Full Screen

Overarching Strategy

More Free Lessons in

Strategy and Planning View All →

Get cutting-edge digital marketing skills, know-how and strategy

This micro lesson is from one of our globally recognized digital marketing courses.

Start a FREE Course Preview Start a FREE Course Preview
Global Authority

The Global Authority

12 years delivering excellence

Members

300,000+ Members

Join a global community

Certification

Associate Certification

Globally recognised

Membership

Membership Included

Toolkits, content & more

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

The value of an overarching strategy

An overarching strategy guides your entire digital marketing strategy. It helps you to develop a high-level, simple, and clear strategy. In essence, it’s a single sentence that tells anyone who reads it what the objective of your strategy is, and how you will achieve it. This key phrase identifies, regardless of platform and execution, what your digital strategy is.

Because the overarching strategy guides the entire digital marketing effort, it must be simple, focused, and clear. People should be able to understand it without having to be educated about it.

A typical overarching strategy might be as follows:

Create a digital platform that introduces our customer to our products and services and allows for a more seamless experience with our brand.

Digital marketing vs digital media

As you probably know, digital marketing involves using digital media. However, the two terms are not synonymous. Let’s explore each one in more detail.

  • Digital marketing consists of all online activities, creative formats, and messaging that aim to engage with consumers online, using both free and paid channels for the purpose of delivering (or part-delivering) on a company’s commercial objectives – such as sales or branding, for example.
  • Digital media, on the other hand, refers to the media transmission methods and devices used to distribute digital messaging to your audience. This includes channels such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, email, and so on. But it also includes digital audio, videos, articles, images, in-app content and digital advertising. To help manage the different activities, marketers use media plans for paid media as a guide to the formats, timings, and spends for a campaign.

So, the difference between digital marketing and digital media is actually pretty simple.

  • Digital marketing, as the term suggests, is the whole practice of using digital assets for the purposes of marketing.
  • Digital media, again as the term suggests, is more specifically the media used deliver the digital marketing content.
Back to Top
Julie Atherton

Julie is an award-winning digital strategist, with over 30 years’ experience. Having worked both agency and client-side, she has a wealth of knowledge on delivering marketing, brand and business strategy across almost every sector. In 2016, Julie set up Small Wonder. Drawing on her past experience, she now supports a wide range of businesses, from global brands, to educational organisations and social enterprises.She is the author of the book, Social Media Strategy which was a top read chosen by Thinkers360. You can find her on X and LinkedIn.

ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

Digital Marketing Strategy
Julie Atherton
Skills Expert

This module identifies the core components of an effective digital marketing strategy, and the role AI can play in strategy development. It also explains how to develop an effective budget plan and measure the ROI for digital activities. It covers how to set clear and actionable objectives and measurable KPIs, as well as the key research activities to undertake to guide channel selection and messaging. And it explains how to develop a creative strategy based on campaign research to engage an audience and deliver on campaign goals. The module concludes by explaining how to execute a digital marketing strategy supported by a channel plan, a paid media plan, a campaign action plan, and succinct strategy documentation.