Highlighted by the 100 million or more members of sites such as MySpace.com, and the continued expansion of e-commerce with more than $1.9 trillion in online transactions in 2006, the generational shift in the use of technology is becoming increasingly harder to ignore.
When new channels become available, people adopt them and generate content to make those channels their own.
As a result, today's digital strategies must address the full spectrum of digital channels, targeting the needs of their specific audiences to achieve the greatest success.
As user curiosity, desire for community, and the proliferation of supporting technologies such as digital cameras and broadband widens, companies must take notice and realize that a targeted digital strategy is no longer merely nice to have; it is now essential to differentiation and creating future value.
Many marketers initially view digital strategy as a question of e-commerce, a business-to-business portal, or an integration problem, but there is more to the story. Because companies interact with many distinct groups of people—including customers, suppliers, partners, and employees—there are different approaches to digital strategy that stretch well beyond setting up e-commerce sites or portals
These diverse audiences provide companies unique opportunities for differentiation and developing real competitive advantage.
By keeping the following four key points in mind, companies will be well on their way toward developing and implementing comprehensive, winning digital strategies.
1. Multiple audiences call for multiple strategies
To address distinct audiences, many companies need to implement multiple digital strategies, each focused on different sets of internal and external interactions that they can shape in reasonable time to create measurable results.
Marketers must remember to create digital strategies around the people who use the technology. Since the audiences interacting with a company's technology are so diverse, the organization needs to take a disciplined, targeted approach to developing digital strategies for each of its audiences.
The more unique audiences a company deals with over various channels and desired outcomes, the more complex the digital strategy becomes. All of these "mores" require greater interactive and technical talent and tighter alignment of people, process, and technology across an organization. It is important for a company to keep this complexity and the potential for resource scarcity in mind as it considers a digital strategy for each audience.
2. Match desired outcomes and audiences
While technology lies at the heart of the activation of any digital strategy, it is the audience and the outcomes that marketers should consider when defining the bounds of a given strategy.
The interaction between an audience and the outcomes that a company wants to achieve with that audience must be clearly understood—along with an estimate of the window of opportunity—before determining the enabling technology options. This evaluation should include a complete business case and scenario analysis to appropriately prioritize audiences and outcomes.
The resulting strategies can be diverse. Take, for instance, the widely reported transformation of Procter and Gamble. Faced with innovation and growth issues, P&G developed an internal digital strategy focused on creating collaboration among its employees as well as with scientists outside the four walls of the company.
This experience translates well to its external collaboration network development efforts with customers and suppliers. P&G can leverage a variety of technologies to meet its collaboration goals with multiple audiences. A 60 percent increase in R&D productivity and innovation success rates at 75 percent that translated into a doubled profit over four years are compelling results.
An alternate approach is to focus on e-commerce enablement and the advertising, marketing, and fulfillment strategies necessary to drive more customers to a Web site, as well as increase average transaction size and overall customer retention. This sort of commerce strategy is typical of our clients who see it as key to their overall corporate strategy in which marketers target online presence to deliver significant top line growth.
These two examples show how companies can require very different digital strategies. One strategy is delivered through collaboration and social networking technologies, and the other through an e-commerce platform, but both bring their respective audience-based goals into sharp focus and improve the competitive positions of each company.
3. Clearly define and frame strategy
Different technologies enable different outcomes, so it is critical for a company to clearly define what it wants to accomplish with each audience. The following are key elements of framing a digital strategy that can be clearly communicated throughout an organization:
- Establishing the strategic themes
- Determining key audiences
- Defining targeted outcomes
- Cataloging channels that can support the targeted outcomes
- Targeting channels that are most likely to achieve outcomes with a positive return on investment
- Listing influencing channels
- Outlining any cross-channel interactions
- Identifying delivery capability gaps for each channel
- Understanding the competitive landscape and potential competitive responses
Once the general direction has been established by these elements, a company can move to the difficulties of execution. Those responsible for the audiences, channels, products/information, processes, and technologies affected by the strategy should be brought together in a coordinated effort to establish portfolios of projects and create a road map to support the strategic direction.
The road map should be supported by a cross-functional governance structure that is able to adapt the plan to changing corporate strategy and the emergence of new channels and technologies. In addition, change management is central to ensuring the rapid progress of the strategy.
Effective communication with key customers and training for impacted employees may seem old fashioned, but these activities are critical enablers in delivering a set of solutions that meets the expectations of the audience for each channel in the strategy.
4. Internalize goals and act accordingly
After framing a high-level digital strategy, marketers must internalize the goals of the strategy with respect to customers, partners, and employees. Companies will quickly notice the necessity of updating numerous capabilities and creating many channels from scratch. Many e-commerce, CRM, and information management/ECM frameworks provide valuable starting points for these efforts.
If a company chooses to create a set of digital strategies designed to focus on discrete audiences, much of the lexicon from the frameworks can be shared. Similarly, the strategies should be evaluated to determine whether there are any overlaps in need or bottlenecks to resource availability that should be addressed to enable the success of each strategy.
Digital strategy is not corporate strategy. Digital strategy is about translating corporate goals and objectives into an effective means of achieving the corporate strategy for each of a company's audiences. Taking this actionable view of the digital world allows marketers to effectively deploy resources for key audience-driven outcomes that will leverage the rapidly expanding reach of digital channels to create sizeable value for the organization.
