Digital marketing strategy examples
Four worked digital marketing strategy examples — a local practice, a B2B SaaS company, an ecommerce brand and a professional services firm — each showing the objective, audience, priority channels, the channels deliberately excluded, and the single primary metric. A one-page strategy template is included as an editable Word document and a PDF.
- EXAMPLE
- TEMPLATE
- DOCX
- FREE
- Best for
- Anyone writing a marketing plan for a business or a client
- Includes
- Word template + four worked examples (PDF)
- Time to use
- 60–90 minutes
Free to download and use in your own client work. No email address required.
Created by Alston Antony 15+ years in search and digital marketing Updated
A strategy is not a list of everything you could do. It is the shorter document that says what you will not do, and why.
That is the hardest part to write, so the framework below puts it in its own field. Four worked examples follow, covering deliberately different demand patterns.
The one-page strategy framework
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Business objective | The commercial result. One sentence, with a number and a date |
| Marketing objective | What marketing must deliver for that to happen |
| Audience | Who specifically, their situation, and the trigger that starts their search |
| Offer and positioning | What you sell and why it gets chosen over the alternative |
| Priority channels | No more than three. Say why each, and what it is for |
| Channels explicitly not used | Naming these is what makes it a strategy |
| Key messages | Two or three claims you will repeat everywhere |
| Measurement | The one number that says it is working, plus supporting metrics |
| Budget | Split between media, production and tools |
| Biggest risk | What would make this fail, and what you will do about it |
Why three channels is the ceiling
Three is not a stylistic preference. Each channel needs someone who understands it, enough budget to leave the noise floor, and enough time to produce a readable result. Below a certain investment per channel you get four channels’ worth of inconclusive data instead of two channels’ worth of answers.
Digital marketing strategy examples
Four businesses with genuinely different demand patterns. The point of reading all four is to see how the channel choice follows from how customers arrive, not from what is fashionable.
Local dental practice
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Objective | Fill 30 additional private appointment slots a month within six months |
| Audience | Adults within a 20-minute drive who have just had a problem, or are unhappy with their current practice |
| Priority channels | Local search and Google Business Profile; paid search on treatment terms; reactivation email to lapsed patients |
| Explicitly not using | Instagram content production, national SEO, print |
| Primary metric | Booked appointments from new patients |
Why this shape: almost all the demand is triggered by a local, high-intent search. Awareness spend would be wasted while local search capture is still incomplete — and the lapsed-patient list is the cheapest demand in the business, which is why it beats any new channel.
B2B SaaS, 20 to 60 seats
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Objective | Increase qualified demos from 25 to 60 a month within four quarters |
| Audience | Operations leads at mid-sized companies who have outgrown spreadsheets and been told to fix a process |
| Priority channels | Comparison and alternative-to content; product-led free tier; paid search on competitor and category terms |
| Explicitly not using | Broad top-of-funnel blogging, events, display |
| Primary metric | Demos booked that meet the qualification criteria |
Why this shape: these buyers arrive already comparing options. The content that wins is decision-stage, not educational — which is why the broad blogging that most SaaS companies default to is explicitly excluded.
Ecommerce, single product line
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Objective | Reach a blended ROAS of 3.0 at double the current monthly revenue |
| Audience | Repeat-purchase customers plus first-time buyers discovering the category through social |
| Priority channels | Paid social for discovery; paid search for capture; email and SMS for repeat purchase |
| Explicitly not using | Marketplace listings, influencer gifting, TikTok organic |
| Primary metric | Blended ROAS across all channels |
Why this shape: the metric choice is the strategic decision here. Per-platform ROAS double counts when several platforms claim the same sale; blended ROAS is the only figure that matches the bank account, and choosing it changes which campaigns look successful.
Professional services firm
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Objective | Generate 12 qualified enquiries a month for one high-value service |
| Audience | Business owners facing a trigger event such as a sale, dispute or regulatory change |
| Priority channels | Depth content on the trigger event; targeted search; referral partner outreach |
| Explicitly not using | Paid social, general brand content, newsletters |
| Primary metric | Enquiries matching the qualification criteria |
Why this shape: volume is irrelevant at this deal size. Twelve right enquiries beat two hundred wrong ones, and optimising for cost per enquiry would actively damage the business.
These are illustrative
The businesses above are composites used to demonstrate the framework. The figures are not real client results and should not be treated as benchmarks for your own planning.
Choosing the KPIs for a strategy
Each example names one primary metric on purpose. The most common planning mistake is picking four “key” metrics, which means none of them is key and nobody is accountable for any.
Use this shape: one primary metric that decides whether the strategy worked, two supporting metrics that explain movement in it, and one guardrail that must not get worse while you chase the primary.
| Business type | Primary metric | Supporting | Guardrail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local practice | Booked appointments from new patients | Local pack impressions; call volume | Cost per booked appointment |
| B2B SaaS | Demos meeting the qualification criteria | Free-tier signups; comparison-page sessions | Demo-to-opportunity rate |
| Ecommerce | Blended ROAS | New-customer share; repeat purchase rate | Contribution margin per order |
| Professional services | Qualified enquiries | Trigger-event content sessions; referral introductions | Enquiry-to-consultation rate |
Two rules that make the difference:
- The primary metric must be something one named person is accountable for. “Brand awareness” has no owner. “Qualified enquiries” does.
- The guardrail is what stops the primary metric being gamed. Chase enquiries without watching quality and you will get more enquiries and less revenue — which looks like success in a report and like failure in the bank.
Once chosen, these are the rows that go in the monthly report. If a metric is not in the strategy, it does not belong in the report’s summary either.
What a written strategy is missing if it fits on one page
The framework deliberately excludes three things people expect to see, because they belong elsewhere:
- Tactics and campaign detail — those go in a campaign brief, which has a start and end date.
- Channel-by-channel audits of what is currently broken — that is the audit, and it should be done before the strategy, not inside it.
- Month-by-month activity plans — these change constantly and would make the strategy look out of date within a quarter, which is how strategies stop being read.
Turning the strategy into work
A one-page strategy is not a plan. Once the page is agreed, the next artefacts are a campaign brief for anything with a start and end date, and a monthly report tracking the primary metric. If you cannot map a piece of planned work back to a field on the strategy page, that is usually a sign the work is habit rather than strategy.