20-Second Summary
When it comes to the growth of a business in the digital world, digital marketing is the first thought for any business. But working on a digital marketing strategy without a Digital Marketing Strategist might not be a sound idea for a business.
This guide will explain exactly why you need a digital marketing strategist for your business marketing goals.
From the introduction of the role to differentiating it from the Digital marketing consultant, their frameworks, strategies, tools, analytical approach, and the emerging trends that will impact the job role of marketing strategist, this blog has it all.
You will not only understand their role, but also know if you really need to hire them, and why exactly they will fit best for your business strategy.
What Is a Digital Marketing Strategist?
A professional who gets involved in formulating the long-term digital marketing strategy of a business for multiple online channels in which they are operating is known as the digital marketing specialist.
This strategy is based on their expertise, based on the analysis of the:
- Market research done on the target audience and competition
- Emerging trends with new business opportunities
- Brand strategy based on the brand message and voice
With the increase in the global online shopping market, and mobile making up the 59% of the web traffic, people are now converting more based on the video content, and social media experience, which is making the need to have a digital marketing strategist essential for the brands and businesses to effectively grow and reach a wider audience increasing their ROI on their digital marketing activities.
Core Responsibilities & Essential Skills for Strategy Excellence
The core responsibility of a digital marketing strategist, in a nutshell, is to conduct market search and develop data-driven digital marketing strategies based on the specific long-term goals of the business for different online channels.
Their core responsibilities include the following:
- Conducting market research for identifying new opportunities or to look for competitors’ gaps.
- Creating digital marketing plans and campaigns to fill the gaps and capture the opportunities.
- Planning, launching, and monitoring the campaigns in collaboration with different departments.
- Analyzing the results from campaigns to measure the campaign’s success and add more strategies for further improvements.
- Continuously overseeing the campaigns and the growth on the marketing platforms to stay ahead and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing strategies.
Actual Role and Duties of a Digital Marketing Strategist
While they strategize for the business and act as a bridge between their goals, and the action-based strategies, they are not necessarily involved in the day-to-day execution of these strategies, but they oversee different departments, coordinating with their team specialists to ensure all the strategy based activities are being performed, leading them closer to the results and analytics to figure out if it is working, and where it needs more improvements.
Who Implements Strategies of a Digital Marketing Strategist
The teams that implement the strategies of the digital marketing strategists include:
- Content creators to develop content such as blog posts, videos, newsletters, etc., as outlined in the content strategy.
- SEO specialists implement the optimization strategies and ensure the content and website platform are optimized for search engines.
- Social Media Marketers manage the social media campaigns advised by the strategists, engage with the audience, analyze the results, and report back to the strategists.
- Web Developers work on website-related tasks like website optimization, maintenance, and development.
- Paid Media Specialists optimize paid campaigns based on the strategies and budget provided to them.
Essential Skills of a Digital Marketing Strategist
When it comes to defining the major skill set that every digital marketing strategist must have, we need to know that being a strategist and having to deal with different departments, they need not just technical skills, but some soft skills are also a must-have for them.
Technical Skills of a Digital Marketing Strategist
The technical skills that they must have include:
- Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are both crucial for the success of any business online, and a strategist must be an expert in these two domains.
- Content Creation and Content Marketing, because even if they are not going to create the content, they must be aware of how certain types of content should be to align with the business and marketing goals.
- Data and Analytics, because they must know how to analyze the results from the campaigns to generate reports for each marketing campaign channel and department, to determine what worked well, and what needs more work.
- Paid Advertising, because digital marketing involves both paid and organic approaches for growth, and with good knowledge of paid social media advertising, they can know exactly how much budget to allocate to get maximum ROI and avoid any losses.
- Strategic Thinking, because they need to be able to see a bigger picture for setting rightful and achievable goals based on the customer needs and market competition, for developing long-term strategies for driving business growth.
Soft Skills of a Digital Marketing Strategist
Key soft skills that a digital marketing strategist must possess include:
- Strong communication skills to be able to talk to both clients and the teams they will be collaborating with to implement their strategies, along with the additional skill of taking both positive and negative feedback and catering to them with effective dialogue to ensure the campaigns’ success and overall audience engagement.
- Skills related to problem-solving are necessary to solve any issues among the teams when they occur and identify the root causes that may affect the organization.
