Developing a digital strategy involves using different approaches and methods. The main goal is to create a structured blueprint or roadmap, that serves as a guide throughout the process. A clear framework helps to ensure a traceable and coherent process focused on achievable objectives.
Why do you need a Digital Strategy?
It all starts with understanding the purpose of your organization. Although it may seem like a simple question, finding the answer requires a deeper understanding. Simon Sinek's influential TED Talk introduced the golden circle process, which helps uncover the "why" in your company. By establishing this connection, Sinek highlights the correlation between exceptional leaders, remarkable brands, and the notion that customers are drawn to your motivations, not just your actions. Once you can identify the core "why?" of your company, creating a compelling brand story, authentic messaging, and engaging content becomes much easier.
Recognize the Current Business Environment
To create an effective digital strategy, it's important to understand the current state of the business. Simply designing a strategy in isolation won't suffice. We've seen many impressive strategies fail because they weren't tailored to the specific needs of the organization. It's important to assess whether the company needs to establish a strong foundation or focus on innovation. Additionally, a well-intentioned strategy may not be enough to outperform competitors if it lacks creativity. To truly enhance performance, it's crucial to comprehend the company's environment, just like a coach tailors their instruction to an athlete's current fitness level.
Analyzing Data to Enhance your Digital Strategy
In today's world, information is everywhere, making it crucial to gather it. Whether the data is vast or limited, shallow or deep, it's essential to collect and document it somewhere. It's better to have a visual representation of the information, like a wall, that makes it easy to understand the extent of the available data. At this stage, don't worry about analyzing the data or drawing conclusions from it. The primary focus should be on identifying various "data points" present.
Establish your Goal
When speaking with the chief marketing officer of a large international non-profit organization, she stressed the importance of their goal to eradicate world hunger as their top priority for a potential digital strategy investment. However, it is essential to establish achievable and measurable goals in both the short and long term to evaluate the success of your efforts. These goals should be clearly defined, quantifiable, relevant, time-bound, and attainable. Choose your top three objectives, document them, and consistently reinforce them to guide your action plan.
Understanding Consumer Trends
To create a compelling story that resonates with your target audience, you need to have a deep understanding of them. This requires more than just brainstorming; it involves creating three to four well-defined personas based on the individuals you want to attract and engage. A comprehensive persona should include details about their background, career, values, goals, concerns, and decision-making habits. You can develop these personas by conducting interviews and online surveys with your audience. By creating and naming these fictional individuals and discussing them as if you know them (which you will), you can accurately picture your target audience. Keep these personas visible on your wall as a constant reminder. This approach is often overlooked but can be very effective.
Product Strategy
The product strategy is a plan that explains how the product can help the company by resolving specific problems and providing positive results for both customers and the business. Once you have a well-defined plan, you can proceed to describe the product, including what it will consist of and when it will be created. By using the product strategy as a reference point, you can monitor your progress before, during, and after production. To create an effective product strategy, it is crucial to set clear objectives or KPIs that can be measured and achieved through the development of your product.
Product Roadmap
A Product Roadmap is a strategic plan that outlines a product's vision and execution strategy to align with a company's business objectives. It includes various components such as the product vision, strategy, goals, initiatives, features, timeframes, status markers, and metrics.
The roadmap process involves different teams depending on the product and methodology chosen. Typically, engineering, UX, sales, marketing, support, operational, design, and testing teams contribute to the development of the final product.
A well-defined and easily understandable product roadmap is essential for the product manager to guide all teams during the development process and ensure alignment with customer needs and company objectives. It serves as a valuable tool by providing clear direction and measurable milestones for the product's progress.
Construct a Journey Map
To improve your digital strategy, it's essential to develop a journey map once you have a clear understanding of your target audience. This map helps you understand your audience's habits and behaviors, enhancing your understanding of online interactions. With a detailed journey map, you can identify opportunities for additional or different types of interactions, making your digital strategy more flexible and adaptable.
Construct a Content Strategy
To create an effective content strategy, first, understand what your audience wants and needs. Providing them with high-quality, consistent, and personalized experiences will help you gain their trust and loyalty. To achieve this, tailor various types of content to different target groups. This will result in a cohesive and visually appealing content tapestry. You can develop this strategy for a specific timeframe, such as a month, quarter, or season, depending on the resources available and the strength of your campaign.
Create a Content Schedule
One effective way to manage your digital strategy is by creating a content schedule. Despite the constant changes in the digital world, calendars remain an essential tool to keep track of your goals and methods. A successful digital strategy requires careful planning and organization of different channels, content types, deadlines, and deliverables. To avoid any complications, it is important to have a content calendar that details the responsible staff members, timelines, and important industry events. It is recommended to create a comprehensive calendar in advance using project management software or a color-coded Google Spreadsheet to prevent any workflow issues during busy periods.
Consumer Insight
Understanding your customers' behaviors, interests, and desires is called customer insight. To achieve this, you need to analyze data such as browsing history, purchase patterns, returns, campaign responses, demographics, and predictive modeling. By doing so, you can engage with your customers in personalized ways and provide consistent added value, which helps build strong loyalty and lasting relationships. To make this happen, you need advanced tools like customer modeling, predictive analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. These tools help you identify trends in customer data and anticipate their needs and preferences. Finally, you can tailor your communications and offers to each customer's individual preferences, timing, and preferred channels.
Regularly Measure & Review Strategy
In the world of digital marketing, there is a wealth of data at your fingertips. You can access various third-party platforms that offer diverse data reporting, and major platforms provide their own analytics options. By utilizing this data, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and gain valuable insights to act upon.
While some businesses only review their strategy once a year, more advanced teams recognize the importance of evaluating their strategy more frequently, ideally on a monthly basis. Additionally, your digital strategy can complement the planning methodologies already in use by your company, such as Objectives & Key Results, which may be part of a quarterly planning framework.
Market Planning
The first step in market planning is to forecast sales and evaluate past promotional efforts. By analyzing the product, a business can identify areas that need more attention or changes. This analysis also considers the implementation of new business strategies and evaluates the company's competitive position in the market.
The second stage involves setting marketing goals and strategies. It's crucial to establish connections between the proposed actions to ensure the plan is executed effectively.
In building a strong digital strategy, businesses need to conduct product analysis, consumer research, and management audits. These essential steps help identify areas that need prioritization, modification, or adjustment to improve the overall effectiveness and efficiency of organizational processes.
