Deriving Value From a Digital Strategy

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Championing strategy

To ensure your strategy is a success, it’s important to:

• Gain C-level endorsement and adopt a unified approach. Digital strategy must be endorsed and championed from the very top level in order for it to be embraced by the whole organization.
• Champion digital strategy across all departments. This will reduce resistance and prevent silos forming, ensuring that the digital strategy is disseminated across the entire organization and implemented both quickly and effectively for immediate impact.
• Implement in accordance with change management strategy. It’s important to first define what kind of value you want from your digital strategy in order to identify the tactics and channels which will deliver the value.

Value-outcomes

Commonly desired value-outcomes from digital strategy are:

• Increase your reach: Ensure your brand message is communicated to a wider audience across the right channels at the right time with content that is relevant to them.
• Increase profit: Drive sales by increasing brand awareness, website traffic, and online deliveries for product-based organizations.
• Automate systems to save time: Program processes in advance to save both time and money, whilst ensuring that you are reaching your customers 24/7.
• Obtain data about your customers and their habits: Gather data to generate powerful insights which can be used to iterate processes and innovate.

Benefits of implementing a digital strategy

The benefits of implementing a digital strategy include:

• Less resource wastage: Prevent idle time, duplication or overlapping of work, and learn from successes/failures so that iterations are made to prevent resource wastage in future.
• Prioritization of most valuable objectives: Prioritize the most valuable objectives which have been set and lead from the top of the organization, so that departments are working towards common objectives.
• Increased ability to obtain resourcing: A compelling digital strategy properly conceived and communicated will make it much easier to gain C-level buy-in and receive the required resourcing needs.
• Prediction of future problems and opportunities: When preparing a digital strategy, it’s important to analyze both your internal and external environments, which will enable you to better predict future problems and opportunities.
• Destroys silos due to increased cooperation: The implementation of a digital strategy will require cross-departmental teams which are aligned to achieving common goals, a key way of promoting cooperation and preventing silos.
• Combats action duplication due to process transparency: It’s important to clearly articulate the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in implementing the strategy. Keep all stakeholders updated via weekly calls or monthly meetings. Take everybody involved on the journey with you.