How digital strategy can save businesses?

Have you created your digital strategy space in the digital world?

If yes, congratulations!

However, a robust digital strategy is needed for your business to survive in this highly competitive online marketplace. Remember that to transform and maximize your business success in the digital arena it would take more than just creating your own online space.

Keep reading to really understand the importance of it.

What’s a digital strategy?

In a more simplified term, a digital strategy is a combination of organised steps and processes that are designed to maximize business conversions.

To make your digital strategy glow you’ll need valuable data, content marketing, seo, tools and technological approaches. Hope this makes sense.

Wikipedia describes “digital strategy” as: a form of strategic management and a business answer or response to a digital question, often best addressed as part of an overall business strategy.

Well, I think of it as a planned structure with optimised steps put together to inform and deliver better business results.

Why digital marketing strategy?

Nowadays, you are more likely to book an holiday via a web browser search than you would walk or drive to the local agency in order to book one, right? So, this shows why you should invest in digital marketing strategies going forward.

I agree that it’s not easier to launch an online marketing campaign, but it is certainly cheaper, easier and beneficial to quantify the impact of a digital campaign.

The reason is obvious, as most of the tools used will show you the results in a matter of minutes and sometimes even seconds – from what is working and not, to which channel engagement performed better with your target audiences.

You can also see top customer video/page interactions, downloads, who commented about your brand etc.

Are you into digital strategy already?

Whilst a lot of business owners are still trapped in the old system of business executions, the digital marketplace requires new business approaches to combat the high-competitive market.

Whether you’re in or out, your business will be affected in some way. Trust me it will. And, don’t mistake building links or new website for your business for the sake of a digital strategy.

A proper digital strategy should have the capability to transform your business in multiple ways to maximize profits.

For example, the use of:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Marketing automation
• Live chats
• Mobile / video marketing
• ABM/customer success
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• SEO
• And more.

If you aren’t doing any of the three to four of these steps yet, yes you could as well be described as not having a business in the digital space.

Is there a struggle or is your online strategy working just fine?

The digital marketplace has evolved so much that having an attractive/optimised website and great product is not enough.

Let me ask you this: Are you struggling to keep up with the rapid change in the way consumers want to buy your products or services?

Depending on your situation, keep reading if your business/company is struggling to find visitors.

Our research informed us that most businesses are having difficulties, or are unable to keep up with the fast and evolving consumer behavior.

There are various reasons why this happens, but our findings tell us that these are essentially due to:

a) poor leadership

b) no customer strategy planning

c) lack of relevant SEO/content marketing.

Industry statistics

Stats showed that it will be almost impossible for a non digital business to survive in the next 3 – 5 years and try to reach out an audience. In other words, you’ll close doors as you would not be competitive enough.

That is a bit scary, I agree. But it will come sooner than later.

Another good survey released by Curata showing that only 30% of businesses have a documented strategy – and with an astonishing 70 percent of marketers saying they do not have a formal content strategy in place.

Many don’t have a documented content distribution process either to feed their marketing channels. They also lack a proper managed content creation/supply plan.

Despite all the above, we read stats telling us that content budgets continue to be allocated and been increased year after year.

So, this begs the question:

Who should be (in charge) asking for the return on investment and find out why things aren’t working so well?

We all know that senior management are always looking to one thing and that is – improving sales revenue and reducing their costs. But often this is done without the approval of experienced managers and effective short-term strategy plans.

As the old saying goes ” You only get what you put in”. One of the many errors is that they keep adding pressure on marketing and sales teams without investing in them (courses, market research, surveys etc.).

The majority of companies may have skilled people in place, but they often don’t have efficient processes, and supportive technology. It is only obvious, that at some point you will find out that teams aren’t that motivated, sales and marketing are mismanaged all leading to poor results.

Which best performing digital channels?

