Friday 21st of November
Digital Strategy Topic
Written by - Jenny Williams (Ideagarden)
This was raised by a few people along the way as an area that we should focus on. The idea here is that we have a mix of clients and agency who have recently gone through the process of developing a more strategic approach to their digital marketing efforts (rather than just banging out websites to support the TVC’s.)
What are the most important aspects to get the panel to discuss in relation to this though?
Here are some initial ideas:
- The approach that companies take (internal vs agency driven)
- The barriers that they must overcome (people, money, buy-in)
- Whether this should be centralised or spread across a whole organisation
- How ready are your average company to take on a full blown digital strategy?
Just some initial thoughts but keen to hear what challenges you think companies face in developing digital strategies and what info you think is most worth getting the panel to discuss.
Hi Jen
A couple of thought starters:
- when is a good time to start a digital strategy, and how do you know if you need one? I speak to a lot of companies that don’t initially understand why they need one.
- what should the scope of the strategy be?
- should budget be assigned prior, or does that hinder strategic development?
- what are the expected outcomes?
- should external agencies be held accountable for the success of a strategy through financial incentive?
- can you ever actually complete a digital strategy?
- should such a thing as a digital strategy really exist, or should it be part of the business strategy? does developing it in situ hinder success?
Cheers,
Peter
I agree. this is a fundamental topic to be addressed. I’d like to hear the panel of agencies and more importantly, clients talk about how they develop a digital strategy in conjunction with their overall marketing strategy. Not in isolation.
Another issue that frequently comes up is clients being uncertain of how to brief an agency to develop a digital strategy – there’s often confusion about what they need to tell the agency, when is the best time to get them involved etc.
We’ve also come across an interesting thought in some businesses where at CEO or Board level, there is the expectation that writing this type of strategy should be well within the capabilities of the marketing team – discussion around how any “digital strategy” (and i use the term in quotes because it should integrate seemlessly into the marketing strategy, the business strategy and the vision and objectives) requires fairly specialised expert knowledge and a broader view of the market than just one industry vertical may be of value.
Great perspectives. Totally agree with all your points.
Interestingly though, you guys (like me) are all responsible for DELIVERING digital strategies. Our focus is on the brief, the stakeholders, the process, the outcomes against which we will be measured etc..
Would love to hear from some of those clients out there on what matters to them when embarking on major digital change and how they choose their partners for the process :-)
J
Hmmm. Interesting. For me (client-side) the biggest challenge is getting people to truly understand the scope of Digital – ie, that it’s far greater than advertising in the form banner ads and ‘viral’ (which is often seen as a short, play-safe TVC uploaded to Facebook/YouTube).
Jen @ IdeaGarden’s slide in the iMedia pack totally sums it up for me… Digital is often considered as another box to tick, eg:
Campaign Idea ->
[ ] PR
[ ] Outdoor
[ ] DM
[ ] Digital
…when in fact it should be more like this…
Campaign Idea ->
– PR: [ ] traditional [ ] digital
– Outdoor: [ ] traditional [ ] digital
– DM: [ ] traditional [ ] digital
The challenge with integrating it this way though, is, in my opinion, that digital mindsets are quite different to traditional mindsets – so you can’t just ask the existing teams to ‘add a line in for digital’ when planning. ‘Scuse the pun.
The analogy that comes into my head is of singers: try getting an opera singer to belt out a heavy rock song. Technically they can hit the right notes, but the output just ain’t what the fan-base of either party wants to see/hear/experience (NB: I have a habit of coming out with analogies that mostly only make sense to me, so apologies in advance if this doesn’t work for you *hahaha*)
So do I believe that Digital should be integrated with Traditional? Absolutely. But only if and when digital marketing experts are integrated at the same time.
And that’ll be an interesting WebCam to watch…. };0)