Digital is not a strategy

If you're thinking you need a digital strategy, you better go back to the drawing board. Digital has enabled us to do many things as marketers, but it has also confused many people in thinking that they need a digital strategy as if it were an isolated "thing".

Digital is a comprehensive mix of channels that has enabled businesses to connect with customers like never before. But the real power of digital is not deploying all the channels, like following a fashion trend. It is about using the right channels to interact with your customers, wherever they are in those channels.



The first task is to understand your target audience digital behaviour. It is imperative to learn and understand their interests, their level of consumption of each channel, their engagement, what they do in each channel. There are multiple research reports online where you can find these kind of details. For example, not everyone has to be on Twitter. You may be able to find through these research publications that your target audience is more aligned to Facebook, and they spend more time on it.

At the end of the day, strategy is about selecting areas to focus. You need to be able to decide which channels are the right ones for your customers, and therefore for your business. Then you can commit your budget and resources to this mix of channels, and you will be able to spend more time analyzing how you're doing and improve your results.

An example of this is that you don't always need an app for your business. If you're trying to copy your website into an app, this doesn't make any sense. If you are building an app it's because you are sure that you're audience responds to this kind of channel, and that the app has an experience to offer. You can then monitor the performance, and continuously improve the experience in that app.
Another important thing is to understand which are the touch-points of your customer with your business. Digital is only a tool in the relationship you build between your brand and your customer.

What do your customers do first when they are looking for your kind of product? If the first thing they do is go online to search, then you need to focus on improving your search results and invest some budget in search marketing. On the contrary, if customers are more likely to go to a shop first, then you may want to see how you can promote your digital channels in-store or create some kind of digital experience connected to your shop (ie. benefit for checking in with Facebook, tweeting something with a hash-tag, etc).

The customer journey needs to be understood holistically. Many companies spend a lot of time doing online or digital customer journeys and forget that the world is not only digital. You need to bear in mind which are the offline touch-points, so that you help build bridges between the offline and online world. You have to create one single brand experience.

It is definitely a big challenge for marketers, as the touch-points increase and change over time, but the good news is that data, research and insights are now more easily available. And technology has enabled us to connect and understand our customers better than ever, giving us the opportunity to build better brand relationships.