- Creativity is another core soft skill, because they need to be creative enough to design and create strategies and campaigns based on emerging industry trends while supporting content creation and wider marketing activities across various industries.
- They should also have the ability to handle urgent issues, adapt to new platforms and algorithm shifts, and recover quickly from experiments that fail, especially when campaign management impacts business goals and key stakeholders.
Strategy Frameworks & Methodologies That Drive Results
Now that we know about marketing strategists and their core skills, let us dive deep into the strategy frameworks and methodologies that they use.
Strategy Framework of Digital Marketing Strategists
Digital marketing strategists rely on proven strategy frameworks to guide decision-making, optimize marketing activities, and align campaigns with business goals. The table below maps each framework to its purpose, process, and the situations where it delivers the strongest impact across various industries.
| Framework | What It Does | How It Works | Where It’s Most Effective |
| 5-Step Proprietary Framework | Breaks strategy into clear, repeatable phases for the organization | Define goals, research, plan campaigns, execute marketing activities, and analyze results using historical data | Marketing roadmap, campaign management, resource allocation, performance analysis |
| SOSTAC | Creates a structured planning system that supports business goals | Assess situation, set objectives, define strategy, plan tactics, implement actions, and control outcomes to align with the company’s KPIs and key stakeholders | Strategic planning, securing buy-in, and organization-wide alignment |
| RACE Framework | Manages the full digital journey across a specified period | Reach potential customers, drive action, convert leads, and engage audience through social media platforms and landing pages | Multi-channel marketing, audience engagement, sales funnel optimization |
| Jobs-to-be-Done | Identifies what potential customers want to achieve | Map customer jobs, analyze motivations and root causes, uncover consumer behavior, and inform content strategy | Consumer behavior insights, content creation, and messaging across various industries |
| AIDA Model | Guides users from awareness to conversion | Capture Attention, build Interest, create Desire, prompt Action, while tracking marketing activities and audience engagement | Sales funnel stages, content creation, and advertising |
| Funnel Framework | Visualizes customer movement across funnel stages | Map top, middle, and bottom funnel stages, optimize touchpoints, and analyze performance at each stage | Conversion optimization, nurturing potential customers |
| OKR Framework | Aligns teams around measurable outcomes | Set Objectives, define Key Results, monitor progress, adjust marketing budget, and resource allocation | Organization-wide clarity, business goals alignment, and key stakeholder buy-in |
| SWOT Analysis | Evaluates strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats | Conduct internal and external assessment, analyze historical data, prioritize key actions | Competitive analysis, digital marketing audit across various industries |
| PESTLE Analysis | Scans macro factors affecting strategy | Evaluate the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental trends, and identify the impact on the organization | Long-term planning, risk management, and strategy across various industries |
| Porter’s Five Forces | Analyzes competitive pressures | Assess Rivalry, Power of supplier, Buyer power, Threat of new entrants, Threat of substitutes to inform campaign strategy | Strategic positioning, market evaluation, resource allocation |
| Growth Loops Framework | Builds compounding growth systems | Create actions that generate outputs, feed outputs back into new cycles, monitor performance analysis, and audience engagement | Performance marketing, customer acquisition loops |
| North Star Metric Model | Defines a primary metric tied to the company’s success | Identify one guiding metric, track progress, align marketing activities with the company’s KPIs and business goals | KPI clarity, long-term decision alignment for key stakeholders |
| McKinsey 7S Framework | Checks internal alignment for smooth execution | Evaluate Strategy, Structure, Systems, Shared Values, Skills, Staff, Style, and optimize resource allocation | Organizational efficiency, internal coordination, campaign management |
| Balanced Scorecard | Tracks performance across four dimensions | Measure Financial, Customer, Internal Process, Learning metrics, analyze historical data, guide performance analysis, and marketing activities. | Holistic performance tracking, aligning marketing budget and the company’s KPIs |
Methodologies being used by Digital Marketing Strategists
The essential methodologies that they use include setting specific, measurable, and achievable SMART goals aligned with business goals.
- Focus on the buyer personas and profiling of your key customers to ensure your brand messages align with their needs and consumer behavior.
- Focusing on just three to five core content pillars at a time to better focus on strategy and engage the audience towards your marketing activities and campaign.
