Digital strategy


Digital Strategy is a plan that uses digital resources to achieve one or more objectives. With Technologytechnology changing at a very fast pace, Institutions have many digital resources to choose from based on what their overall goal is. Typically a plan that helps businesses, institutions, and brands, etc transform its course of action, operations, and activities, etc into digital nature to market their products, Analyse their consumer transactions or
reduce operating cost, etc will be the digital strategy for that business, institution or brand. For e.g. brands at one point of time used print media advertisements for promoting its offers but now with the help of technology, Social social media is being used aggressively by brands to communicate their offerings to their respective consumers consumers. 2019 was the first year in the history of humankind that witnessed brands. total advertising spent on social media crossed over the brand's total advertising spent on print media.

Overview

The digital strategy is part of the business strategy and experts maintain that it cannot be effective or successful if built independently. It is argued that it represents how the business strategy is influenced by leveraging digital resources to create differential value. In the process, it reshapes traditional organizational strategies into modular, distributed, cross-functional, and global business processes.
There, are numerous approaches to conducting digital strategy, but at their core, all go through four steps:
  1. identifying the opportunities and/or challenges in a business where online assets can provide a solution;
  2. identifying the unmet needs and goals of the external stakeholders that most closely align with those key business opportunities and/or challenges;
  3. developing a vision around how the online assets will fulfill those business and external stakeholder needs, goals, opportunities and challenges, and
  4. prioritizing a set of online initiatives which can deliver on this vision.
Within each of those stages, a number of techniques and analyses may be employed.

Identifying the key opportunities and/or challenges in a business

Includes one-on-one interviews, group interviews and workshops with a company's senior management, marketing and sales, operations and service stakeholders with a goal of understanding the business strategy, challenges and opportunities, products, organization, processes, supply chain and vendors, distributors, customers, and competitive landscape, as well as the potential role of their online assets.
Includes evaluations of a company's main competitors and potential substitutes with the goal of understanding a company's strengths and weaknesses relative to their competitors and potential substitutes. While this often includes steps found in traditional marketing competitor analysis, such as products, prices, etc. Competitor analysis includes two unique items:
An analysis of a company's financial data with the goal of understanding the financial impact that certain changes would have on a company.
ASSIMPLER Blueprinting - The Business Blueprinting of the organization is designed based on the ASSIMPLER framework. ASSIMPLER stands for Availability, Scalability, Security, Interoperability, Maintainability, Performance, Low cost of ownership, Extendability and Reliability - applied to business services and processes. The framework helps model the business expectations and challenges to be addressed through the Digital Strategy.
The digital positioning model stands as one of the first visual frameworks for assessing an organization's digital positioning strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities. The model focused on four key positions: Customer Experience, Operational Excellence, Industry Transformation, and Market Transformation.

Identifying the unmet needs and goals of external stakeholders (consumers of online assets)

Includes one-on-one interviews and focus groups with a company's external stakeholders, with a goal of understanding external stakeholders behaviours, needs, goals and perceptions of the company and their industry both in the broadest business context as well as specifically online. In addition to standard marketing strategy methodologies and questions, external stakeholder interviews for Digital Strategy may include usability testing, an analysis of how effectively external stakeholders can use the online assets developed by a company for their intended purposes. In digital strategy this is used to uncover usability barriers that may prevent the online vision being achieved.
An analysis of external stakeholder behaviors in their environment, for example: field observations of shoppers in a store. In addition to standard ethnographic research, digital strategy research may include video recording of an external stakeholder using their computers or specific computer applications or web sites.
An analysis of the usage patterns of a company's online assets with the goal of better understanding external stakeholder behavior as well as identifying strengths and weakness of the company's current online offerings. This may include understanding how many people are visiting a web site, what are the most popular pages, what are the most popular paths, where are people coming from, where do they drop off, how long do they stay, etc.
A specific methodology for web analytics where the company's online assets are modeled as a sales funnel, with a visit or impression representing a new lead, a certain page or action in the web site considered a conversion and specific pages in the web site representing specific stages of the sales funnel. The goal of the analysis is to provide insight into the overall conversion rate as well as the key weak points of the funnel. This may also involve analysis of a company's search engine optimization situation and changes in online traffic pathways.
An analysis of a company's customer databases and information repositories with the goal of segmenting customers into homogeneous groups across one or more dimensions of behavior, demographics, value, product or marketing message affinity, etc. In digital strategy, this often includes the online customer registration database which companies use to provide access to their customer specific, protected areas.
An analysis of a customer's behavior that looks across all of the different channels, in which customers interact with a company's products or information. There are lots of different ways to do this; a representative example would be, a company focuses on the customer purchase process. The analysis would look at which channels a customer uses at which stage of the purchase process, attempting to understand why each channel is used, each channel's relative attribution and evaluating the company's strengths or weaknesses in that particular channel for the particular stage of the process.
An approach to the collection of external stakeholder feedback in a quantitative manner from a large population. In digital strategy, surveys may be used to validate or invalidate key questions raised in more qualitative exercises such as external stakeholder interviews and focus groups. Depending on the breadth of the survey population and the degree of variation within the population, survey results may be segmented to form homogeneous groups across one or more dimensions of behavior, demographics, value, product or marketing message affinity, etc. Surveys are often conducted online using web surveys, e-mail lists, or 3rd party panels, although phone surveys or other offline methods may sometimes be used when there are questions as to the online savviness of a particular target population.

