A digital strategy is a document where you outline a plan for all of the elements of your digital and online suite of marketing tools, and how you are going to apply them to build your business. When writing a digital strategy, it’s important to think upfront about what you are trying to achieve. Is it designed to increase brand awareness? Is it to drive sales? Is it to educate your market to remove barriers to the previous two? Or is it a bit of all three?

One of the main aims people have in their digital media strategy is to create a brand aware engaged community to drive more traffic to their website and generate more sales (either in site or through a bricks and mortar venue). To do this, you need to truly understand what your customer wants, what makes your offering unique and how best to connect with your customers online.

Social media plays a huge role in your digital media strategy but of equal importance is the User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) of your website and its search engine optimisation. That means that when people land on your website, it is easy to read, easy to navigate from page to page, they can find what they want, and if there are transactions involved, they are easy to complete.

For both your website and your chosen social media channels, what strategically connects them is content. Generating compelling content that people want to like, share and engage in is the gateway to achieving brand awareness, removing barriers and increasing sales. Getting it right means you build more connections which opens up your reach.

It’s important to be consistent in your approach. You need to engage regularly with your customers/clients and update your site and social media channels with new content on a very regular basis. Content is king, connections build your business and consistency keeps you in your customer’s eye.

You may be tempted to look at business strategy documents for inspiration when writing your digital strategy. After all, their format is well established. However, as is so often the case when looking to other mediums for guidance, they don’t always fit the digital landscape. A traditional business strategy focuses on two key components: a long-term roadmap for business growth and budget forecasting. Unfortunately both of these elements are hard to replicate in a digital strategy. You may know where you want your business to be in 5 years, but you can't possibly know where technology will have evolved to beyond even 12 months.

Return on investment (ROI) for digital and online investment is less tangible and has more abstract pathways for conversion from engagement to sales. Timeframes are short and often opportunistic with digital rather than planned and executed in a linear way. The temptation when starting out is to constantly be immersed in the ‘doing’ of digital without a specific plan. This temptation needs to be tempered with linking action and engagement in a targeted and strategic way, by using clear and meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) and utilising analytics from social channels as a guide and measure of success.

Writing a digital strategy for your business is not as intimidating as it sounds. It’s just a document outlining how your business should handle the different aspects of digital from the website and mobile to email, social media and digital marketing. Creating a digital strategy that looks 3–5 years ahead is unrealistic, technology just moves too fast. Equally, accurate budgeting is difficult when the landscape is evolving at such a rapid rate.

A digital strategy therefore has to take a different approach. It doesn’t need to cover everything in huge depth, but instead should cover a time span of 3–12 months of macro implementable actions, with clear measurements and regular points of decision as to what is working linked to your sales and growth targets. A more micro strategy of a monthly breakdown of content posts, times and channels can then be developed to guide your execution, and you can measure and test continually, and do more of what customers engage with, and less of what they don't.

A digital strategy needs to focus on creating a detailed program to make the right decisions as new technologies emerge, and when to pivot and try something new rather than defining everything up front as a fixed program and pushing on when its not working.

The exact scope of your digital strategy will vary depending on your business and what you do. In most cases a digital strategy should encompass:

• Website – What features should you support on the website? How do you decide on content? Who is responsible for site maintenance from design, content and technical perspectives? How often do you update?
  
• Mobile – How responsive is your existing site? Do you need a refresh or a new site? Do you need native apps? If so, what platforms will you support? Can you integrate a shopping cart, which one will work best for your customers?
  
• Social Media – What platforms are you going to support? How are you intending to use social media? Who is responsible for it? What policies exist around acceptable behaviour? How are negative events handled? What is your posting frequency? What platforms will you use paid posts and advertising? What are the KPI's?
  
• Digital Marketing – How are you going to raise your online profile? Will you use search engine or social media advertising?What is the budget for advertising within your social channels? What is your search engine optimisation strategy? How will you ensure that your blog or news page is widely read? How will you engage with other businesses and promote each other organically? Will you use AI Chatbots and messaging as part of your customer service?
  
• Email – How do you use email to engage with your existing customer base? Do you send out regular emails? Would an email newsletter help your business if so what frequency? Do you use online tools to make your email marketing easier to manage? How do you collect email addresses? How do you ensure that privacy of your customers is protected?
  

In each area, the digital strategy should look at the benefits these technologies have for your business, assess its current performance through quantifiable measurements and make recommendations over the short and long term.

Your digital strategy may have some elements outside of your expertise. If that’s the case, it may be that your digital strategy recommends getting in experts to provide more detail in certain areas. It is better to know your key skills and your limitations than leave the strategy vague or worse not delivered on. You do need to write the strategy with a budget in mind, or at least understand that some of the recommendations will need to be implemented incrementally and are going to cost actual money or an in kind investment of time.

Establish the funding priorities, even if you don’t know the exact dollar value. The big ticket items are likely to be in the initial web and/or app development and perhaps in your brand collateral for digital and images. Smaller amounts can be budgeted as needed for social media advertising and subscription services like Survey Monkey or Campaign Monitor.

