A digital strategy sounds like a sensible thing to have.
It suggests that someone has sat down, thought carefully about the business, looked at the market and worked out what needs to happen online.
Unfortunately, that’s not always how it works.
Quite often, a digital strategy starts with the digital.
Someone decides the business needs a new website. Or more social media. Or better SEO. Or Google Ads. Or an AI strategy. Then everyone gets busy making those things happen.
It can look very productive.
It just doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
Start with the business
The place to start isn’t Google, Instagram, AI or your website.
It’s the business itself.
What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to find more customers? Sell more products? Build awareness? Become more visible in your industry? Make it easier for people to find your research? Improve the way your team works?
These questions sound obvious, but they are surprisingly easy to skip.
Digital gives us an enormous number of things we can do. The difficult part is deciding which of those things are actually worth doing.
More isn’t necessarily better
One of the easiest traps in digital is assuming that more activity means better results.
More posts.
More traffic.
More emails.
More campaigns.
More content.
More tools.
More dashboards.
Before long, everyone is very busy and nobody is entirely sure what all the activity is supposed to achieve.
The answer isn’t always to do less. Sometimes you genuinely need more activity. But it should be activity that moves the business towards something.
A good digital strategy gives all that activity a reason.
Who are you trying to reach?
The next question is one that gets surprisingly little attention.
Who is this actually for?
Not “everyone”.
Nobody has a target market of everyone.
Your customers, members, clients, readers or stakeholders have different needs, questions and reasons for paying attention to you. Understanding those people should influence what you say, where you say it and how you expect them to find you.
This is particularly important for organisations with a lot of information to share.
You might have excellent research, valuable expertise or years of accumulated knowledge, but if the people who need it can’t find it, understand it or use it, its value is limited.
Digital strategy should help close that gap.
Then choose the tools
Once you understand what you’re trying to achieve and who you’re trying to reach, the digital choices become much clearer.
Perhaps you need better SEO.
Perhaps your website needs restructuring.
Perhaps your content needs a rethink.
Perhaps Google Analytics and Search Console can tell you something important about what people are already doing.
Perhaps AI could remove some tedious work from your team’s day.
Perhaps you don’t need another tool at all.
That last option is worth considering more often.
There is always another platform to sign up for, another subscription to pay and another piece of software promising to transform your business before lunchtime.
You don’t have to buy all of them.
Strategy should make decisions easier
For me, that’s what a useful digital strategy should do.
It should make the digital landscape feel less overwhelming, not more.
It should tell you where to focus, what can wait and why you’re doing the things you’re doing.
It should connect your digital activity to the actual business.
And it should be practical enough that somebody can do something with it.
You don’t need a strategy document that disappears into a drawer after the presentation.
You need a sensible plan that helps you decide what to do next.
Digital strategy shouldn’t begin with the question, “What should we do online?”
It should begin with a much better question:
“What are we trying to achieve, and how can digital help us get there?”
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