Last year, the question was no longer: “Should we build a digital strategy for your business or not?” This fourth industrial revolution of digitalization has become essential for the development and success of your business daily.
Today’s customer is technophile, demanding, and constantly on the go. According to studies, 89% of Swiss people use smartphones, and 21% a tablet computer to access the Internet. In fact, in 2022, the number of monthly active Internet users will reach 6.92 million people in Switzerland.
What is a digital strategy?
In short, digital strategy offers many channels that you can use to market the services or products of your business, SME or multinational.
But without direction, all effort is in vain. To succeed in this constantly changing digital world, you need an action plan. This plan is an effective digital strategy to ensure that your efforts have the maximum impact, i.e., a maximum return on investment (ROI). Designing a digital business strategy is easier than you think. The secret is to divide it into small, realistic steps. Here are eight steps to build an effective digital strategy for your business.
Analyze your position on the market
Before you start your digital strategy, consider three points:
- Your company
- Your industry
- Your position in the market
Define the strengths and weaknesses of your business concerning the market. Consider the business opportunities available in your market and external threats.
This methodology is known as SWOT analysis. This English acronym can be translated into French by SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.
It gives your business an overview of internal and external business factors and identifies key issues.
Define the goals and objectives of your digital strategy
To ensure the success of your digital strategy, set realistic goals. Digital enables many goals to be achieved, such as:
- Conversion of Internet users into customers
- Lead generation
- Increased visibility
- Traffic generation
- Customer loyalty
- Improving Customer Experience
The best practice for defining your digital strategy’s objectives is based on SMART indicators – Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Realistic, Temporarily defined.
Analyze your competitors’ strategy
You are trying to establish a dominant position for your company in your digital market. Your competitors do too. Plus, they could have the same goals as you. It is, therefore, interesting and useful to analyze their practices followed to build your digital strategy.
Here are the key points to take into account when analyzing your competitors:
- Who are their clients?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of their strategy?
- What communication strategies do they use?
- How do they connect with their target customers?
- What social media are they active on?
By comparing your objectives to your competition analysis, you assess their relevance.
Identify your target customers
If you want to tell a story that connects with your audience, you have to understand who your audience is. Identifying your target customers is, therefore, one of the important steps in implementing your digital strategy. If you don’t know your target, chances are you are shooting nearby.
By creating personas specific to your products or solutions, you will adapt better your marketing efforts to your target customers’ needs.
It has been shown that the use of persona increases between two to five times the traffic of targeted Internet users on the website.
Define your communication strategy
Once you have identified your SWOT, your objectives, competition level, and persona, identify the communication channels to spread your marketing message.
The channels to consider for your digital strategy are
- Web ecosystem (main website – microsites, applications)
- Email and customer relationship management (CRM)
- Intranet
- Social media for internal and external users such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Workplace, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Email marketing
- Pay per click
- Search engine optimization
- SMS/text messaging
- Video Marketing
- Integrations/Systems that will help reduce administration
Create an effective editorial strategy
A strategy within a strategy?
Yes, by creating content that engages your potential customers, you attract Internet users looking for solutions. The content marketing leaders (editorial or content strategy) collect 7.8 times more traffic on their site than the others.
To promote your engaging content through the most effective digital communication channels. This will make it easier for you to get the results you want. Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on creating high-quality content for Internet users who, in turn, will promote your product/service and your commercial messages. Many marketers, often inexperienced, think that content marketing is too expensive. Reality shows the opposite. Although content marketing takes longer to be profitable than outbound marketing, it costs 62% less and generates more than three times more leads in the medium term.
Manage your resources and budget
To optimize the functioning of your digital strategy, consider these two important points:
First, identify resources internally and externally. Hire the people in your organization who can best manage the actions that add value to your strategy – and contract out accordingly. By analyzing your available resources and deciding where to place the talents concerning your goals and milestones, you guarantee greater success for your strategy, and therefore for your business.
The second point is to set a web marketing budget. This budget determines, at least in part, the resources you will use to achieve your goals. Certain digital tactics require greater financial investments. Simultaneously, other solutions require more patience and internal efforts (e.g., inbound marketing).
Measure the performance of your strategic actions
Don’t think that once you’ve implemented your digital strategy, your work is done. Measuring the performance of your strategic actions is an ongoing task.
Collect all digital data from resources such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console. Regularly request reports from key departments and your suppliers to distinguish between actions that work and those that don’t.
KPIs (key performance indicators) that can help you effectively measure the performance of your strategy are
- Traffic on your website
- Average time spent on your website
- The position of keywords on Google (natural referencing)
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rates
- ROI of each campaign (return on investment)
There is a free tool that allows you to generate free dashboards with all these indicators: Google DataStudio.
By regularly monitoring your KPIs, you will discover which content or campaigns generate traffic, clicks, engagement, and ultimately sales. Learn from your mistakes to correct your digital strategy. It will become smarter, stronger, and more efficient.
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