Developing a vision and prioritizing a set of online initiatives

A spreadsheet with supporting documentation that quantifies the investments and returns over time, resulting from the execution of the online strategy. The Business plan also defines the Key Performance Indicators that will be used to measure and evaluate the success of the online strategy.
Design of a technical architecture that will meet the needs of the business vision and conform to the business plan and roadmap. This is often done as a gap analysis where the current technical architecture is assessed. A future technical architecture, which meets the needs of the online vision, is designed. The gaps between the current state and future state are identified, and a series of initiatives or projects to fill those gaps are developed and sequenced.
Similar to a technical assessment, organizational and process assessments look at the changes that need to be made to an organization and its processes in order to achieve the online vision. They may involve a series of business process reengineering projects focused on the areas of an organization most affected by the online initiatives.
A way of prioritizing various initiatives by comparing their cost of implementation with their expected business benefits. This is often done by creating a two by two matrix where the cost of implementation runs along the x-axis and expected business benefit runs along the y-axis, from low benefit to high benefit. Individual initiatives or projects are then plotted on the matrix in terms of their calculated costs and benefits. Priorities are then determined according to which projects will provide the greatest benefit for the lowest cost.
A plan detailing the allocation of media spending across online media usually as part of the customer acquisition or retention elements of the digital strategy. Since the late 2000s, social media has become increasingly important in engaging with customers both for marketing and customer support purposes, especially benefiting smaller businesses.
Graphical representations or an outline of key ideas or processes of the digital strategy. These are often created in order to better communicate a key concept or to build excitement among stakeholders when building consensus or socializing a digital strategy.
A high-level project plan which details the durations and dependencies of all the initiatives in the digital strategy. The roadmap will often include checkpoints to assess the progress and success of the digital strategy, over time.
A description of the key performance indicators used to measure the effectiveness of the digital strategy as well as the process for collecting and sharing this information. The measurement plan usually covers the financial, operational, and e-business metrics and their relationships.
The organizational structure, roles, and process description of the operational entity that will manage the initiatives in a digital strategy. The governance model describes who is responsible for what, how decisions are made, how issues are escalated, and how information on the performance of the projects is communicated within the organization.

Digital Marketing Channels

Marketing has changed rapidly. Some marketers believe that marketing has changed over the past two years, rather than the last 50 years. The complete guide to and digital marketing tactics/channels for small business. These are the some digital marketing channels.
1. Email Marketing
2. Social Media Marketing
3. Pay-Per-Click Marketing
4. Search Engine Optimization
5. Influencer Marketing
6. Content Marketing
7.
8. Viral Marketing
9. Affiliate Marketing
10. Referral Marketing
11. Mobile Marketing
12. Native Advertising
13. Inbound Marketing
14. Growth Hacking

Personas

As of 2007, a trend in digital strategy is the use of personas as a framework for using customer information to prioritize online initiatives. Personas are character sketches that represent a typical member of one customer segment and highlight their needs, goals, and behaviors. Because it is representative of a customer segment, it allows decision makers to prioritize various features based on the needs of the segment. Because it is a character sketch, it is sometimes easier for decision makers to internalize the key needs of the segment than it would be by reading large quantities of information. A typical approach is to create the segment based on customer analysis such as customer interviews, ethnographic research, and statistical surveys. Then assemble key decision makers or stakeholders, present the findings of the personas, and use them to kick start a brainstorming session around different online initiatives that can meet the persona's needs and goals.

Execution

Historically, execution of a business or digital strategy is done as a big bang, with large initiatives such as site redesigns and transactional systems taking 6–12 months to develop and often an additional 6–12 months before they deliver any results. As of 2007, a trend has emerged where companies adopt a more iterative approach to rolling out their strategies, one which leverages a series of smaller tests, which are carefully measured and analyzed and used to modify or optimize the digital strategy. An example of this test-measure-optimize-scale approach is that a company might take some key pages on their site and test a number of versions of those pages with different marketing messages, design approaches, user experience optimizations, navigation optimizations, and even new features and functions using a multivariate or A/B test. The company would then identify the page which had the best combination of changes in terms of some key business metric, analyzing the results to understand which changes were most instrumental in affecting the high conversion rate, and applying those learnings to future pages and future tests.
The advantage of this approach is that in the long run, it tends to be more successful in delivering business results, because each step is measured and adjusted for. In addition, it tends to favor smaller steps rather than larger initiatives before getting the payback. The disadvantage is that over time this approach tends to converge on a solution, not necessarily the best solution that might have been reached if a company starts from scratch instead of building each step on the previous one. Another disadvantage is that although this solution tends to favor smaller, more incremental changes, there is often a larger up front cost to setting up all the measurement systems and staffing a company with the right analysts and change processes to react to these tests in a timely and effective manner. As a result, companies often adopt a mix of big bang efforts augmented by some smaller, more iterative efforts as part of their overall strategy. A person who is primarily focused on digital strategy may be referred to as a digital architect or digital strategist and a person who executes a digital strategy may be referred to as a digital marketing engineer.
There are also several challenges when developing and implementing a digital strategy. This include human factors, particularly knowledge, skills, and attitudes, which impede full engagement.