Digital Strategy is a part of business strategy, which is designed by business owners to strategically respond to a digital phenomenon. It focuses on incorporating new digital technologies into the existing business as a result of technological advancements.
Every enterprise goes through the following basic steps to conduct digital strategy:
- The first step involves identifying the potential opportunities that can be tapped or challenges that can be addressed with the help of digital technologies and online assets.
- Identifying new or unmet expectations of external stakeholders that are in line with the identified opportunities and challenges
- Developing a detailed plan as to how the newly incorporated technologies will help in addressing identified challenges, tapping potential opportunities, and meeting unmet goals.
- Execution of the plan by incorporating a decided set of digital technologies as well as online initiatives to achieve the desired outcomes.
Why Digital strategy?
Given below are some of the most basic reasons as to why every company should have a digital strategy in place:
- Increases online reach: With the majority of people constantly engaged in a screen and spending time on the Internet, a digital strategy gives you an online presence to gain their attention. But a mere online presence is not going to do the tricks for you. Only a cohesive digital strategy could help you be at the right online space at the right time to reach your target audience.
- Digital differentiation: A digital strategy will help you stand out from your rivals even in the digital world. Almost every business enterprise has a digital presence these days. A digital strategy will help you nurture your leads efficiently thus making your business a cynosure.
- Helps in tracking ROI: With a digital strategy, you can adopt various online tactics and analytics for keeping a track of ROI and measuring the efficiency of your digital marketing strategies.
- Identifying opportunities: With a digital strategy, new areas can be identified for a business to focus on. This not only saves you from missing any good opportunity but also keeps you ahead of your rivals in seizing the same.
- Streamlines business operations: A cohesive digital strategy is designed in a way to align the goals of every business department and operation. It improves business processes and everyone works towards achieving a common vision.
Why do digital strategies fail?
It is quite obvious that your digital strategy might not fetch you the desired outcomes. Hence, one must know how to avoid failure. Given below are some of the reasons why it fails that might help you in taking corrective actions to prevent the same:
- The common reason is not having a broader scope. Most enterprises use digital strategies just to enhance their digital marketing and sales. As a result, they do not work out on a strategy to address other issues or goals.
- Most enterprises overlook the digital ecosystem. With a digital presence, business enterprises are open to more threats and competitions from unexpected places. Besides, online platforms aggregate new customers in huge numbers. If appropriate initiatives are not a part of your strategy to respond to such phenomena, your digital strategy is bound to fail.
- Digitization is not only about creating something new, a misconception most companies believe to be true. Digitizing existing business models is equally important to keep them in line with the new ones.
- Most companies only focus on addressing threats and issues from new entrants in the market. The real competition often arises from digitizing incumbents. If not appropriately designed, your digital strategy will bring more harm than good to your business.