7 steps to build an effective digital strategy

Digital Strategy: Explained & Benefits

What is a Digital Strategy?

A digital strategy encompasses all the techniques for promoting a business online to pursue specific business objectives. It's also called digital marketing strategy, online strategy, or web marketing.

A digital strategy can have several goals:

• Traffic acquisition

• Recruiting new employees

• Customer retention or increasing sales

It integrates into a broader development strategy for the business.

To create a relevant digital strategy, you need to choose the right tools based on your objectives, budget, and priorities. That's why, before diving in, we take time to assess the company's digital situation at a specific point in time: we conduct an audit, then develop an action plan.

Here are some web marketing tools that can be deployed to implement a digital strategy:

• Websites

• SEO or organic search - actions taken to improve a website's ranking on search engines

• SEA or paid search - creating online ads, particularly with Google Ads

• Email marketing - creating content sent via email to customers

• Mobile marketing - sending SMS marketing, creating apps, or sending geolocation-based notifications

• Content marketing - making your business desirable through quality content creation

• Social media marketing - leveraging social networks...

Why Implement a Digital Strategy?

In France, 93% of the population is online (Digital Report by We are Social and Hootsuite, 2022). The average French person spends 2 hours and 18 minutes on the internet daily, primarily on smartphones (Médiamétrie). With these staggering numbers, how could anyone deny the importance of a digital strategy today?

Nearly everyone uses the internet and social media to get information, communicate, and be entertained! It's obvious that businesses must have an online presence to have any chance of reaching their prospects and future customers.

A strong digital strategy is essential and offers numerous advantages for businesses. First, through this preferred communication channel, a brand can create genuine relationships with customers, revolutionizing and improving customer relationship management. Social networks enable the creation of true communities and real-time engagement.

Moreover, digital strategy can help enhance your brand or business if the chosen action plan is relevant and innovative compared to competitors.

Ultimately, digital strategy helps achieve the objectives a company sets for itself. If the goal is improving revenue, it will take the necessary steps to make digital serve that objective. We can confidently say that a web strategy is a tool for business growth!

Digital Strategy Requires Preparation!

As we've seen, digital is no longer optional. It's essential to allocate human and financial resources to this project, and most importantly, dedicate time to it.

Success with digital strategy in a business requires a long transformation process. You must understand that:

• A digital strategy involves major changes in your organization, particularly in using new tools or shifting mindset. With digital, you must accept that consumers will talk about you and influence new product launches—the customer becomes an active participant.

• For the process to work, all stakeholders must embrace the digital strategy. It's not just the Marketing department's responsibility. Digital touches all areas of the business.

• To facilitate the integration of new tools and digital operating methods, you'll need to support the change with short training sessions or hiring new specialized profiles.

How to Build an Effective Digital Strategy?

Step 1: Audit Your Current Situation

The first step of a successful digital strategy is the audit. You can't dive headfirst into implementing actions without taking time to assess where you stand.

Maybe you already have some digital elements in place? For example, a website. In that case, you need to audit it. To audit your website, examine each element—what works for you and what are its weaknesses.

Take time to evaluate the chosen technical solution, design, page content, user experience, buttons... This will provide a solid foundation for your website redesign.

Next, you can conduct an SEO audit to understand the site's search engine positioning. Generally, an SEO audit breaks down into three parts:

• Semantic audit - reviewing keywords and text content

• Technical audit - correcting technical and performance errors

• Authority audit - examining links created between your site and other sites

If your website includes dense text pages, you can also launch an editorial audit. You'll need to ask: is the content relevant and consistent?

Then, for a complete analysis, finish with an external perspective. Through an external audit, businesses learn about their competitors and market. You need to assess how your company positions itself against competitors. What market share does it hold? How do competitors communicate? What are the current industry trends?

This research helps businesses find new ideas and draw inspiration from current best practices.

Step 2: Define Your Objectives

Like any strategy, digital strategy must be built on clear objectives. The web objectives of your digital strategy must align with your company's broader objectives.

How do you set clear objectives? You can use the SMART methodology, which states that an objective should be:

• S for Specific: exclusive to the company, defined so we know what will be done, by whom, and under what conditions

• M for Measurable: we must be able to determine if an objective is achieved quantitatively or qualitatively

• A for Achievable: to avoid discouragement, it's important to have attainable objectives without being overly ambitious

• R for Realistic: choose realistic objectives. For example, you can't reasonably say "gain +10,000 social media followers in 6 months" without knowing how the company will break through on social media

• T for Time-bound: internal teams must be able to regularly check objective progress, for example by monitoring key performance indicators monthly

Step 3: Determine Your Buyer Personas

Today, a successful digital strategy puts the customer at the center of the process. That's why, to know where to go and how to get there, you need to start with what you already know: your customers. Specifically, who are they? What does your "ideal customer" look like?

