Why digital strategy is essential to your business
A targeted digital strategy has goals. You’ve only got so many resources to work with. A good digital strategy takes these into account and will work within these limitations.
What is digital strategy?
A digital strategy is your blueprint for achieving your organization’s goals using the ever-increasing bounty of tools and techniques available on the Web. Digital strategy must be aligned with your business strategy to be effective and it must be measurable in order to ensure accountability and to track progress towards a business’s goals.
In short, digital strategy is essential to any and every business. It is at least as important as your advertising in print and broadcast media, even if the business you are running happens to be geographically localized.
But “digital” is one of those impossibly broad terms. Like “social,” it’s perhaps too broad to be useful. Your digital tools and platforms include:
Your company website
Any microsite or landing page campaigns
Social media channels (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, etc.)
Mobile applications
Email or SMS marketing campaigns
It also includes your digital workplace itself:
Company Intranet
Email
Collaboration platforms (e.g., project managaement, Jira, Microsoft Teams, Slack)
Applications (e.g., ERP, learning management, timecard entry)
Legacy systems (e.g., benefits & payroll system, ERP)
In short, your digital ecosystem includes both the public and private, new and legacy.
Digital Strategy Requires Accountability
The point of a digital strategy is to transform your business, to bring about real change.
Change should be quantifiable and documented. Too much digital work has slid by without being meaningful, by making vague claims to raise awareness or to protect reputations. However, without attaching meaningful metrics to these efforts, accountability is impossible.
Digital Strategy Embraces Fear
A successful digital strategy will depart significantly from your “business as usual” processes, which can be uncomfortable, even frightening.
Strategy that does not take into account the talents of your people, your time constraints, and your limited resources isn’t a strategy at all. Strategy answers the question of goals. The goal or objective expresses what you want, but the strategy explains how you’re going to achieve your goals with the resources you’ve got.
Strategy entails some fear and discomfort, both of which are healthy.
But if your digital strategy does not take constraints and limitations into account, if it is not proceeding with an acknowledgement of reality, then it is fated to fail.
Many large and successful enterprises have faltered and fallen because they were more comfortable lying to themselves about their resources and not committing to a strategy that they might find, on the surface, risky, preferring instead to follow the same marketing approach every year.
When you’re a big company, you’ve got a certain amount of vested interest in the status quo. But disruptions will come and even the largest companies can be shaken.
Did you know that 88% of the Fortune 500 Companies in 1955 are long gone?
Digital Strategy Enables Resilience & Antifragility
However, one desirable endgame of digital strategy is to make your business more resilient to marketplace disruptions. Even better, your business may become more antifragile.
Resilient businesses are more able to weather difficult situations for a time. Antifragile businesses have systems that actually become stronger when they are subjected to stress. What does that mean? Think of a customer base that rallies to your brand’s defense when it is attacked, because the members of your online support community fervently believe in the mission and good that your organization does. The stronger the attack that comes at you, the more your community of supporters steps in and is willing to take up your defense like a strong immunity response.
Regardless of either outcome, a successful digital strategy makes it easier for your customers to work with you. It helps your employees get more work done. And it enhances your bottom line, making your investors and shareholders happier.
Your Digital Strategy Roadmap
As a digital marketing partner, Clocktower Advisors provides a roadmap to help clients align with goals. We work with you to create a roadmap for changing the business and a plan for how to measure and govern these new processes.
Whether you are a newly created startup in a small city like Two Rivers (where Clocktower Advisors is proudly headquartered!) or a global, multi-location enterprise in the Fortune 100, having a plan and cultivating new digital habits is essential to a successful and sustainable digital transformation.
Learn more about our Solutions.
