In the ever-changing environment, everyone needs to be updated as per the demands of time. Those who don’t respond to the changes fail in the end. Similarly, organizations and businesses need continuous improvement and evolution for their survival through digital strategy. We are living in a computer age which has made the world a global village. Companies and organizations should be responsive to technological changes in their progress.
What is Digital Strategy?
A digital strategy is a form of strategic management and business response to a digital technology, often best defined as part of an overall business strategy. A digital strategy is often termed as the application of new technologies to existing business activity or a focus on the enablement of new digital capabilities to their business such as those produced by the Information Age and often as a result of development in digital technologies such as computers, data, telecommunications, Internet, etc.
As is the case with its business strategy parent, a digital strategy can be formulated and implemented through a variety of different approaches. Formulation often includes the process of specifying an organization’s vision, goals, opportunities, and related activities in order to maximize the business benefits of digital initiatives to an organization.
These can range from an enterprise focus, which considers the broader opportunities and threats digitally which can create and often includes customer intelligence, collaboration, new product/market exploration, sales and service optimization, enterprise technology architectures and processes, innovation and governance; to moremarketing and customer-focused efforts such as web sites, mobile, e-commerce, social, site and (SEO) search engine optimization, and advertising.
The digital strategy is part of the business strategy and experts view 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 competitive value. In the process, it reshapes traditional organizational strategies into modular, distributed, cross-functional, and global business processes.
>> Recommended reading: What is Gamification and How Can This Help Your Business
How to Design a Digital Strategy?
There is a number of approaches for conducting digital strategy, but generally, all go through four steps.
Within each of those stages, a number of methods and analyses may be employed:
- To identify the opportunities and threats in a business where online assets can provide a solution;
- To identify the unmet needs and goals of the external stakeholders that most closely align with those key business opportunities and/or challenges.
- Devising a vision around how the online assets will fulfill those business and external stakeholder needs, goals, opportunities and challenges.
- Implementation of a set of online initiatives which can deliver on this vision.
Why is it important for your company?
To a well-defined digital strategy is key to the success and profitability of a company. It helps to build efficiency and profitability in a multidimensional way. Followings points will highlight the importance of digital strategy for a company.
1. It Provides Direction
I find that companies without a digital strategy don’t have a clear strategic goal for what they want to achieve online in terms of gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones. And if you don’t have goals with SMART digital objectives you likely don’t put enough resources to reach the goals and you don’t evaluate through analytics whether you’re achieving those goals.
2. Helps A Company to Know Its Online Audience Or Market Share
When customer demand for online services you may be underestimated if you haven’t researched this. Perhaps, more importantly, you won’t understand your online marketplace: the dynamics will be different to traditional channels with certain types of customer profile and behavior, competitors, propositions, and options for marketing communications. There are numerous methods available from the main IT platforms where we can find out the level of customer demand, we recommend doing a search gap analysis using Google’s Keyword Planner to see how you are tapping into the intent of searchers to attract them to your site, or see how many people interested in products or services or sector you could reach through Facebook IQ.
3. Gaining Overall Market Share
If you’re not devoting enough resources to digital marketing or you’re using an ad-hoc approach with no clearly defined strategies, then your competitors will eat your digital lunch!
4. To Enhance Online Value Proposition
A clear digital strategy would certainly increase the value proposition. Developing a competitive marketing strategy is key to this for many organizations since the content is what engages your audiences through different channels like search, social, email marketing and on your blog.
5. To Know Your Online Customers Well Enough
It also plays a key role in knowing customers. It’s often said that digital is the “most measurable medium ever”. But Google Analytics and similar will only tell you volumes of visits, not the sentiment of visitors, what they think.
6. Helps to Improve Integration and Coordination
It’s all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos whether that’s a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT or a separate digital agency. It’s easier that way to package digital marketing into a convenient chunk. But of course, it’s less effective.
7. Make Your Enable to Respond to Competitors Threats:
Insufficient resource will be devoted to both planning and executing e-marketing and there is likely to be a lack of specific specialist e-marketing skills which will make it difficult to respond to competitive threats effectively.
8. Saves Money and Time
Even if you do have sufficient resource it may be wasted. This is particularly the case in larger companies where you see different parts of the marketing organization purchasing different tools or using different agencies for performing similar online marketing tasks.
9. Keeps A Company Updated About Current Trends
When you look at the top online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, they’re all nice – trialing new approaches to gain or keep their online audiences.
10. Key Role in Optimization of a Company
Every company with a website will have analytics, but many higher-ranking managers don’t make certain that their teams make or have the time to review and act on them. Once a strategy enables you to get the basics right, then you can progress to the continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user experience, email, and social media marketing. So that’s our top 10 problems that can be avoided with a well-thought strategy.
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