‘I hope you had a lovely Christmas and New Year break. New year brings new excitement, new dreams and renewed vision. Digital Strategy can be a primary vehicle to achieve your business vision. Many set goals every year, success however comes to those who act. This article can help you model your digital strategy this year.
Step 1: To build a solid strategy, an absolute clarity of goals is essential. The goals need to be SMART i.e. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound goals. Secondly, you need to allocate resources for your goals. For example; who will be responsible for what, the budget, time allocations etc. Thirdly, what worked for others may not work for you. Have some past data, old experiences, reference points or benchmarks ready so that you can use them to choose the right strategy for your business. Start by writing down your goals for each area of your business.
Step 2: Now, work out the different ways you can use to reach these goals. If increasing sales is one of your goals, you can do it either by increasing new sales or by increasing average order amount (upsell) or by increasing frequency of purchase. If you choose to increase the new sales, you will need more leads. Lead generation can be done via paid search engine advertising or search engine optimisation (SEO) or social media engagement. What is the most efficient channel for you? You don’t have to choose one verses the other. You can use a combination of them to help you achieve your goals on time on budget.
Step 3: Start to put together a set of strategies for each goal. For example, a strategy for lead generation will be different to a strategy for customer engagement. Choose the target segment, the relevant platforms (Facebook, Google etc) and the targeting techniques. Tie everything back to your measurable goals.
Step 4: Do the analysis based on the past experiences and benchmarks to choose or prioritise your strategies. Sometimes, you may want to put a Plan A & Plan B type scenario. Know the difference between a strategy and a tactic. Tactics are used for short term goals that are generally small and independent. Strategy is a holistic, long-term and sustainable approach. A combination of the two can be used to create your overall digital strategy.
Step 5: Make a decision and commit to the chosen strategies for your goals. You don’t have to be right all the time. You can review your plan every quarter to make sure your resources are used efficiently. Define KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to track the performance of each strategy. Don’t try to use ‘set and forget’ type strategy.
Crafting a digital strategy may sound like a lot of work, but you can keep it simple. Start with one goal and go from there. You will be surprised how easily it unfolds itself once you start working on it. Let me know if I can be of any help.
I wish you a very successful and rewarding year ahead.
Sam Gupta is the managing director of Synapse Worldwide.
Sam would love to hear your thoughts on this advice column.
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Email:www.synapseworldwide.com
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