The best digital strategies are anchored in the use cases that drive your business. For example, the industrial company used digital tools to help farmers identify weeds and pests in their fields.
Many companies miss opportunities to bolster their economic underpinnings or tap new ones because they need more clarity on what digital means for strategy and cannot adapt quickly enough. Successful digital initiatives require a combination of absolute clarity, galvanized leadership, and unparalleled agility.
Benchmarking
Digital benchmarking is a great way to learn what strategies work for your competitors and how to implement them in your business. It can also highlight your strengths and weaknesses, helping you determine what to improve and keep doing.
The first step in digital benchmarking is identifying your goals and what metrics you want to measure. You can use this information to create a plan for reaching those goals and to track your progress over time. You can also compare your results to your competitors to see if you are falling behind or ahead.
When choosing your competitors to benchmark against, choose those with similar resources and objectives. This will ensure that your results are valid and helpful for achieving your business goals. Additionally, it will help you avoid wasting your resources on activities that are not likely to yield the best results.
Using benchmarking as part of your digital strategy can significantly impact lead generation and customer experience. Setting clear goals and measuring your performance against these benchmarks ensures that your digital marketing efforts are practical and generate the desired results. With these benefits, it’s no wonder that more and more businesses are using digital strategies based on benchmarks to grow their businesses.
Content Strategy
A content strategy is a high-level planning process incorporating SEO and other digital marketing tactics. It helps you to identify the content that will bring the most value to your audience and boost your business so that you can focus on creating it and deploying it across the proper channels.
To develop a content strategy, you must first understand your audience and their needs. Surveys, social media monitoring, and data analysis can help you identify demographic information and common pain points. This will help you create content that reflects the needs of your audience, showing that you care about them and want to solve their problems.
You should also consider your resources when developing a content strategy. This includes identifying and leveraging your team’s skills for the best impact. For example, if your audience is more likely to respond to blog posts than podcasts, you may want to focus on blogging and email campaigns.
Finally, it is important to set measurable goals. Use a tool like the SMART framework to define objectives that can be easily measured. This will allow you to celebrate a win or defend the need for change based on performance. As with any project, your content strategy’s success will depend on getting buy-in from the top down.
Resource Management
Implementing new digital capabilities and software systems can reshape business operations and goals, including supply chain efficiency, product fulfillment, customer engagement, and internal alignment and management. But before senior business leaders can reap these gains, they must ensure their companies have the proper digital infrastructure.
That means identifying and procuring the appropriate technology and building up the necessary human talent to use it. This requires a different approach to traditional hiring. Instead of seeking to fill specific roles, developing a flexible workforce that can shift as needed to support ongoing digital initiatives is essential.
This includes using a resource management tool that allows managers to create and manage project schedules by matching availability with demand. It helps to prevent over-allocation and scheduling conflicts and provides a clear view of the capacity of team members. It can also help to predict potential issues and mitigate them before they occur.
An excellent digital strategy such as Clear Digital looks beyond defensive measures to proactively seek growth and value-creation opportunities. Those opportunities will vary by industry but can include leveraging digital to strengthen existing competitive advantages, as was the case for Pizza when it developed a mobile app that streamlined its ordering and delivery processes or for first movers tapping into new sources of demand by delivering a differentiated experience, such as Uber.
Measurement
A common mistake businesses make when creating digital strategies is to become too enamored with emerging technology. This blind embrace of new tech for its own sake, without a solid framework or plan to guide it, will ultimately fail. Instead, look at how digital could change your business’s position in the marketplace. Effective benchmarking provides a great starting point for this.
From there, consider your current strengths and weaknesses as a business. Then, ask yourself what digital innovations could strengthen these strengths and give you a competitive advantage over other companies. The answer to this question should form your attack and defend categories.
Once you’ve established a clear purpose for your digital strategy, you can start to develop realistic and ambitious goals. To create a genuinely effective strategy, you’ll need the support of your leadership team. And you’ll also need the backing of a budget that allows for experimentation and learning.
A clear digital strategy will help you create a more efficient workflow. You can reduce long-term costs and boost productivity by leveraging new digital technologies. This is especially important when it comes to resources like employees and content. For example, digital solutions like instant emails and chatbots on websites allow customer service teams to serve customers faster. At the same time, online inventory management tools save companies money by enabling employees to track the status of shipments.
