Digital strategy can be a complex subject. New trends and ideas are emerging all the time, and every situation you encounter will require a unique approach. To help you get to grips with this challenging and shifting subject, we’ve put together a list of digital strategy resources, encompassing a range of tools and educational materials that will help give you some clarity and direction.
Moz – “Digital Strategy Basics: The What, the Why and the How”
We need to start by defining what we actually mean by Digital Strategy Moz’s guide will give you a solid grounding in the thinking behind the subject. Perhaps the most important point in the guide comes when it highlights the role of strategy as an intermediary between your objectives and the work process you use to get there. So our objective is what we want to achieve; our strategy is the planning process we use to decide how we’ll achieve it, and our tactics are the things we do to deliver on our strategy and achieve the objective.
Ditial Marketing entrepreneur Neil Patel takes a look at how you can create an online marketing plan and marketing strategy for nearly any type of small business and how you can use this plan to hit your marketing goals
Now we have a handle on what a digital strategy is, it’s time to devise one. With refreshing brevity, this infographic-led article by Smart Insights provides guidance on how to do just that. Every process it describes takes time to master, but the overall approach described is robust and accessible.
To keep up with the rapid pace of digital developments, you’ll require an agile approach to digital strategy. This article spells some of the ideas behind the Agile working methodology. For further reading, check out Target Internet’s Introduction to Agile Working.
Choosing the right KPIs for your projects is crucially important: they provide a clear reading on whether your campaign has succeeded in the ways you intended. Scoro’s comprehensive guide talks through 37 digital marketing KPIs – which is probably more than enough choice to tell you what you need to know about your campaigns. It’s certainly enough to get your head around. Just trip the KPI’s they suggest to fit with your overall business strategy.
Hopefully, by this point, we’ve all got our heads around what digital strategy is and how to approach it. Now we can move on to explore some of the tools that can help you create your own digital strategy.
For the uninitiated: Google Analytics is a free web analytics console providing real-time reporting that shows what’s happening on your site. You can see how people are arriving at the site, how they got there and where they are going when while they browse through your website. If you set up Goals you also have a good idea of which visitors are doing the things you really love them to do. Insights like these are the lifeblood of an informed digital strategy.
The more we know about our web visitors, the better we can target our marketing towards them – and boy does this app know a lot. HotJar tracks visitors’ behaviour in-depth to create heat maps of where they click or move the cursor most on your web pages. It also provides in-depth behavioural reporting and can serve visitors with interactive feedback polls to find out what they think of your site. In short, it helps you learn how your website is being used in unprecedented detail.
This web tool lets you review all online mentions of your brand and related keywords in one place, bringing together mention types including mentions in articles, video comments and tweets. Mention provides an understanding of both the volume and the content of online discussion around your brand, which can feed great value into your strategy. It plays an active role in the tactical side of your digital activity, allowing your brand representatives to handle negative mentions as they arise.
See our article on content marketing ideas tools for an in-depth take on 5 of the best content strategy tools online.
To successfully deliver a digital strategy, you’ll need the right people on board. These resources will help you to assess the digital skills within your team, and to identify the digital skills required on a project-by-project basis.
Take a look at our free Digital Skills Benchmark Beta. It’s a simple test-based tool that gets either individuals or teams to respond to questions on all things digital. It then takes the results for the quiz and provides a report on the participant’s digital knowledge levels, broken down into categories such as SEO, PPC and digital strategy. The participant also gets delivered some recommendations on how to upskill in each of their weaker areas. There’s nothing negative about this process – it’s about assessing the current situation and immediately identifying the best route to improve it. Give it a go if you haven’t already.
Digital strategy is often formulated, drafted and managed within project management software, shared among the members of your team.
Each team is different and will be better suited to some software than others. We recommend investigating the following platforms in detail:
Choose your project management software carefully – it is the environment in which your digital strategy must develop and be communicated to your team and if you are using it properly, it’s a system that will weave itself into everything you do so it’s important to pick one that you enjoy using.