Digital Strategy

The digital landscape has become quite accessible the last few years thanks to free tools, online courses, self education all over the worldwide web but at the same time it remains so complex to get it exactly right… That’s why a digital marketing strategy is an essential and continuous phase to go through. Digital marketing will help you reach a more qualified audience to market your products or services, which will lead to more sales for your business. We all know that… but where to start, how to go about it? The truth is, even if software and tools are easily accessible for all and data (per tool) gets captured without effort, you still need to build a strategic plan based on this to be successful!

So, where to start?

First step will be to collect information, analyze all the pieces of the puzzle, look for the missing pieces and align them next to each other. This initial audit will include the analysis of current on- and offline media purchases and performances, the outlining of the current customer journey and the digital ecosystem and the analysis of peformances of current content and data capturing points. But do not fear, you will not receive a 100 pages report. The audit will be handson and provide you a holistic view of strong points to capitalize on and weaker points to tackle. By outlining potential opportunities and possible pitfalls and barriers, we will be able to identify the opportunities to pursue taking into consideration your ultimate goal, the objective you wish to attain and the KPI’s to set out to define when the goal has been reached.

Choosing what to do… and what not to do!

Your set goals together with our ecosystem analysis, will have uncovered the pain points points to solve or opportunities to follow to attain the business objectives. Those business objectives can vary from driving awareness, to repositioning of the product offering or improving the direct conversions. Most often, they are a combination of different opportunities that can be prioritized based on an impact-effort analysis. To be reliable and useful, the effort-impact matrix should consider all previous elements including a realistic resource estimation and confidence index of realization. After understanding what problems needs to be solved, so which business opportunities exist, you can create your strategic pipeline and start acting on the tactics.

The strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term goal, a tactic is an action carefully planned to achieve a specific end. Don’t confuse both as tactics should support your strategic plan, not overwrite it. In digital marketing many tactics exist, but they should be purposefully chosen to serve your goal (which will be met when solving the business problems or seizing the opportunities to get there).

What will the strategic digital marketing plan look like?

To deliver digital growth initiatives or tactics and have accountability for the success of the digital strategy of the company, we will map the strategic plan into tactics or initiatives and create empowerment of ownership. The ownership can lay in your company but can also be partly externalized. This depends on in-house resources’ capabilities and competences. Another very important factor is timing estimations. Did you know that in 2003, Kahneman and Lovallo* added to the definition of Planning Fallacy the tendency to underestimate elements of time, costs and risks of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits. This is something to factor in, when building a realistic yet pragmatic Digital Marketing Plan.

This implies designing your Digital Marketing Plan in stages, depending on your in-house competencies, and according to your objective to achieve your goals, taking into account resources and time at hand. Very important is to top the marketing plan off with a global view on KPI and to measure those in a continuous way. We can also advize on how to agglomerate all data from your active digital tools towards the right data needed to monitor our defined KPI’s.