
Combine customer conversations with evidence from your store:
- Interview recent buyers. Ask what triggered their search, which alternatives they considered, and why they chose you. If you haven’t yet launched, speak to people who buy similar products.
- Send a short survey. Ask customers where they first heard about you and what nearly stopped them from ordering; use the responses to identify discovery channels and barriers to purchase.
- Read reviews and support conversations. Look for recurring complaints, unexpected uses, and the words customers use to describe benefits. Also check competitors’ reviews for needs your product could address.
- Examine buying patterns. In Shopify, go to Analytics > Reports and filter by Customers . The Returning customers report shows order counts and spending, helping you identify repeat buyers to interview.
Before launching, the toothbrush brand Suri used surveys and interviews to uncover weak brand loyalty: many people couldn’t name their current toothbrush brand. That finding helped shape their product and branding.
“We ran a lot of surveys,” says Cofounder Gyve Safavi . “We started with cheap surveys, any survey we could get that were not friends and family. We used SurveyMonkey, Attest, and then we did in-person interviews.”
2. Set your marketing goals
Choose a business outcome, then put a number and deadline against it. Use your current performance to set SMART goals : specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
For example:
- To grow your email audience. Try “Add 300 new email subscribers in 90 days. ” Use Shopify Forms to collect sign-ups and review each form’s views, submissions, and completion rate.
- To acquire customers within budget. Try “Acquire 100 new customers this quarter at a campaign acquisition cost of $25 or less.” Use Shop Campaigns to set a target average acquisition cost and a daily budget; then choose your ceiling based on product margins and other selling costs.
The footwear brand Kizik wanted to reach new customers at the same or lower acquisition cost as their existing channels. For them, Shop Campaigns brought in more than 13,000 new customers in 2023.
“Every brand who has digital-savvy consumers should be using this [Shop Campaigns],” says Jesse Semchuck, former head of acquisition.
3. Establish your budget and tech stack
Set a monthly marketing budget you can sustain while testing your strategy. And as you do, account for four types of spending:
- People: Employees, freelancers, or agencies; if you’re doing the work yourself, estimate the hours you can commit each week.
- Tools: Subscriptions for email marketing, keyword research, scheduling, and reporting, including fees that increase with usage.
- Content production: Copywriting, photography, video, design, and equipment.
- Distribution: Advertising spend, influencer fees, and affiliate commissions.
Choose your marketing tech stack , the software you’ll use to execute and measure your plan, around your first campaigns (you can always add more programs later as you expand). For an email sign-up campaign, for example, you need a form, an email tool, and reporting.
Shopify includes tools for email sign-up campaigns––and more:
- Shopify Forms is free to install; use it to collect subscribers.
- Shopify Messaging includes 10,000 email sends per month on Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus plans, with charges beyond that allowance.
- Shopify Flow is free on the plans above and automates recurring tasks without coding.
- Shopify Inbox provides free store chat to answer shoppers’ questions and help them find products.
- Shopify Audiences builds audience lists for ad targeting and is free to eligible Shopify Plus stores using Shopify Payments in the US or Canada.
- Shopify Analytics brings store traffic, sales, and customer insights into your admin.
For example, the pet lifestyle brand FunnyFuzzy combined these tools as they expanded internationally. They used Shopify Audiences to refine ad targeting and lower customer acquisition costs (CAC), while Shopify Flow automated remarketing messages based on shoppers’ browsing behavior. Those follow-up marketing emails helped bring shoppers back to complete their purchases, increasing the conversion rate by more than 40% .
“With Shopify’s Plus plan, we transformed our approach to global expansion, achieving remarkable growth in sales and customer loyalty,” says Founder Chen Shuo.
4. Select marketing tactics to attract, nurture, and convert customers
Decide how you’ll bring potential customers to your store and what will help them buy once they arrive. Beard care store Beardbrand’ s experiences show how different tactics can support different stages:
- Attract customers by answering questions they’re already searching for. Beardbrand publishes YouTube grooming tutorials and adapts them into searchable articles, including a guide to trimming a beard. You can apply this by creating content around a problem that your product solves.
- Nurture interest by helping shoppers understand what suits them. Beardbrand’s customer quiz collects visitor information and provides grooming advice and product recommendations based on their answers. A product finder can give undecided shoppers a clear starting point.
- Encourage purchases by addressing the risk of choosing the wrong product. On their beard oil page, Beardbrand highlights free fragrance swaps and a 120-day refund window. Find out why your customers hesitate, and then explain the relevant policy near the time of purchase.
5. Focus on your differentiators
Your unique selling proposition (USP) should give customers a specific reason to choose you. Start with what customers value in your reviews, then compare it with competitors’ promises to identify a difference you can demonstrate in your marketing. For example:
- Ridge emphasizes slim wallets built for long-term use and backs that positioning with a lifetime warranty.