It’s worth emphasizing that in recent years business marketing strategies have evolved around interactive webinars and video content marketing taking the lead including YouTube and Facebook videos. Today you can shedule and make an online demo and sell your product or service at the end of it (…well almost). There is room for the new technology and savvy channels that are coming fast and furious, such as bots; AI apps; VR etc.

More digital marketing stats with hubspot

Digital innovations have thrown up more opportunities in the marketplace today than in the past five years.

There is good news, however, and the positive side is that there’s equal opportunities for all business owners in the digital realm in order to maximize business profits.

Saying that and I quote “it all depends on how they approach and engage their tactical sequence (digital) and strategic concepts“. This innovation is aimed at responding to customer demands to ensure a stronger customer value proposition.

The major questions here are:

• What value could your customers gain from your product/service?
• How does this value differ from the one provided by the competition?
• Is your business creating compelling content marketing strategies to help your social media/SEO campaigns?
• What are your best marketing channels/campaigns to include in an overall strategy?

What is needed to start your digital strategy journey?

The term ‘digital strategy’ shouldn’t strike fear into you. You simply need to collect the usual suspects to execute a solid digital plan.

I’d say, depending on the size of your business, its digital strategy should be based on vision, goals, data and aspirations.

But also a successful digital strategy requires a cross-functional team with visions, managerial leadership, solid agile marketing and an information technology (IT) teams.

Online Planning Process

Take note and integrate the following ones:

• Vision
• Mission statement
• Customer plan
• Data strategy plan
• Content marketing/SEO strategy plan
• Social media plan
• CRM email marketing /marketing automation plan
• etc

To ensure a consistent and howling digital customer experience, a powerful digital strategy is needed to help you break the gaps between all the departments actively involved in your business executions.

It’s evident that:

• Real-time data analytics
• Customer journey
• Content topic creation
• SEO content landing pages
• Blogging user stories
• Video/podcast (digital assets)

are the most effective digital content tactics as revealed by clients or prospects reviews. Of course, these are the major aspects of a digital strategy, which by no means will not alone help transform a more scalable business and/or create a large space for you in the digital marketplace with guaranteed results.

However, there’s one major challenge often encountered by digital strategy adopters.

The challenge is – figuring out which part of the strategy should be done in-house, outsourced from a digital strategy provider and/or which should be customised according to prospects and client’s demands in order to be more effective. This is why using a service provider is highly recommended.

Let’s recap.

I do recommend as a priority to truly understand your customers, update your mission statement and revise your customer strategic plan.

Hint: Listen to what your audience needs, wants and try (hard) to create relevant content ( create awareness) for that particular problem/need that will help them solve it.

Tools to listen and monitor your social media:

FollowerWonk – TweetReach –  Likealyzer for FB – IFTTT and Mention.

If this ins’t enough or you aren’t sure what they’re looking for, then you can ask them directly or run through your industry blog’s comments to pick ideas (my favorite).

Otherwise you can always crowdsource for ideas using your social media channels.

From there, prioritise your target audience to engage them ( promote it @ right times) with the relevant content you created. Remember to optimise your website/blog.

Then pick your content from your content calendar plan so you can create a consistent plan of action for the next coming months.

Explore marketing tools to serve them better, engage daily with video/Podcast marketing and implement/revise your processes and of course.. include good metrics.

Conclusion

Is your company or business ready for this type of change in business model? Our opinion is simple – If you want to stay competitive and open for business, then change/adapt your online strategy now.

Here at CTH, our sole responsibility is to help you embrace digital marketing strategy and transform the way you do business as we’ve done for other agencies and/or businesses.

We understand that while a traditional technology strategy focuses and relies on 18 months roadmaps and budget forecasts that can take around two years. However, if you adapt a digital strategy focus and rely on short-term, actionable and objective-driven month-to-month roadmaps your business will prosper.

We can help you make that change and focus on where your company’s core and value are more vulnerable to interruptions.

That is it – you can now share this post, add a comment here if you fancy/thing this post was useful to you and/or if you like to add something else!

Thanks for reading.