Digital strategy is the set of steps you follow to transition your business practices into the digital world.
A digital strategy for your business implements technology to plan, build, and expand your business model and performance. You might use digital tools to generate leads for your business, advertise your business, and analyze your business practices.
As more and more tools and tasks become digitized, it’s more important than ever for businesses to move toward a digital model to map the present and future of the company. In this guide, learn more about the framework that makes up a digital strategy and learn from other successful digital strategy examples.
Digital Strategy Framework
A digital strategy framework is made up of various components that make your digital strategy come full circle. Your team, customers, and products are important pieces of your framework. But your analytics process, digital channels, digital platforms, and business model are, too.
Think of your digital strategy in three parts:
- Business model: Your digital business model might differ from your traditional business model. You might need to adapt your model to suit the customers you’ll appeal to online. You’ll also need to decide on your digital brand story, voice, branding, and products or services.
- Business operations: Your business operations in the digital world encompass all the ways you’ll make your digital business model happen. Your team is a crucial part of this framework piece. This area will also govern what digital platforms and channels you use to reach customers, like a blog, email list, and social media channels.
- Customers: The customer piece of your framework includes customer acquisition, customer service, and user experience. Analytics also fall into this category, as you’ll use a digital analytics strategy to measure your business performance and customer success.
Successful Digital Strategy Examples
Now, let’s dig into some examples of digital strategy. Although it’s impossible to know all the details of a business’ digital strategy, we can pull apart bits and pieces that are obviously successful to various online businesses. Here are some successful tactics used by real businesses with a clear digital strategy in place.
Digital Marketing Through Blogging
Screenshot via NeilPatel.com
Digital marketing is an important component of a digital strategy. Digital marketing includes any type of marketing that you do for your business on the web, including social media, digital advertising, and blogging.
Niel Patel’s digital marketing blog is one of the best examples of how well digital marketing can improve your overall digital strategy. Niel Patel blogs about digital marketing, and it’s one of the ways he pulls in interest in his products (digital marketing tools) and services (consulting and training). By positioning himself as a go-to digital marketing expert on his blog, Patel makes people want to work with and learn from him.
Incredible Digital Customer Service
Screenshot via Zappos.com
More and more people turn to digital customer service to get their questions answered and problems resolved. That’s because they expect digitized support to be quick, simple, and painless. If you give customers multiple ways to contact you online — social media, live chat, email, etc. — and have a ready-to-go team to provide 24/7 support, you’ll probably have some happy customers.
Zappos excels in this area. Not only is its contact information incredibly easy to find, but it lends support through multiple channels, all day, daily. Customers can even text the company to chat with the support team.
Awe-Worthy Social Media Presence
Screenshot via @Wendys on Twitter
The average social media user spends about 145 minutes each day on social media! If your business isn’t on social media, you’re losing out on an integral piece of a successful digital strategy.
Consider companies that are killing it on social media, like Starbucks on Instagram and Wendy’s on Twitter. They know exactly who their audience is on each platform, and they market directly to that audience. You don’t need to be present on every platform, but you should pick one or two you know your business can shine on.
Highly Targeted and Interesting Email Campaigns
Screenshot via BuzzFeed.com
Email campaigns that are personal to your audience can keep customers coming back to your business. No one wants to sign up for a generic newsletter that doesn’t provide them with value in some way.
Buzzfeed is one company that has a winning email strategy with its multiple newsletters for fans to choose from. Depending on their interests, subscribers can checkmark newsletters about food, celebrities, and even cats, and only receive the newsletters with information they want to know more about.
If you’re building an email list to improve your digital strategy or want to make it easy for your audience to contact you through your website, you need an exceptional popup or form to capture visitors’ attention. ShareThis has partnered with POWR to make their popup builder available directly through the ShareThis platform for easy implementation. With the POWR popup builder, you can make eye-catching contact forms, signup forms, and more in just minutes.
