Digital Strategy
How to reboot your digital strategy
Covid-19 has fundamentally changed the way we live, work, and communicate online. Your digital strategy needs to change too. Where should you start?
We’ve run a series of strategy sessions recently, and find they are a really useful way to capture your ideas, research, and aims. We’ve worked with a military organisation, a safeguarding charity, and scientific instrumentation company to develop a digital strategy with them. All very different organisations but with a common goal to freshen up their current online presence.
Here are our tips for the first stage of your next digital strategy:
Start by talking
Talk – and talk deeply – with all your stakeholders. This is a vital step to help you build an internal business case for the digital transformation you’re about to undertake.
Review current data and performance
Look at your goals and context. We always encourage our clients to think strategically. Check the analytics for your existing digital output. But also take time to step away from current thinking and look again at whom you are targeting, how you engage with them, and how to reach your goals.
Listen to as many people as possible
Take the time to involve a wide range of people. We conduct in-depth sessions with our clients, and ask challenging questions. We always want to talk to as many stakeholders as possible. You’d be surprised at the differing perspectives and needs within one organisation – perspectives rarely captured in one place. This is always an exciting session of discovery. For us, it’s a collaborative process – we facilitate, prompt and, most importantly, listen.
Make time for a strategy session
It’s fantastic to be able to get people in a room together and capture all of your thinking. If that’s not possible, use an online collaboration tool such as Miro. If you haven’t used it before, it’s a clever online whiteboard, where everyone can stick their ideas using virtual post-it notes.
Here’s a set of boards with the structure that we use (these are adapted from a not-for-profit client) that you are welcome to copy and edit for your own use.
Bringing it all together
By this point you should be able to draw up a ‘straw-man’ set of ideas – a kind of outline of your goals, audiences, commercial aims. You’ll need a clear picture of where you need to go, and how to get there: how to build the right website, targeting your audiences and your desired results.
Next steps
It may take a couple of weeks or a couple of months, depending on how many people you need to talk to and the complexity of the goals, to arrive at a vision and a plan for your website and digital strategy.
Create a vision that encompasses your thinking; a fully-fledged digital overview – and overhaul – for your organisation. Not just websites, but social media planning, new technology embedded into sites, and a host of other options. Make sure you have a strong business case for implementation too.
If you are planning a digital overhaul, feel free to use our template for a strategy session or get in touch to see how we could work with you to offer valuable external support to get your strategy underway.