GUEST POST: 6 questions to ask before developing an innovative digital strategy

Our latest guest post comes care of Sara Devi Earnshaw, a seasoned digital marketing professional based in Hong Kong who helps create online strategy for major FMCG brands in Asia Pacific. Here Sara offers advice on how to create and implement a great digital strategy.

Digital strategy is an area that gets a lot of attention, sometimes agony and always discussion, from the boardroom to through to the marketing team and right on to the digital agency floor. While everyone thinks they should or do have one, there are often as many articulations of the digital strategy as there are people in the room.

1. Why so complicated?

Let’s start with the what-it-is part: “digital” could be a website, a social network, a tablet, a watch, an interactive billboard, etc, etc. A digital strategist might be a technology platform specialist with a background as a developer, or a social media “guru” who graduated last year, or a sociologist who draws on the science of epidemics to model viral effects of content types across media. With the sheer number of experts one might call upon, not to mention the large set of channels, platforms, technologies and devices to cover, it’s not surprising the conversation is frequently muddled.

My approach to digital strategy is to ask a series of questions that lead the team within the business to an understanding of what role or roles digital should play in the organization.

2. What type of business are you in?

This may seem a basic question, but it’s fundamentally important. A luxury brand may sell products, but at the heart of these brands is the experience of the brand beyond the product and the image of aspiration. To lose sight of the type of business creates a significant risk of making decisions that work against the long-term health of the brand or company.

3. Do you sell to everyone, or only certain types of people?

Digital is not one-size-fits-all. Each business has to address its customers in different ways.

I work on fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and got a call today from a company that sells customer response management (CRM) systems. FMCG brands with low-value products are unlikely to invest in the same CRM system that automotive brands love for one simple reason: the per-lead cost offers a much higher return on investment when the product sold is high value.

4. In what areas of your business could digital marketing and/or platforms have an impact?

Digital could be an extension of marketing, of customer service, or of investor relations. All three departments could work in tandem to broadcast messages, monitor responses in social media, and respond to concerns from a variety of stakeholders. Digital could, as with Nike, create a vast database of athlete information for athletes who use your competitor’s products as well as your own.

5. Which area is the highest priority?

For each area defined by the last question, would the initiatives create revenue, or drive efficiency? Try to understand which areas would have the biggest impact, and prioritize accordingly. Strategy is about making decisions, and “everything’s a priority” is not a decision.

6. What areas are you best equipped to tackle?

Some parts of a business may already have processes in place that make it easy to adopt new technology. Other parts of a business may already not be using technology that exists because the processes aren’t aligned. Start with the easy wins to build momentum.

A to Z and Z to A

When digital only involves marketing, I like to say that digital is one part of the marketing strategy, which is one part of the sales strategy, which is one part of the business strategy. A similar thought holds true when digital is used in the context of human resources, investor relations, customer service, etc.

Work the process forward to figure out what to do, and put the pieces back together again to make sure that each initiative serves the overall business. With so much that can be done, we strategists need to make sure that we’re doing the right things.

 Besides working with large consumer brands from airlines to fashion, Sara has also helped small businesses and startups map their digital presence and grow online audiences. She blogs about technology, digital marketing and working in Asia (especially China) at www.realdigitallife.com