Marketing Technology is shaping how we conduct business in a digital world. Being able to transform organisations without compromising the integrity of the customer is crucial, while also ensuring the customer remains at the heart of any digital strategy. Creating and maintaining this strategy is part of the journey to success, and a critical aspect of keeping up with the rate of change.
Assessing strategy
Digital tools and trends are saturating the market faster than companies can understand whether they would be helpful to their business, or even what to do with them. This rate of change has shifted our communication, consumption and marketing dialogue – forcing cross-functional teams to move quickly to keep up with customer expectations.
Creating a digital strategy that works comes down to learning new skillsets about how to successfully leverage new systems and platforms in our favour. With insights into customer expectation and behaviour, companies can design a strategy and experience that influence decision making, direction, and ultimately, customer creation.
7 Key Factors for an Actionable Digital Strategy
There are a mind-boggling number of ways to implement your digital strategy. So many, in fact, that it is easy to get lost and end up going nowhere at all. The list of available options is always growing, and the overlap can make things confusing. So, how does a company obtain an accurate assessment of their business objectives? Companies should consider these 7 key factors to ensure that their digital strategy development is appropriate, affordable, and actionable.
1. Set real goals that drive business value
Before you begin, your business should decide on goals that your digital strategy will attempt to reach. These goals need to be specific, actionable, appropriate, and obtainable. It is also a good idea to create multiple goals that support each other, as well as developing secondary goals. The clearer each goal is, the better the strategy can be. This is a process in itself, and having the entire team on board and developing the same understanding is important.
2. Understand which Customer is your priority
Understanding the customer is the core of successful modern digital strategies. Identifying 3-5 types of consumers, based on previous metrics will allow a business to adapt their strategy and goals. Ideally, 80% of customers will fall into one type, and if they cannot be identified by type, then your business should work on filling in the gaps. All future content will be targeted at these customers, so knowing who they are and what they want helps ensure success.
3. Identify metrics that matter
Once your business understands where to go, it should know what to do. With the appropriate metrics, a company can discover the scope of their marketing challenges and sync with their team to obtain better strategy-oriented Business Intelligence. Teams are then on board and focused on what is important – and where they need to go.
4. Align the value your customer is seeking to your service
Solving for the customer means understanding where your service or product can remove a pain or amplify a gain in your customers world. Nothing more, nothing less. Getting clear on this will help you simplify your service and stand out more effectively
5. Assess how your customers find you
Companies should survey their brand keywords, traffic, social metrics, referrals, SEOs, and direct traffic. This will provide a company with insight regarding their primary sources of digital activity. From here, you can assess an appropriate direction and have a better understanding about who, where, and how to target your market.
6. Make it visual with a single document that’s easily shared
Businesses should be accountable for their digital strategy, and this means creating a document that identifies the most pressing needs and direction. Devise a strategy based on challenges and issues, and outline the tactics required to achieve business goals, detect and obtain customers, focus marketing efforts, and facilitate growth.
7. Identify the minimum marketable product (MMP) to fund
A digital strategy budget should identify growth areas, be flexible to allow the reallocation of resources if required, offer scalability for efficient deployment, and be adaptable enough to accommodate future needs.
The Loop of Experimenting and Results
A business’s digital strategy requires constant monitoring for improvements to be made, waste is eliminated, and data relevant to business goals is focused on and utilised. This creates a loop that campaigns can follow, and that can be adapted to optimise digital marketing activity (read how we do this with Hastings Deering).
Ultimately, the best way forward in digital strategy is to use small experiments rather than large, structured plans. Experiment, see the result, adjust, re-experiment and perfect activities based on what you know actually works.
Keeping up
Learning how to implement and utilise an efficient digital strategy is part of keeping up in a modern marketplace. Discover more about what you can do for your company, and develop insights that help you find your way forward.
Contact us today to be part of better business tomorrow.
