A digital strategy isn’t just for the big guys. It can have terrific results for small businesses too. It’s about making sure that your marketing dollars are used wisely, getting bang for your buck in the online environment. So, really, it’s a must-have for any savvy small business.
This lack of understanding is one of the fundamental reasons why digital adoption has been slow in businesses. Often there is a marriage to more traditional marketing as that’s what has worked in the past. You can’t start properly marketing on the web until you step back and look at the big picture. What are your goals, and who is your customer?
Customer Expectations Are Changing
The essential principles of customer service are timeless, but consumer expectations are not. Customers have always wanted a friendly, efficient and reliable service, but with the widespread use of technology, their expectations have been changed.
Today, customers expect relevant content in relation to what they’re doing anytime, anywhere and in the format and on the device of their choosing.
If companies are to continue to succeed, they need to utilize the tremendous advantages provided by digital technology properly. Digital technology can create efficient solutions to enable businesses to evolve alongside consumer expectations.
By identifying your customer, you can leverage the plethora of digital channels available to market your company’s services or products to potential customers and make them work in unison to drive growth. The simple fact is that in the modern age, a brand’s opportunity to make an excellent first impression is happening in the digital sphere. Your success is hinged upon how you communicate your brand to the people you wish to affect the most. Without a sharp sense of purpose, your brand can fall out of step with who you are as a business. It’s a disconnect that can be costly to your bottom line.
Prioritizing Digital Media
As the importance of digitalisation continues to grow, you need to formulate a Digital Strategy to shift your organisational thinking away from favouring traditional marketing channels to prioritising digital media.
This means transforming your marketing culture and processes to be ‘digital-first’ and not merely viewing digital marketing as an add on.
Digital strategy is not about a whole new way of viewing business. Technology has changed, but the nature of business is much the same as it always was. As the importance of digitalisation continues to grow, you need to formulate a Digital Strategy to shift your organisational thinking away from favouring traditional marketing channels to prioritising digital media.
Too often, a company’s digital strategy becomes a blind embrace of the latest and most exciting technology for its own sake. This approach may provide some short-term publicity, but that advantage quickly fades when it isn’t backed up by a strong business case. Digital should be a tool and is only a part of the bigger picture of what an all encompassing business strategy and how it relates to the digital transformation process with respect to processes and procedures.
Gartner recommends shifting your thinking so that “digital is now the context in which business occurs, not a mechanism for conducting it”. As digital technology becomes more pervasive and companies move further in the journey of digital transformation, digital strategy and business strategy will be the same thing. For now, it is still useful to use the term “digital strategy” to focus the effort behind digital initiatives.
Our Approach
If you want to get the most out of your digital marketing strategy, you have to choose a good digital marketing agency. We can help you develop your digital strategy by undertaking a review and assessment of the current state of digital in your marketing activities. We will also review your competitors’ activities, other players in your sector, and other digital marketing leaders across various industries. Together, we will create a digital vision and why it is critical to become ‘digital-first’ and build a business case to focus on the value of digital to your business.
We believe in seeking harmony between necessity, viability and sustainability, and we collaborate closely with our clients to identify pain points, incubate ideas and ultimately build exceptional experiences for your customers through our three-step process:
a. Discover
Insight drives everything we do. We collect data to glean powerful insight that will revolutionise how you view your customers and how they view you. This deep understanding helps us to connect customers to your brand, know who they are, what matters to them and when.
b. Design
We then entwine those customer insights with information architecture design in accordance with business and user needs and validate them through user testing to achieve multifaceted digital presence spanning across multiple platforms and mediums. Websites, social media, customer relationship management, and marketing automation systems all play a part in defining a business’s digital strategy.
c. Deliver
Working in partnership with you, we bring your new blueprint to life, developing a digital customer-centric ecosystem that we can track, report and recalibrate to ensure all interfaces are integrated, cohesive, intuitive and effective for your business. We will then drill down to the tactical campaigns and identify your key performance indicators and put measures in place that will help you to keep momentum when the going gets tough.
Your Digital Growth Partner
Developing a digital strategy is more than simply making a website or adding on technology. Instead, it’s looking at your business holistically and finding ways to streamline and improve your entire process. To succeed in the digital sphere, you need an effective digital strategy to ensure your efforts make maximum impact.
But, without direction, any effort you make will fall by the wayside. Get in touch today and let us help you make sense of it and bring together a digital strategy to achieve your business goals.