Digital Strategy

Got Digital Strategy?

Nowadays every company, regardless of the industry, is greatly affected by the digitization going on around us. If you are an entrepreneur, executive or the CEO, and you want to succeed and grow, then you have to develop a clear and viable digital strategy.

What is digital strategy?

One of the best ways to answer this question is to focus on four main points:

  • How does ‘digital’ affect my business model, industry positioning, and value chain?
  • Which are the areas where value is created? Do we need to diversify, change both inside and outside our current industry?
  • Where will the ‘new’ competition come from and what can we do about it?
  • How can we prepare for it? What skills, capabilities and resources do we need?

Why is digital strategy important?

There are still many industries and businesses where there is no clear strategy or direction when it comes to digital. 47% of businesses (according to SmartInsights) are ‘doing digital marketing’ without a defined strategy. The rest are split between those who have a standalone digital plan (18%)  and those (35%) who have integrated it into their overall strategy.

The challenge is growing as digital is diverging into so many different channels such as Social media, Search Ads and RTB. Now your customers have many access points and the journey is hard to track and conversion to measure. At the same time the digital assets (e.g. your website, app, FB page, etc.) are multiplying and communicating a consistent brand positioning or purpose is becoming a harder challenge. (read more on Omni-channel sale points)

Here’s why you have to have a digital strategy:

  • Ensures everyone in the company is aware and on-board – regardless of the size of your company, a clearly defined strategy will help make sure that everyone knows what the plan is.
  • Focus – as soon as all your employees and stakeholders are aware of your plans, it will make it easier to stay focused and achieve the desired results.
  • Allocate resources– you’ll be able to budget and allocate your time and resources better.
  • Optimize better– once you have clearly defined goals and are committed to tracking them, you’ll be able to measure your progress and optimize your activities in order to achieve your objectives.

Digital Strategy

How should you do it?

How do you play to win in the digital world? Four points to consider here:

  • Understand and even pre-empt your customers’ needs & wants – like in any industry or media, knowing who your product or service is for and learning about their ‘pain’ in order to address it is key.
  • Make your presence – be at every step of your customers’ digital journey.
  • Differentiate – Make your digital assets unique and memorable.
  • Track and measure – one of the greatest advantages of digital media is the ability to track and measure almost everything. Make sure your tracking is set up properly.
  • Work with experts – it’s impossible to learn everything so seek and follow the right experts in every field rather than discover everything by yourself. Your chance of staying ahead of the game will be much bigger and you will get the much needed competitive advantage.
  • Evoke the right emotions – we all know that it is not the product or service that sells, but the emotions that they evoke. Digital gives you many opportunities to reach people in the right place at the right time. But you have to keep an eye on trends and be ready to discard all the sacred cows – things are moving much faster nowadays. Let’s take Facebook which has taught us all to ‘share’ and thus given businesses the opportunity to use this trend to build strong brands. There are clear signs that this might be changing and people might not want to spend so much time in the walled garden that FB is becoming. So if you are heavily reliant on your FB page as the main source of leads, you need to have a plan B for when this trend changes.

Where should you start?

Putting together a digital marketing strategy doesn’t need to be a complex activity:

Start small by defining goals, KPI’s and how to achieve them. It’s a changing living document so you can add more as you go.

Map the channels that are crucial to your users and therefore your presence.

To fully understand and turn to your advantage trends such as live streaming or the rise of mobile to mention just a couple, it’s always helpful to find the right partner.

Want to know more? Please feel free to reach out to us and we will be happy to set up a free, no obligation 1-hour consultation.

Digital Strategy