- Three Ships Beauty supports their transparency positioning with a searchable ingredient glossary; the product-page sourcing maps also let shoppers investigate where ingredients come from.
Make USP visible in your campaigns and on the pages they link to. If durability is the selling point, for example, show the product undergoing a wear test and link to the warranty.
6. Define a way to track results
Choose a metric that matches each goal before launching. For an email sign-up campaign, track new subscribers and cost per sign-up. For customer acquisition, calculate customer acquisition cost.
In Shopify’s Q4 2025 survey of store owners,* 30% of respondents with more than $1 million in revenue tracked CAC, compared with 5% of those under $100,000, a sixfold difference.
Once ecommerce tracking is configured, use Google Analytics 4’s (GA4) Traffic acquisition report to see which channels bring visitors to your site and how those visits contribute to purchases.
Shopify Campaigns lets you group related marketing activity , such as a launch newsletter and its social ads, into one campaign. You can create a separate tracking link for each placement, then compare attributed orders and sales by channel. The reports also distinguish orders from new and returning customers.
Types of digital marketing strategies
Here’s where and how different platforms, channels, and approaches can fit in your digital marketing strategy:
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO helps your store appear in unpaid search results and gives your website marketing strategy a way to reach people already researching a purchase. Google reported more than five trillion searches annually in 2025 .
Start with the questions your customers ask, then build product pages and buying guides that answer them.
Shopify handles technical SEO automatically, including sitemaps and canonical tags that identify preferred page versions.
A generative engine optimization (GEO) strategy extends this work to AI-generated recommendations. Shopify’s Q1 2026 data shows AI chatbot referral sessions grew more than eightfold year over year, while AI-referred orders grew nearly thirteenfold.
Google says SEO fundamentals still apply, so make your content accessible to search engines and provide original information that helps shoppers decide.
Content marketing
Content marketing aims to give customers useful information, such as a tutorial that solves a problem or a buying guide that explains their options. In turn, that education can influence purchases. In Wyzowl’s 2026 survey , 85% of respondents said watching a video had convinced them to buy a product or service.
Your Shopify store includes a blog where you can publish guides with embedded demonstrations and links to the products featured. Start with a question customers regularly ask before buying, and make the next step relevant to the answer.
For example, Epic Gardening ’s blog includes advice on selecting plants, tips for starting seeds, and advice on how to help your plants thrive.
You can also schedule blog posts on Shopify to coincide with product launches.
Email marketing
Email marketing lets you stay in touch with people who’ve opted in to hear from your brand. You can tailor messages to their purchase history, so first-time buyers get different advice and offers than frequent customers.
Email marketing punches above its weight: In Klaviyo’s 2026 email marketing benchmarks , automated email flows drove nearly 41% of email revenue from just 5.3% of sends.
Linking your store data to your email platform can help you tailor your messaging. Dollar Shave Club , for instance, once needed developer help for every email, and segmenting customers could take more than a month. After adopting the Shopify-Klaviyo integration , their marketers now personalize campaigns with little technical help and have cut campaign setup time by more than 60%.
Affiliate marketing
An affiliate program lets customers or creators earn commissions on sales they refer through a tracked link or coupon code. Since payment depends on sales, it’s a form of performance marketing. Set commissions your margins can support, and factor in the cost of any samples you send.
The ramen brand Immi started by sending creators samples and inviting interested recipients into their “Ram Fam” affiliate community. They used Shopify Collabs to manage gifting and affiliate commissions, and generated more than $200,000 in affiliate sales within a few months.
“The platform saves us so much time with really easy-to-use features for affiliate tracking, gifting, and commission tracking,” says Simal Adenwala, former senior manager of brand and growth.
Influencer marketing
In influencer marketing, creators feature your products in content for their audiences. An influencer might charge a fixed fee for a demonstration, while an affiliate earns commission on referred sales; the same partnership can include both structures.
IAB expects US creator advertising to reach $44 billion in 2026 , nearly triple its value in 2021. Speakers at IAB’s 2026 CreatorFronts recommended involving creators before the brief is finalized and giving them room to develop content their audience will respond to.
Shopify Collabs helps you manage these relationships by keeping collaboration and gifting history in each creator’s profile.
Social media marketing
In social media marketing, you use platforms like Instagram and TikTok to build an audience and put your products into people’s daily browsing. YouTube reaches 84% of US adults and Facebook 71%. Half of US adults use Instagram, and 37% use TikTok, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey . And, DHL’s 2026 survey found that 45% of shoppers purchase directly through social commerce channels.
Glossier’s Instagram page shows how product education can fit into a brand’s feed, with eyebrow tutorials alongside close-ups of makeup shades.
Give your followers something they can try themselves, then make the featured product easy to find. Shopify’s Facebook and Instagram by Meta channel syncs your catalog so eligible stores can tag products in Instagram posts and stories.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
SEM puts paid ads in front of people searching for products like yours; with cost-per-click pricing, you pay whenever those searchers click to your site. You can reach shoppers while they’re considering a purchase, without waiting for your pages to rank organically.
