As a business owner, staying up to date on the latest technology can give you a competitive advantage. With the right digital tools, you can remain innovative, enhance the customer experience, and support business growth. Before you adopt new software, you need a digital strategy—a roadmap for how technology can steer your company toward its goals, whether they’re internal (like operations) or external (like marketing). Learn what makes for a successful digital strategy.
What is a digital strategy?
A digital strategy outlines how a company plans to use digital technology to grow or adapt its brand and business. It encompasses a plan of action and the tools and techniques used to reach goals. An effective digital strategy requires evaluating your current systems to find better solutions and new opportunities. For example, you might realize you need to switch to a different project management system to increase cross-department collaboration, or implement a chatbot to provide round-the-clock customer service support.
Unlike a digital marketing strategy, which focuses on using digital platforms to connect to your target audience, a digital strategy can touch any part of your business.
Digital strategy vs. digital transformation: What’s the difference?
While a digital strategy and digital transformation both recognize the importance of technology in meeting goals, they are not the same thing. With a digital strategy, you’re sketching out the role technology will play in different parts of your business. A digital transformation, on the other hand, is a digital strategy in action on a large scale—and it typically involves digitizing legacy systems and revamping how the company operates.
Pillars of digital strategy
If you run an online business, you need a good digital strategy to thrive. Your digital strategy can take a holistic approach supported by four key pillars:
Marketing and advertising
A digital marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that details how you will use digital channels and platforms to convert your audience into customers. There are various digital marketing models (for example, AIDA, inbound marketing, and growth hacking) to help shape your digital marketing strategy. To map out how you will market and advertise your business online, ask:
- Who is your target audience? Where do they spend time?
- What channels will you use? Social media, email marketing, video platforms, and/or paid advertising?
- How often will you post, send promotional emails, or run ads? What tools can help make this a reality?
- What kind of data will you use to measure the success of your paid advertisements, original content, and social media efforts?
- What is your budget?
Answering these questions will help you create content that resonates with your audience. Being transparent and focusing on storytelling helped the skin care brand Dieux Skin grow an audience. “We call ourselves a too-much-information brand,” Charlotte Palermino, cofounder of Dieux Skin, says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “One of our most viral videos is just talking about packaging and non-mined aluminum and what that carbon footprint means. It’s doing incredibly well, and it’s because it’s about storytelling.”
Digital customer service
Digital customer service refers to how a company interacts with and assists its customers through digital touchpoints such as chatbots, direct messages on social media platforms, web pages dedicated to frequently asked questions, emails, and virtual calls with customer service representatives.
Like traditional customer service, the purpose of digital customer service is to solve problems and field questions; done well, it adds a human touch to online transactions, increasing customer satisfaction and fostering brand loyalty in the process.
For example, the accessories brand Room Shop uses Shopify Inbox, a messaging app that Shopify merchants can use to send messages to customers. “It feels like I’m text messaging with someone,” founder Shelly Horst says. “So it’s very immediate and casual.”
To determine what technologies can improve the customer service experience, consider:
- What channels you’ll use
- How to make the process convenient for your customers
- Where you can automate to help customers in a more timely manner
- How you’ll ask customers for feedback
- How you’ll follow up
Online shopping experience
The online shopping experience is about ensuring all your platforms—from desktop to mobile web to apps—are intuitive, easy to navigate, and engaging. To achieve this, consider:
- If your checkout flow is optimized
- Whether the shopping experience is consistent across platforms
- How you can incorporate customer feedback
- How to respond to technical issues quickly
A focus on personalization, for instance, can make for a better shopping experience. Using first-party data and demographic information, you can provide product recommendations and deliver relevant offers, which can increase cart sizes, customer lifetime value, and brand loyalty.
The award-winning beauty brand ILIA worked with Octane AI to create a quiz before it launched its Skin Renewal Complexion Sticks. Since customers must determine their correct shade virtually, the artificial intelligence–powered shade-matching quiz helped customers feel confident they were picking the right product.
Operations
Operations include administrative tasks, project management, document management, inventory management, and other back-end processes. The right tools help improve internal alignment and company collaboration. To improve operational efficiency, consider the following:
- What processes take the most time?
- Can your teams easily collaborate?
- Are your systems integrated?
- Do your tools help you pivot?
Switching to a new platform can help your team work better. When Skullcandy migrated to Shopify, the electronics brand wanted to improve operations. Specifically, it wanted to unite diffuse data systems: product data, inventory data, sales order flow, fulfillment operations, and its enterprise resource planning system—all of which it was able to integrate with Shopify.
How to build a digital strategy
- Appoint a project manager
- Audit your current digital approach
- Outline measurable goals
- Identify new technologies and tactics
- Create a digital adoption plan
Building a digital strategy that’s both realistic and ambitious requires a thorough understanding of your digital-savvy customer’s expectations and the possibilities for improvement within your own business. Here’s how to get started:
1. Appoint a project manager
For a successful digital strategy, appoint a project manager who has a strong grasp of your products or services, understands your audience and goals as a company, and is up to date on new and emerging technologies and techniques in the digital landscape. Placing one person in charge prevents a “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation and keeps things on track.
2. Audit your current digital approach
Take stock of your current digital footprint, both internally and externally. Gather input from any departmental leads to gauge pain points and incorporate customer feedback to ensure your digital technologies also benefit your shoppers.
3. Outline measurable goals
Next, establish what you hope your digital strategy will achieve. This might include higher conversion rates, a more cohesive brand experience between platforms, or a more efficient fulfillment process. For each goal, note how you’ll measure success with specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that the team will revisit regularly, such as once a quarter.
4. Identify new technologies and tactics
Explore various options within the marketplace for best-fit technologies or denote which digital assets or platforms you’ll use to achieve your goals. For example, if you’re hoping to increase organic traffic to your website, part of your digital strategy might include search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing. Therefore, you might add keyword research tools and a content management system (CMS) to your arsenal.
5. Create a digital adoption plan
Capture all the relevant learnings and digital initiatives into a single document or presentation to share with your team. This could be a spreadsheet with separate tabs, a deck with slides for each department, or even a simple infographic containing the major strategy points for each pillar. Save this document in a central, shared location so everyone can refer to it as needed.
Digital strategy FAQ
What are the three main elements of digital strategy?
Your digital strategy should come down to:
- People. This encompasses both your customer experience and customer service teams.
- Processes. The prescribed workflows your companycreates to processdata and manage digital properties.
- Technology. The software you use to enact your strategy across digital platforms, both internally and externally.
How do I create a digital strategy?
To create a digital strategy, appoint someone well-versed in your company’s short- and long-term goals, your various audiences, and the digital tools and technologies that could help get you there. This person should spend time mapping out areas of opportunity within your current digital approach, identifying the best tools or platforms to reach your goals, and outlining how you’ll introduce them into different workflows and departments within the company.
What’s the difference between digital strategy and digital transformation?
If it’s time to introduce or refine digital operations, a digital strategy provides a roadmap for the work ahead, detailing how each department will use digital processes or technologies to contribute to an overall goal. Digital transformation is what occurs when your digital strategy involves a total overhaul of your organization—even to the point of adopting new business models.
