The importance of a digital strategy

Grant Leboff: Dave, one of the things that I find odd sometimes with digital marketing is I often say to people; the tools like Facebook and YouTube, they’re just not so complicated. That’s why they have billions of people using them, but it’s the planning and the strategic thinking before you go near any of the channels. How does a business start to think about that strategic thinking and that planning?

Dave Chaffey:  I think first you’ve got to have recognition that you need a strategy and you need a plan. What’s always surprised me with digital marketing, and in fact marketing more broadly, is that people don’t have a strategy or plan. Everyone is doing digital marketing. Like you say, they’ve got Facebook, they’ve got a website, but they’re playing at it – effectively. We’ve done some research where we’ve asked people this question do you have a digital strategy?  That’s yes, it’s integrated into our marketing.  Yes, it’s a separate digital strategy, and no, if we’re honest, we don’t really have anything at all.  What surprised me is that over the years, the people without the strategy, it’s still pretty high. It’s a third or a half of businesses don’t have a strategy at all.

Of the ones who do, there seems to be an evolution that first of all, you should have a separate plan, which really makes the case for digital transformation in larger companies. What sort of resources you need to make, how you need to change the way you run your campaigns, how you work with agencies, perhaps. Then once you’ve got that buy-in from colleagues, which is going to give you the investment you need in digital and change the way you work, that’s when it becomes more part of business as usual and there isn’t a separate digital strategy. It’s part of an integrated multi-channel strategy, which is where everyone should be heading. You don’t want digital silos, where digital channels are fighting against other ones it’s supporting.

Grant Leboff: What are the key ingredients for you? I know that’s a big question, but what are the key ingredients that people should really start thinking about? What are the key questions they need to start identifying when they’re putting that strategy together or starting that journey of strategic thinking?

Dave Chaffey: There’s a great mnemonic. You can see I’m a fan of mnemonics. This one is developed by my co-author of Emarketing Excellence book, PR Smith. This is the SOSTAC® mnemonic. The first part of that is Situational analysis, Objective setting and Strategy. That gives you a nice, simple way to review what you’re doing now, review your capabilities to set goals through Google Analytics, so some smart objectives and then strategies to support those. What we recommend in Smart Insights is – it doesn’t need to be a massive thirty page plan, it can be a simple table which says this is the situation, this is how I’m addressing it through our objectives, and then there’s these are our strategies to achieve that.

It might be something quite practical, such as we’re going to invest more in…  when you’ve looked at your SWOT, where you’re strong and where you’re not. So, what are we going to invest in? It could be social CRM, content marketing, conversion rates, optimisations. It’s really about identifying the strategic initiatives. Prioritise them, not try and do everything at once. Just to round off the mnemonic, so we’ve got situation analysis, objective setting, strategy, the TAC are Tactics, Action, Control. That’s more the operational implementation of the strategy. Then the control is looking at the analytics to make sure you’re on target. Overall, it’s a virtuous circle of planning and review.

Grant Leboff: It seems at the end of that you’re looking at the channels as part of that Tactics and Actions.

Dave Chaffey: Yes, absolutely. The Tactics are across the whole customer journey, that’s what you would cover there. So within Smart Insights we’ve developed our RACE planning framework, so that would look how you reach, how you interact with your audience, the conversion optimisation, and then the customer engagement. That comes at the Tactical Stage.

What is SOSTAC®?

SOSTAC® is a planning model, originally developed in the 1990s to help with marketing planning by PR Smith, who is my co-author on Emarketing Excellence.

SOSTAC® stands for:

• Situation – where are we now?
• Objectives – where do we want to be?
• Strategy – how do we get there?
• Tactics – how exactly do we get there?
• Action – what is our plan?
• Control – did we get there?

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.