Digital Strategy: A Narrow Perspective


Digital Strategy: A Narrow Perspective

 

The internet has taken over the world, and most companies know that the digital era is here. Unfortunately, far too many companies don’t take advantage of its possibilities or even understand the consequences of not keeping up with the digital evolution. There’s a lot more than you might even realize than the digital strategy. Still, with endless possibilities, the question to ask your company is, “How do we identify the right digital initiatives for our company?”. To answer this, it is important to know the impact of each possibility, making sure that the direction your company takes is the right one and that money is well spent.

But how do we identify the best way to go? Now that’s the hard part. Don’t just start building websites or apps. Start with creating a digital strategy, a digital strategy, when created and applied in the right way, will light up the direction for your company to take to become part of the digital age.

A digital strategy consists of four phases: set a vision, stop and think, create a business case, and prioritize.

Steps In Digital Strategy

Let’s go through each of the steps of digital strategy.

One by one, start with establishing a digital vision for the company. This vision indicates where the company would like to be or what it would like to accomplish digitally within a specific timeframe. Naturally, a gap will appear.

You now know where to go, but not how to get there. Instead, stop and think. Take a look at your business internally. For instance, are your processes working as you’d like them to? Is your business functioning at its optimum? And look externally, what are the needs and expectations of your customers or business partners? Lastly, look at the development within your company and other industries. What are the current trends?

With that inspiration in mind, you move on to the business case. You want to make well-informed decisions about your digital investment based on data and not based on assumptions or neat ideas. Do some number crunching, and reveal the correlation between new digital initiatives and their potential value. In other words, what will give the most for less, by doing the math, will focus on digital possibilities as actual business development. Instead of just online marketing, you’ll only apply initiatives that stand a chance of making an impact financially or brand-wise. The company needs to think holistically, even though it requires more work in terms of research and analysis, and the outcome will be worth it in the end. Digital concepts that take both internal and external factors into account will provide the most value.

Now it’s time to act. Based on the knowledge of budgets and opportunities, the initiatives must be prioritized, and that’s relatively simple. Put the easiest and smallest projects at the top. For each project, your organization will be better at executing digitally.

Now, you know where to start to narrow the gap between your company and its digital vision. And so, digital strategy is not about investing lots of money in the company’s online media budget. It’s an inseparable part of the company’s core fundamentals, not just moving your company forward but also making it truly part of the digital era.

 

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