The three key inputs you need to create your digital strategy

To create a great digital strategy you need the right inputs. As Zig Ziglar puts it…

Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.

And a digital strategy is the output that gives you the vision of your future. 

So what are the inputs and how do they help inform the digital strategy? Well, there are actually a lot more than three inputs, but typically we group them under three themes, which are Business, Market and Customer. 

Below I have set out some of the most common inputs we look for before developing a digital strategy. This is far from an exhaustive list but I hope it helps you think about what you should be looking at and considering before starting to write your digital strategy. 

Business inputs

Business inputs are important as we want the digital strategy to support and build on what the business is doing. There are exceptions to this where a business wants to use digital as a starting point to disrupt the business or as the driver of the business strategy. 

To understand the business we want to establish its key activities, aims and objectives, as well as its brand personality, proposition and positioning. Key documents that are going to help us will be the business strategy, business model(s), brand strategy, sales & marketing strategy and approach to customer retention and development. 

Having gathered and started to digest these inputs, we would look to validate and augment them through a series of stakeholder interviews. Stakeholders in various roles and seniority within the organisation will give context to the research and get an internal view of the company and whether the reality matches the documentation, as well as insight into the day-to-day challenges and opportunities the business is facing. 

Market inputs

Having started to get under the skin of the business, it is vital to understand how it sits within the market and the challenges and opportunities that presents. Here we look to identify the direct competitor set, new market entrants and any relevant out of sector business that shares similar challenges. We then compare and map these businesses with our business. The comparison often includes looking at the product and service offering, brand positioning and use of digital across the sector. 

It is important to set this within a context of an understanding of the market landscape so we look at the trends happening within the sector, how these are affecting performance and are responded to by a comparable set of businesses. 

Customer inputs

Customer inputs are the third and arguably the most important inputs into the digital strategy. It is vital to have a deep understanding of your customers, their needs, behaviours and journeys. We need to establish the business’s target customers and how they are segmented by demographics, geographics, psychographics and behaviour. It is often helpful for these to be developed into digital User Personas. These are customer archetypes whose goals and characteristics represent key customer segments. They are often illustrated with names, goals, interests and other contextual factors such as brands they buy. Sometimes businesses will have all of these already and other times they will need to be undertaken as part of the digital strategy.

We will also explore general behavioural changes within the customer segment, examples may include the use of technology, engagement with media or buying habits. Alongside the segmentation, we look to tap into available data sources that relate to your customers. These may include analytics data from digital usage, buying patterns, and customer service enquiries. 

Finally, we will try to get information directly from customers through surveys, workshops or interviews to try to further understand them, how they are behaving and interacting with the business, competitors and sector. We generally avoid asking direct questions about the use of digital or what they want but look to ask open questions about their behaviour, goals, how they achieve them and their attitudes to brands. 

Distillation 

So that is a brief snapshot of the key inputs we believe are critical to creating a solid and robust digital strategy. But the inputs are the first step. Next, we have to analyse the research and data, structure it and distil it down to inform thevision, goals and roadmap that make up our digital strategy. The process for doing this I’ll leave for another post.