- Only choose the distribution channels and online platforms where your audience uses the most to maximize audience engagement.
- Since each channel has its own requirements, their strategies vary for different online channels and algorithms related to them.
- Using both paid and non-paid strategies together for a long-term approach, gaining initial traction with paid campaigns while building a sustainable content strategy organically.
- Maintaining company KPIs like conversions, engagement, leads, and landing pages, and keeping a close eye on them to extract insights from their results for timely campaign improvements and performance analysis.
- Another key methodology and strategy for an expert digital marketing strategist is not only to use their historical data, but also to keep an eye on emerging social media trends and their potential customers’ reaction to them, in order to come up with unique products or ideas to for capturing more market share by offering products based on new trends and pain points of their customers.
Real-World Case Studies: Strategic Decisions That Drove Growth
Now, let us have a close look at two major examples of strategic decisions, where a great digital marketing strategy brought success to Notion and Duolingo.
Notion: How Strategic Positioning Beat a $10B Marketing Budget
The Challenge: Notion was a new productivity tool trying to compete against giants like Microsoft OneNote and Evernote. The company had no major marketing budget, hence they had to think about something to outsmart their competition.
Digital Marketing Strategy the Business Chose
Notion conducted detailed audience research that revealed the real opportunity for them. They figured that instead of targeting the enterprise-level companies, they could target the content creators, students, and productivity enthusiasts who were hungry for something different in their budget.
- They marketed themselves as the “creator-first” platform and picked one audience segment, than chose to be an all-in-one platform like their competition.
- They built a multi-channel strategy that actually matched where their audience lived.
- TikTok for the young, trend-loving creators.
- Twitter for the tech community who wanted to talk about workflow.
- YouTube for people who actually want to learn and master the tool.
- They made a strategy for each platform, and none of the messages were identical; each was dedicated to its specific platform.
- Notion made its users want to talk about it. Word-of-mouth became their best marketing channel.
- Notion used zero-paid advertising and grew from nothing to millions of users without a traditional ad budget.
Results of Notion Marketing Strategy
- 4M+ users by 2021
- $10B valuation by 2024
- 95% of new users came from word-of-mouth and organic growth
- Became one of the highest-valued SaaS companies without major advertising spend
This case study shows that sometimes the best marketing ROI doesn’t come from spending more money, but it comes from understanding your audience better than your competitors do.
Duolingo: Conversion Optimization Through Strategic Customer Segmentation (2018-2024)
The Challenge: Duolingo was spending $1.50 to acquire every new user. But despite spending this much, the cost for acquiring the users was increasing causing unsustainable unit economics.
This required the company to change its strategy before executing new changes.
Digital Marketing Strategy the Business Chose
The strategists researched their customers and segmented them into two types. Type one was of those who were using the app generally for fun and gamification, and the second type of customers were serious learners requiring a structured curriculum to learn from the app.
New strategies were built for both types of customers
- For casual learners, they went viral with TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts with short, entertaining, gamified content that made learning fun.
- For serious learners, they invested in educational YouTube content, SEO-driven blog posts, and structured learning guides.
- The same product was being offered to two completely different positioning, customer types, and channels.
- Free tiers were generated for casual learners, and the paid tiers were for converting serious customers.
- The company tested messaging, pricing, and messaging for each stage of the customer journey, removing friction points to get more people from “free user” to “paying customer.”
- Instead of trying to be corporate and serious, they made learning fun through a consistent, entertaining social media presence,
- They raised brand awareness with the virility factor and word-of-mouth strategy.
- KPIs measurement played a key role
- They tracked which audience segment was spending money
- Which channels were actually profitable
- Which messaging was driving conversions?
- Data-driven decisions replaced guesses.
Results of Duolingo Marketing Strategy
- User acquisition cost dropped 99% ($1.50 → $0.10 per user).
- Free-to-premium conversion rate hit 2.5% (vs 0.5% industry average).
- 500M+ active users by 2024.
- Marketing ROI improved 10x without increasing the budget.
- $3B valuation, making them one of the fastest-growing EdTech companies.
Digital Marketing Strategist vs Consultant: Which Do You Need?
When the talk is about the digital marketing strategist, we see many people confusing them with a digital marketing consultant. Both are different roles that play a different part in the digital marketing strategy for a business.
