Digital strategy

Hello, and welcome to the session on digital strategy. My name's Annmarie Hanlon, I'm a senior lecturer in Digital Marketing at the University of Derby. And in this session I'm going to explain the key factors within digital strategy.

Your digital strategy and plan is a core component of your business. In this very fast evolving world, it's essential for organizations whether they're business-to-business, business-to-consumer, or even consumer-to-government to have a firm digital strategy and plan in place. Your digital strategy is comprised of three key elements. Step one is an audit, step two is the strategy, and step three is the plan. We're going to look at each of these in detail. The step one has a good look at, "Where are we now?" So that is a review and a benchmark to understand where the organization is now. And to understand what action may be required in order to move forward towards the strategy. And you'll see some familiar terms in there, SWOT and PESTLE. Just to remind you, a SWOT looks at your strengths and weaknesses which are inside the business and the opportunities and threats which are outside the business and over which you have less control. And typically, those opportunities and threats evolve from another planning tool that we call PESTLE. And PESTLE looks at political issues, economic factors, social issues, technology, legal which is all about law and legislation that may directly impact and control your business, as well as environmental issues which are coming to the fore more and more. Within your strategy, we look at the strategic recommendations and we tend to do this using some form of framework, a really useful framework that many marketing people are familiar with, is the 7Ps. And the 7Ps looks at your product or your service, your price or your fees, the place, that's access to the product or service which could be online or offline. So we've got product, price, place, then it looks at methods of promotion, it may look at physical evidence. And physical evidence has changed a lot within the environmental situation of the online world. Physical evidence used to be about, "How nice was your shop front?" Or if you were in financial services such as banking, "How big were the pillars of the door outside the bank?" "And how much does this mean that I trusted you?" Within the online environment, physical evidence is much more about the user experience. "How easy is it for me to navigate your website?" "How easy is it for me to contact your staff?" So you've got product, price, place, promotion, physical evidence and two other areas, we've got processes and people. And in the online digital environment, they are very, very closely connected. So your processes may be, "Can I pay with PayPal?" "Can I download a white paper from your site? Without having to tell you every single bit of information about myself, perhaps just a little bit of data to start with, such as my name and my e-mail address". And people, this is a big factor, especially with the growth of online chat. "What's the tone of voice?" "Is it friendly? Is it official?" "If I am using online chat, do I know who I'm talking to?" "Have you given me a name or are you just anonymous or do you just have a corporate face?" So we're going to look at that as well as customer personas and smart objectives, that I'll explain later on. And finally, you get to step three, the plan. And that's all about, "How do we get there?" "What resources do we need?" "What's in the plan?" "Perhaps what should our budget consider?" "And how do we monitor all of this?"