Digital strategy is something we hear referenced regularly, we know we need it, we know all successful organizations leverage it, but for small businesses and teams without strong digital knowledge it can sound out of reach.
So, where is the best place to start if it sounds like double-dutch?
Auditing current efforts is always a good place to start. These four questions will get you started…
1. Do you have a clear direction for your marketing (on or offline)?
Have you defined some goals so you know what you want to achieve? Without these you can’t make a plan, and without a plan you can’t allocate your time and your marketing budget effectively.
2. Do you know who your digital audience are?
You’ll know who comes through your doors, but do you know who engages most online? Researching this means you can design your plans around opportunity and create a strategy for action. Reaching the right people, with the right offering, at the right time, on the right platform is part of a good strategy. Makes total sense right.
2. Are your competitors and new-startups gaining market share?
There is no escaping the reach, opportunity and success offered via digital channels, whether you like it or not, whether you understand it or not. If you have no digital plan your competitors will take your customers and clients and eat your share of the digital pie.
3. Are you optimizing your existing channels?
Every company with a website will have analytics. These should be reviewed and acted upon regularly to ensure any effort is relevant and timely. This may simply just be to understand which pages on your website are most popular, or which blog posts show the highest engagement so you can create more of them. It may be to help you to develop personas so you have a clear picture of your customers and their preferred channels and interests. Ultimately you want to meet the needs of your customer as best you can, this research and optimization will help you do that.
What to do next…
Even if you have a very small marketing budget, a limited people resource, or a fear and lack of understanding of digital channels, remember that small gains can be made by simple, robust planning and a sensible strategy. Start with one clear, simple goal and think about what will be needed to achieve that. Decide what information you will need and how to find it. It is likely that the data is at your fingertips, you just need to interpret it.