WordStream’s 2026 benchmarks put average search advertising costs for Google Ads at $5.42 per click . Start with a small budget and track which searches produce profitable orders.
For product ads, Shopify’s Google & YouTube channel syncs your catalog with Google Merchant Center . You can also edit product titles and descriptions for Google Shopping , helping shoppers recognize whether an item matches their search.
Video marketing
Video marketing uses filmed or animated content to promote your products and help customers understand them. In Wyzowl’s 2026 survey , 63% of consumers said they’d prefer a short video when learning about a product or service.
Start with something shoppers need to see, such as how a garment fits or how to assemble your product.
For promotional clips, Tinker by Shopify is a free mobile app that can turn existing product photos into AI-generated videos. Upload an image and describe what you want to create, then refine the result with written instructions.
Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing reaches customers on their phones through channels such as SMS and in-app advertising. SMS can deliver time-sensitive offers: Klaviyo’s 2026 benchmarks classify a good SMS campaign click rate at 5.6% .
Give subscribers a specific reason to act, such as early access to a collection they’ve been waiting for.
You can use Shopify Messaging to manage SMS (and email campaigns) in your Shopify admin, sending texts to opted-in customers in supported countries.
Examples of successful digital marketing strategies
These ecommerce brands on Shopify show how individual tactics can support a larger plan , from helping shoppers choose a product to giving them a reason to return.
Alo Yoga
Alo gives people reasons to engage with the brand between activewear purchases. Their yoga pose library includes expert tutorials and modifications, while their Pro Program gives certified fitness professionals in their community 25% off apparel.
Both initiatives connect the brand with the practice their products are designed for. The brand currently has nearly four million followers on Instagram .
Alo also connects celebrity exposure directly to shopping with their influencer marketing. Their website features an “ As Seen on Kendall and Kylie ” section, letting visitors shop the looks associated with their paid ambassadors.
Rare Beauty
Rare Beauty links discovery to purchase in their owned media. A four-step shade finder on their website guides visitors to the right foundation, and an online-only collection gives them a reason to buy direct.
Rare Beauty also uses in-person events to grow their digital audience. At a Los Angeles pop-up in January 2026, guests could tap souvenir photos with their phones to unlock a Selena Gomez video and browse products in the Shop app . In return for personalized blush recommendations, visitors shared their email addresses to receive a redemption code.
The campaign generated more than 700 pieces of organic user-generated content (UGC) and approximately four million earned social impressions , extending their reach through attendees’ posts while directing interested shoppers to their products.
Caraway
Caraway’s digital marketing starts with the decisions people make while stocking a kitchen. Their blog explains how to choose cake pan sizes and clean ceramic cookware, giving shoppers practical advice related to the products they sell.
The brand extends that education through their partners. Their affiliate program supplies bloggers with products and keyword guidance, while their ambassador program rewards creators for ongoing content.
On Caraway’s own website, videos show people demonstrating kitchen tools in their homes.
Caraway also tested Shop Campaigns to reach new customers through exclusive offers in the Shop app. The channel generated more than $1 million in revenue in 2023, at an acquisition cost comparable to their other channels.
“We were looking for efficient customer acquisition, and we found it,” says Connor Dault, vice president of growth and digital product.
*Based on a November 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with two or more years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.
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Digital marketing strategy FAQ
What are the 5 main strategies of digital marketing?
The five main digital marketing strategies are search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and paid advertising . Each serves a different purpose, from increasing online visibility to encouraging repeat purchases.
An integrated digital marketing strategy connects the channels your customers use—for example, promoting a buying guide on social media networks and following up with subscribers through email.
Why do you need a digital marketing strategy?
An effective digital marketing strategy connects your marketing efforts to business objectives and helps you decide where to spend your budget. If your priority is repeat purchases, for example, customer emails may deserve more attention than reaching new audiences.
A clear marketing objective also gives you a basis for evaluating results and deciding which activities to continue.
How do beginners start digital marketing?
Start your own digital marketing plan with a specific customer group and one measurable goal, such as generating 50 email sign-ups in a month.
Choose a channel those customers already use, and give them a reason to visit your website or subscribe. Set a budget you can sustain, then review which activities generate leads or sales before expanding.
What is the 70-20-10 rule in digital marketing?
The 70-20-10 rule is a flexible budgeting guideline: allocate 70% to proven activities, 20% to promising opportunities, and 10% to experiments. This leaves room to test ideas while continuing to fund what works. Adjust the proportions based on your results resources; a new business will need to establish which activities deserve ongoing investment.
How do you measure the success of a digital marketing strategy?
Measure results against the goals you set before launching your digital marketing campaigns. For customer acquisition, track new customers and acquisition cost; for customer retention, monitor repeat purchases. Then compare results with your starting point over a defined period.