Below is a table that highlights their roles with core differences in a side-by-side comparison, so that you know whom to hire for your marketing needs.
| Aspect | Digital Marketing Strategist | Digital Marketing Consultant |
| Core Focus | Builds long-term digital marketing strategy, multi-channel planning, campaign strategy, and performance marketing frameworks | Provides expert guidance on digital marketing audits, competitive analysis, and improving marketing ROI |
| Scope of Work | Deep involvement in SEO strategy, SEM, content marketing strategy, social media marketing strategist tasks, and conversion optimization | Offers high-level recommendations on campaign management, marketing analytics, and channel improvements |
| Role in Organization | Works with key stakeholders to align marketing activities with business goals, KPIs, and the company’s success | Acts as an external advisor to refine brand awareness strategy, inbound marketing, and customer acquisition issues |
| Time Frame | Long-term involvement with continuous optimization, KPI tracking, and Google Analytics reporting | Short-term or project-based engagement focused on solving specific issues or evaluating historical data |
| Ownership of Results | Owns the marketing roadmap, performance analysis, digital channel integration, and budget allocation | Suggests improvements but does not manage ongoing execution or resource allocation |
| Team Collaboration | Collaborates daily with SEO, SEM, content creation, paid media, and email marketing teams to optimize the sales funnel and landing pages | Provides direction but does not stay embedded in teams responsible for execution |
| Deliverables | Strategy frameworks, customer segmentation, audience research, multi-channel marketing plans, and digital activation roadmaps | Reports, insights, audits, competitive analysis, and strategic recommendations |
Tools Used by Digital Marketing Strategists
Tools play an important role for a digital marketing strategist at each stage and channel of the marketing strategy. The major tools being used by them include:
- Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Looker Studio for analytics and reporting
- Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Google Ads for SEO strategy, keyword research, SEM strategist tasks, pay-per-click marketing
- Meta Business Suite, Hootsuite, and Buffer for managing their social media for activities like Campaign management, audience engagement, and social media platforms optimization
- Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Grammarly for content creation and creativity-related tasks.
- HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Klaviyo for email marketing and automation
- HubSpot CRM, Salesforce, Zoho CRM for multi-channel marketing CRM
- Trello, Asana, and Notion for team and project coordination tasks like campaign planning, resource allocation, and stakeholder coordination.
Final Remarks: Your Path to Strategic Marketing Excellence
If you are a business that needs a long-term digital marketing strategy that not only aligns with your business goals but also caters to multiple channels with strong collaboration between different departments, then you must hire a business strategist so that they can devise a great marketing strategy, and keep a keen eye on the results, so that they can make timely adjustments in ongoing campaigns for improving them and generate high ROI.
For more insights on digital marketing, SEO, social media management, and digital trends, keep visiting The Digital Advice, because we keep updating you with new information regularly.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is the Difference Between a Digital Marketing Strategist and a Digital Marketing Consultant?
A digital marketing strategist usually works as an in-house team member who develops a long-term digital marketing strategy, manages multi-channel marketing campaigns, optimizes digital channels, and tracks campaign performance, while a consultant provides expert advice and audits on specific project-based marketing requirements without executing daily strategies. They can be hired temporarily for different projects, along with a digital marketing strategist, or in a single role.
How Long Does It Take to See Results From a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Results depend on campaign performance, digital channels, and audience engagement; generally, measurable outcomes appear in 3 to 6 months when strategies are data-driven and continuously optimized.
What Are the Best Digital Marketing Strategy Frameworks?
Successful frameworks include SOSTAC, RACE, Jobs-to-be-Done, and proprietary 5-step approaches, supporting strategic planning, cross-functional teams, and multi-channel marketing execution.
How Do Digital Marketing Strategists Measure Marketing ROI?
They track KPIs like conversions, engagement, landing pages performance, and organic traffic, using Google Analytics, CRM tools, and campaign data analysis to optimize marketing efforts and maintain a competitive advantage.
What Tools do Digital Marketing Strategists utilize to Optimize Campaigns?
They use Google Analytics, Google Ads, SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, email marketing campaign platforms like HubSpot and Mailchimp, social media management tools, and project management apps for managing campaigns across digital platforms.