As the digital environment is constantly evolving, this is a sensible, agile approach to how you develop, implement, measure and evolve your tools to suit your business and customer needs. This acknowledges that your digital assets are never finished, and digital expenditure is an ongoing budget line cut to fit your business rather than a one-off spend.

More and more, social channels and digital tools are being created that are highly user friendly. Even if you see yourself as tech-lite, be open to up-skilling and learning how to use your key tools, as this will be of great benefit to knowing your businesses most important marketing facing portal, interacting with customers from the outset, and if you do outsource, monitoring performance with awareness. Use the massive amounts of information available for free on the Internet (like right here on the Digital Ready portal) Google Garage and YouTube to help you build your confidence as you get started.

The digital strategy for your business sits within your business strategy. In the contemporary business of today, all businesses should be using digital channels to reach their customers. Assuming you have a business plan that isn’t a dusty doorstop, the digital strategy is part of the marketing, sales and communication section, and, like a good business plan, relies heavily on a clear understanding of your customers, competitors and the value proposition of your business. If you understand where your business fits in the wider landscape, then you can use this information to determine where to focus your efforts online.

The most important thing is to figure out where your existing customers (and potential new customers) spend their time online. Are your customers teenagers chatting with friends on Snapchat, mums on Facebook, professionals on LinkedIn, fast-moving tech junkies on Twitter or designers and architects on Instagram and Pinterest? Do they want video, mobile, chock-a-block shops with seamless pay gateways, deep-diving blogs or pretty infographics? Or do they want a combination of all of these things? In some cases, your customer base will be varied and you’ll need to figure out a way to provide value to a number of disparate groups as part of your strategy. It's more likely however that you will have a targeted niche who have more than less in common with you and can be clearly profiled.

Once you have established the “who”, “what” and “why” of what you do digitally, you can make a situation analysis of where you are now. What tools does your business have, what needs to be updated, what needs to be tested, what’s working and what’s not? Are there digital or social media channels that you aren’t using because you or your team need to update their skills? Does your business need to get your website updated to be mobile responsive, have you considered the potential return on investment of being able to use more email marketing? Who are the people in your business that are your key digital communicators and if you don't have them, how can you get them? These are the types of questions you need to ask and answer before sitting down to write your strategy. The more thought and preparation you’re able to put into your strategy, the more effective it will be and the more easily you’ll be able to identify where the strategy may need to be updated over time.

There are thousands of templates on the internet to help you write your digital marketing strategy; you should use the one that you feel best suits your business. The template you choose needs to be short, sharp and agile. It’s a document that you should keep on your desktop and refer to regularly - like weekly regularly, especially in the early days of your business.

Once your situation analysis is done, revisit your business mission and vision, and how that is linked to KPIs. Now add in the relevant KPIs for your digital tools. These will be things like time spent on pages on website, unique visitors, conversion to sales etc. For social media it will be likes, followers, shares, favourites, retweets, views, pins and comments. Strategically linking your social media channels and then creating content that brings customers back to your website is the objective, so tracking where your page views come from is important. Each channel has advanced analytics to help you do this that can be downloaded to a spreadsheet and monitored over time. This is the best way to see what is moving the needle forward and what is lying stagnant.

As you enact your strategy, you should be vigilant about checking your expectations against the analytics from your website, advertising and social media accounts. By looking closely at your analytics in the context of your larger aims, you’ll gain a much better understanding of what’s working and what isn’t and you’ll be able to adjust your strategy for the future accordingly.

A digital strategy and your analytics are no use to you in isolation; they need to be constantly checked against the reality of the environment within which your business is operating. If your customers aren’t responding in the way you expected, try something new and measure your results. Look for unexpected trends and spikes, and monitor to see what caused the change in your customer behavior and if that can be replicated.

Creating and measuring content is another important metric – how often and what are you posting where, what is its reach and engagement? What happens when you increase or decrease the frequency? Where are the hits on your website coming from? Is the time you’re putting into social media actually leading to customers getting to your website? Can you change something to try and improve your outcomes? What posts are you choosing to boost or promote on social media channels, and how does that investment change the engagement graph? Keeping track (weekly) and tweaking regularly (monthly at minimum) helps to ensure that your strategy is fresh and the investment of time and money in your business is commensurate with the revenue it creates.

The two most hardworking parts of your digital strategy should be the spreadsheet you use to measure your KPIs and track your analytics, and your implementation calendar. Your spreadsheet must be simple, measurable and repeatable and make you want to use it. The key output of your digital strategy is an implementation plan or calendar for the year broken into a day-by-day posting schedule (this would be created monthly, and updated and evolved against your analysis of what is working).

Use this to map out key events in your business year, and what campaigns you are going to run, the budget, the target, and measurement of success. Break it down into what happens daily, weekly, monthly and seasonally, and who is responsible. Make it as detailed as it needs to be, revise it regularly and place it somewhere prominent in your office. In this way, you can ensure that your digital strategy is a living document and something that you refer to every day.