A well-crafted digital strategy is crucial for businesses looking to thrive and stay competitive. For anyone new to this, a digital plan generally outlines how an organization leverages digital technologies and channels to achieve a goal, meet customer expectations, meet internal benchmarks, and more.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the critical steps involved in developing a winning digital strategy. Then, once you understand the vital components (pssst — before you do, check out this 3-part digital transformation series!), it helps to create roadmaps that more easily align with a company’s “big picture.” It can also help align initiatives that compete with other overall business objectives or have a more departmental perspective.
So, follow the suggestions below to assess the current state, set clear goals, and implement effective tactics. Skipping over items further limits what you must work with and unbalances those benefits vs. challenges.
Digital Strategy Development
1. Develop Your Objectives and Goals
First, clearly define the objectives and goals before you plan a digital strategy for your business. The goal is to understand what you want to achieve. For example, you could increase brand awareness, drive customer engagement, expand market reach, or boost online sales.
Digital transformation leaders (like myself) commonly start this process using the SMART method. Overall, the point is to help ensure your objectives are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. Once you have this clarity, it’ll help guide your strategy forward. It’ll also help nix or determine realistic tactics so that you can track your progress.
2. Uncover Your Target Audience
Next, a company should aim to understand its target audience more deeply over time. Once they do, it helps to foster a more cost-effective approach to developing marketing campaigns and other digital strategies. Moreover, companies must use tools to help them conduct thorough market research to analyze customer demographics, behaviors, and preferences. This will enable them to create detailed customer personas, tailor digital initiatives, and meet their needs. We must also consider their preferred digital channels, content consumption habits, and pain points.
On a side note, if you’re completely lost and don’t have data or analytics, contact a digital strategy consultant like me (learn more) for more complex project planning needs, technical project management, or my specialty, citizen development, where I use tech for good. Ultimately, the outcome here is to align your web strategy with customer insights to ensure that the efforts resonate with your target audience so there is meaningful engagement.
3. Assess Your Current Digital Presence
Moving forward, we must evaluate the company’s digital presence to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. To do this, assess the website and social media profile(s), compile online reviews, send out surveys, etc.
Once you have tangible data and insights, analyze the performance of ALL existing digital channels and content against the information you’ve gathered. Then, put it into a digestible presentation to show your findings. This assessment helps us understand where the org stands in the digital landscape and helps identify gaps that must be addressed before moving forward. Additionally, evaluate your competitors’ digital strategies to gain insights and identify opportunities for differentiation.
4. Develop Key Digital Initiatives
Now, without skipping over any of the above items, use your objectives, target audience insights, and current digital presence to develop a digital strategy for your business. Additionally, those items could include website optimization plans, creating engaging content, a new social media marketing plan, implementing internal training plans, leveraging AI and automation, etc. Ultimately, decide which tactics best align with your chosen objectives. For example, are they realistic based on available resources (pssst that’s the next section)? Will they resonate with your target audience? Will employees understand the goals? Overall, each initiative should have a clear purpose, desired outcomes, and metrics to measure success.
5. Allocate Resources and Budget
Allocate the financial and human resources (remember to assess your talent pool for skill gaps and remember that team communication is vital) to execute your digital strategy. Then, identify the internal resources or external partners needed to support the execution of your talent strategy. If you have the resources and talent, assign responsibilities, establish a timeline, or hire a project manager. If you don’t have the resources, you must go back to Step 1 and reassess.
6. Implement and Monitor
Once your digital initiatives are defined and resources allocated, it’s time to implement! To do that, execute each initiative according to your timeline and monitor performance regularly. Use analytics tools to track key metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, social media engagement, and customer feedback to save time.
After that, create a monitoring schedule so that the new data obtained isn’t wasted and can be used to gain new insights. At the same time, documentation on dedicated resources should be updated with room for improvement or optimization. Ultimately, this is how orgs become data-driven decision-makers because regular monitoring and analysis allow you to adapt and refine your strategy to ensure ongoing success.
7. Stay Agile and Evolve
Staying agile (P.S. being agile and digital agility are different) and adapting to emerging trends and technologies are essential to maintaining a winning digital strategy. To do that, we must continuously evaluate the effectiveness of our digital initiatives. Also, we must stay updated on industry developments and be willing to experiment with new approaches. Then, seek customer and employee feedback, and be open to refining your strategy based on evolving needs. A flexible and adaptable system helps to foster enablement and buy-in to help a business stay competitive and achieve long-term success.
Digital strategy for the win!
Developing a winning digital strategy is time-consuming and requires careful planning and alignment. You can create a roadmap that drives success by defining clear goals and continually assessing, reevaluating, and optimizing. Of course, allocating resources, implementing and monitoring your initiatives, and staying agile are vital to ensure ongoing effectiveness.
Remember, a winning digital strategy is not a one-time endeavor but an iterative, continual process that needs refining occasionally. To truly embrace innovation, we need to stay ahead of industry trends and be willing to adapt. With a well-crafted digital strategy, businesses can harness the power of digital technologies to achieve goals and drive growth.
