What do executives want to see when you provide your digital strategy?
Most organizations, from small businesses and start-ups to retail companies and franchises, will need to have a digital strategy in place in order to effectively make a difference in their marketing efforts. Typically this document is created by a Marketing Coordinator, Specialist or Manager (sometimes others are involved as well and bridges between the communications department and marketing are required). Regardless of who is involved in making it, a strategy document is a valuable piece of documentation that will help your individual teams and the overall company succeed at their goals.
So what’s in a Digital Strategy doc?
As much as we all wish for this, there is no cookie cutter template that can be applied to every sector and every business when it comes to a digital strategy document. Business to Business differs from Business to Consumer and any brand in either category has different business objectives and goals.
along with creative thinking, you have to apply data-driven decisions to your digital strategy.
A digital strategy will definitely require creativity and forward thinking to ensure that you test out new conversion generating tactics, but it also needs existing data, or sector-based data, to make informed decisions. If you currently have social media pages, google analytics and a customer database, you may be surprised at the parallels and strategic alignment that can come out of them when it comes to planning the future of your company’s digital marketing execution. Utilizing data trends, you can make some pretty solid decisions based on what has been a success for your business to date.
All of that being said, there are some “for sure” things that should be included in your digital strategy document.
Some of those are:
- Your company’s business objectives.
- Your company’s digital marketing objectives.
- Data trends and existing reporting on what’s working and what’s not working.
- How your digital marketing strategy will align with your overall marketing and business objectives.
- Hard goals or “data-based” goals to help measure success.
- Specific tasks for the next year to ensure you meet these goals.
- A strategy for all of the major digital initiatives from conversion reporting to search engine optimization, and social media organic to social media paid.
Your strategy document should be considered a “moving document” and something that will be changed and updated as you go. The initial development of this doc will take some time, considering stakeholder input and collaboration, but for the most part, the first round will be a bulkload of the work.
If you are looking to start a document consider contacting us about our Playbook, where you will get the fundamentals of a well-rounded strategy document, personalized around your business and past performance. This document will set you up for success and assist in building out the future of your company’s digital strategy.