We recommend establishing what we call your buyer personas. This is a fictional representation of several typical customer profiles that will help you find your positioning for strategy deployment.

Creating these fictional profiles involves conducting market research, studying your social media follower profiles, or conducting customer surveys.

Ultimately, this study helps you better understand your target audience to offer the most accurate customer experience possible. After completing this work, you can answer these key questions for building your digital strategy with greater precision:

• Why should customers choose you over competitors?

• What barriers might they have to purchasing?

• How do they seek information when they need something?

• How can you help them find necessary information about your products/services? ^‍

Step 4: Evaluate Your Channels and Available Resources

To define a digital strategy, you can build on the audit conclusions from step one.

Next, you can review acquisition channels one by one and question whether they're relevant for pursuing objectives, based on buyer personas.

To choose the right digital channels, you need to understand them well. Here's a quick overview of the main digital channels:

• Your website: the cornerstone of your strategy where all channels will converge. Pay attention to your site's UX and UI to ensure optimal user experience

• SEO and SEA: organic or paid search will help you drive traffic to your site—either by working on your site or blog content, or through online advertising

• Marketing automation: a widely-used communication tool for messaging prospects through a well-planned strategy. This integrates well with inbound marketing strategies

• Social networks enable reaching a broad audience. Choose them based on your industry and target audiences. For B2B activities, opt for Twitter or LinkedIn. For B2C, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok are better suited

• SMS marketing: a perfectly appropriate communication channel for creating advertising campaigns for your customers

• Affiliate marketing: promote your product or service through influencers or partnerships with complementary brands

Ideally, a successful digital strategy encompasses one or several of these elements. Choose the right channels based on previously established objectives.

Step 5: Focus on Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing helps attract prospects, engage with them, then retain them after their first purchase.

First, inbound marketing builds on the buyer persona work done earlier. We aim to create content that naturally interests them. This moves away from traditional marketing that reaches everyone and no one at the same time...

Inbound marketing aims to please and be useful. No false promises allowed. If your customer needs help choosing your product, you must do so as objectively as possible. This might involve creating blog articles, white papers, professional interviews, customer testimonials, emails, etc.

All created content will then be distributed through different channels.

Step 6: Define Your Budget and Timeline

The world's best digital strategy can't move mountains without proper organization! That's why you need to define your budget and timeline.

First, understand that to succeed with your digital strategy, you must invest sufficiently to see results.

You'll quickly discover that having a beautiful website isn't necessarily useful, or at least, isn't enough today. You'll probably need to invest in paid advertising or organic search strategies to promote that site.

Consider all costs necessary for strategy deployment: software and licenses, internal resources and contractors to help you, paid advertising campaign costs, etc.

The second consideration is timing and deadlines. You won't see definitive results overnight. You'll need to plan actions over several months.

For example, if you want to improve your content strategy, nothing beats developing an editorial calendar. You can plan articles to publish weekly. Having clear objectives with deadlines will help you stay consistent and regular in your communication. Consistency is crucial for digital strategy!

Step 7: Track Your Performance with the Right KPIs

You can track and measure everything with analytics tools! In industry jargon, we call these KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These are all the objectives you've decided to monitor for digital strategy success.

You'll see there are many indicators to track!

To do this, use one or more analytics tools like Google Analytics. Then, to measure SEA success, monitor results on Google Ads or other advertising networks based on your targets (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). For SEO, you can use Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Ranks, etc. The choice is vast—select tools that suit your budget.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of indicators for tracking your digital strategy effectiveness:

• Gross margin

• Number of visits

• Number of leads

• Bounce rate

• Average time per visit

• Form completion rate

• Customer lifetime value

• Customer acquisition cost

• Cart abandonment rate

• Cost per click

• Number of subscribers...

You'll need to track the right metrics and use them to adjust your digital strategy. What you've implemented might work for many weeks, then become obsolete—either because competitors have "overtaken" you, or because usage patterns have changed.

A concrete example: Google algorithm updates can regularly affect organic search results. Similarly, on social networks, what works can change quickly (like Instagram Reels, the preferred format now after photography).

Always keep an eye on your KPIs and adjust your actions. Digital strategy is an evolving strategy. Stay adaptable and follow trends to avoid being left behind!