Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing Strategy
A plan with arithmetic in it. A strategy that cannot be disagreed with specifically is a document, not a plan.
A digital marketing strategy states what to do, in what order, and what each line is expected to produce. The Nexclick writes it with numbers attached so it can be argued with before money is spent, rather than admired and quietly ignored.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- Marketing is whoever has time that week, and it shows in the consistency.
- You are active on five channels and cannot say which produces enquiries.
- Every agency proposal recommends whatever that agency sells.
- You have a strategy document from last year that nobody has opened since.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Establish the commercial position first
- What a customer is worth, what you can afford to acquire one for, and what growth would actually require. Without these, channel choice is guesswork.
- Audit what is already running
- Every channel currently active, what it costs and what it produces. Frequently establishes that two of five are carrying everything.
- Assess the tracking honestly
- Whether the numbers you have can be trusted. Almost every strategy engagement starts by discovering that some of them cannot.
- Recommend channels on evidence
- Where your buyers are, how long the sales cycle is, and what your budget can realistically compete in. Not a template of everything.
- Sequence it deliberately
- What happens first, and why. Tracking before optimisation, foundations before scale. A plan where everything starts in month one is a wish list rather than a sequence.
- Attach numbers to each line
- Expected cost, expected outcome and timescale. A plan you cannot judge in six months is a plan nobody will be accountable for.
- Say what to stop
- An explicit list of activity to cease. This is the least commercially convenient part of any strategy and the clearest sign it is honest.
Checklist
Judge any marketing strategy against this
Use it on ours, or on the one an agency has just sent you. A strategy failing more than four of these is a proposal with a different cover on it.
- 01Does it state what a customer is worth to you?
- 02Does it state what you can afford to pay to acquire one?
- 03Does every recommended activity have an expected cost attached?
- 04Does every activity have an expected outcome and a timescale?
- 05Does it say what to stop doing, not only what to start?
- 06Does it name which channels it recommends against, and why?
- 07Does it acknowledge where the current tracking cannot be trusted?
- 08Is the sequence argued, or is everything happening at once?
- 09Does it say who inside your business owns delivery?
- 10Does it state what you would need to see in three months to continue?
- 11Would it still make sense if a different agency executed it?
- 12Does it reference your actual data, or only industry benchmarks?
- 13Does it name real competitors and what they are doing?
- 14Does it recommend anything the author does not sell?
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1–2
Commercial and channel audit
Unit economics, current activity, cost per channel and what the tracking can actually evidence.
- 02Week 2–3
Market and competitor assessment
Where the demand is, what competitors do, and which channels are realistically winnable at your budget.
- 03Week 3–4
Build the plan
Sequenced activity with expected cost, outcome and timescale against each line.
- 04Week 4
Present and argue
A working session rather than a presentation. The disagreement is the useful part, and the plan is revised in the room.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- A written plan with expected cost, outcome and timescale against every line.
- A channel audit showing what each currently costs and produces.
- An honest assessment of whether your current numbers can be trusted.
- An explicit list of activity to stop, not just activity to start.
- A document you own, usable with any agency or an in-house team.
Tools and platforms
- Google Analytics 4 & Search Console
- Ad platform data
- CRM and closed-deal history
- Ahrefs or Semrush
- Unit economics modelling
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Four weeks. Executing it takes six to twelve months, and that gap is where most strategies quietly die — the document is produced, everyone agrees, and nobody publishes to it after week five. The single biggest determinant of whether it works is not the quality of the plan but whether a named person owns delivery. We ask who that is in the first meeting, and where the honest answer is nobody, a smaller plan somebody can sustain is worth more than a comprehensive one they cannot.
Pricing model
Day rate
Fixed-price strategy engagement. No obligation to buy delivery from us, and plenty of clients take the plan and execute it in-house.
Questions
Digital Marketing Strategy questions
How is this different from an agency proposal?
A proposal recommends what that agency sells. A strategy should be usable by anyone, including a different agency or your own team, and should recommend things its author does not provide. If those two documents look identical, one of them is mislabelled.
Why does the tracking assessment come first?
Because a strategy built on numbers you cannot trust allocates budget on fiction. Almost every engagement finds at least one conversion counted twice, missing entirely, or defined differently between two systems. That has to be established before anything is planned around it.
How many channels should we actually be on?
Fewer than you are. Most UK small and mid-sized businesses do better on two channels run properly than five run thinly. Which two comes out of the commercial position and where your buyers are, not from a general rule about channel mix.
What if we disagree with the plan?
Then we argue about it in the session and revise it. The numbers exist precisely so disagreement can be specific — you can dispute an assumption rather than a preference. A strategy nobody pushed back on has usually not been read.
How long before a strategy needs revisiting?
Twelve months planned, one quarter committed, revised on data. Treating a twelve-month plan as fixed means ignoring what the first quarter told you, which is the most useful information you will get all year.
Can you execute it as well?
If you want us to, and there is no obligation. The plan is written to be executable by anyone. Plenty of clients take it in-house or to an existing agency, and that is a perfectly good outcome — a strategy that only works if we deliver it is a proposal.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.