How to define your perfect digital strategy template? For years, strategy has been this fancy word used by corporates to define a 5-year, 10-year major plan. When it comes to digital, needless to say that this scale can not exist due to innovation and short cycles.
An efficient digital strategy first relays on being practical, data-based, and iterative. And if this context makes sense, switching to practice is another story. Before jumping in a blurry digital wonderland, you can get started with this digital strategy template, using 5 relatively simple first steps.
Step1. Goals
It sounds like a stupid comment, but the first step to build your digital strategy template is usually to define your goals. You’ll be amazed at the number of organisations rushing straight away into projects without having defined any goal at start.
Defining your goals is not an easy exercice, but a few tips to get started:
– do not go for a list of hundred kpis, you will lose your focus
– do identify 5 main kpis only, they will help you build your success
– do take into account what is “non measurable” at start, and turn it in a kpi
– do take into account the industry you’re in
– be realistic on your positioning on the market
Step2. Funnel
Once your kpis are identified and measurables, there comes the difficult part of the funnel. In other words, how to define the journey, where do you move on from the starting point to the milestones in your plan.
An easy trick here is to work reverse. You might already have defined for one year or more the different milestones you want to reach. Try to map the journey reverse from the final results like this: if C is my final result, how much do I need in B to reach that, and one step backward, how much to I need in A.
Based on your conversion asumptions, your funnel would be something like:
– I need 5 customers for this year (C).
– I can assume to convert 1 customer out of 5 meetings, then I would need 25 meetings (B).
– I also can assume to manage to have one meeting out of 50 leads. Then I would need 25×50 = 1,250 leads (A).
Step3. Personas
Figures are key. But moving them to practice is always another story. The key part here is to gain a good knowledge of your personas to succeed in building your digital strategy template.
In other words:
– who are your typical buyers
– which are their main pain points
– which are their characters and codes
– ultimately how you can talk to them
Defining personas require a constant effort. To get started quickly, two things you can actually do:
– a benchmark of interviews, existing research,…
– a market research through a survey, mixing both quantitative and open questions.
Step4. Experience
Experience is the place where you invite your personas, and optimise the conversion. A key part of a good digital strategy template lays in building the best experiences, in line with your targets.
There’s no unique way to do here, but here a few tips to get started:
– keep it simple. Playing with data and complex patterns are useful, as long as the final experience is simple for end users.
– keep it natural. Even when you’re in a high pressure for sales, discussing, informing and bringing the most adequate propositions will most of the time pay more than a constant sales speech.
– use micro-moments. With today’s tools, digital experience is no longer uniform, but gets polyform. Using the micro-moments the end user is in, you’ll be able to bring an instant reply or interaction matching the needs.
Step5. Solutions
Ultimately, moving along with your strategy will require the proper solutions to be effective.
Digital solutions have been booming (SaaS, softwares, portals, web, apps,…): using the right solutions for your business is key. Take into account the different CRM solutions you can use, or the mobile app marketing partner you are going to use (a list of mobile app partners on DesignRush).
When building your digital strategy template, take into account which solutions will be the best and which workflows they will enable.
