Having a digital strategy is essential for business owners who want to grow their business.

So what is digital strategy? Well, the job of a digital strategist is a similar job to a brand strategist or maybe a business consultant. There are so many different answers to the question, because it all depends on your own skills, background and experience, and that influences what you bring to the table in your sessions.

Digital strategy supports:

1. Business strategy – so how our business reaches its goals – so there’s some financial strategy in there too.
2. Brand strategy – which is how you’re presenting your business or your brand to your customers, and
3. Marketing strategy – how to use online platforms to market your brand.

Strategy gives the bigger picture, then you can just drill down until you get into your tactics of email marketing, social media, marketing, and so on.

Imagine you’re at the top of the rain forest canopy and you’ve got everything going on below, and you’re taking this higher perspective into someone else’s business, brand and audience.

Here’s a graphic to demonstrate the overlap in digital strategy and the interplay between business, brand, and marketing.

For another visual we can see the higher level strategy with digital, brand and business elements, and then underneath the tactics.

So this is in the digital or online world:

• website
• email
• social media
• courses
• podcasts and
• marketing

And so how do you do it?

How does a digital strategist carry out a digital strategy session?

The skills are deep listening, and emotional intelligence. And I like to describe it as having the ability to dance between creative inspiration and strategic thinking. In a session, you’re looking to achieve a dance in flow state between the strategist and the client.

I love this quote by Fabian I’m a big fan. He says “the business plan takes care of the left brain of your organisation. And the brand platform takes care of the right brain, the side that will be responsible for connecting with your audience. Both are crucial for a functional and empathic brand“.

And I like to apply this to digital strategy.

And so how do you start the conversation?

With a simple question. When I meet with my clients, I start by asking them to tell me about their business. I then wait and I listen.

Tell me about your business.

So I’m going to show you a case study.

This is Gill Wilson from butteredhost.com. She’s based in Glasgow in the UK. And we had a couple of questions we were working with in our session. How do we come up with a strategy that will work for us as a business right now? And how do we take the next steps to grow our business sustainably?

The challenges we discovered where that:

1) all tasks fell to Gill along with a challenge on how to distribute the workload in her company

2) something’s not working in the business process to generate revenue and be profitable enough.

3) Gill has a diverse portfolio with diverse roles and is being “everything for everyone”.

When we started talking about strategy, we realized that the issue may be to do with task switching, not the diversity of projects themselves. And task switching takes up a lot of time and eats into profitability.

The recommendations were to reduce distractions, prioritise tasks, and to work in a more focused way.

“That makes a lot of sense” says Gill.

The actionables we discovered together were:

1) to map out and categorise clients, projects, tasks and different aspects of your business on paper

2) to look at the day, and plan accordingly to what you want to do with your time. Remember, this is your business.

3) to focus on “the thing”, that important thing, that’s going to grow your business, not on the low hanging fruit.

The deeper strategy we uncovered was to remember the reason you set up the business in the first place – to have more freedom. And so the intention is to bring you and your business back into alignment with the original purpose.

We concluded that the business challenge was not so much about the types of projects or clients, but about a deeper strategy on how to grow the business in a sustainable way.

“You’ve definitely unpacked some things and there were clearly some deeper strategic things that we need to look at” says Gill.

Please contact me if you’d like to explore having a digital strategy session with me, and see how I can help you to grow your business.

First Published: 11 December 2022