Digital strategy is a crucial component of the overall marketing strategy. Actually, it is a “must have” part these days.

Companies are aware of the importance of creating a digital strategy. And there are some steps to follow to create a digital strategy for your business.

First of all, everything starts with understanding your customers and their preferences better. So, you need to identify Customer Profiles (or Personas), including the general characteristics, digital needs, preferences, challenges, what they value,… etc.

Once you identify your customers, then you need to draw the Customer Journey as the second thing. Customer journeys are key elements of the digital strategy creation process. They describe the steps of customer behaviors from current status up to the future desired state. Your customer journey should clearly be reflecting your marketing goals. Actually, better to keep in mind always that all these digital strategy creation processes are part of the marketing strategy.

After creating the Customer Journeys next step will be mapping the relevant contents and services across the journey steps. This process is called Customer Journey Mapping and is another key step to creating the digital strategy. During content and service mapping, you do not need to be specific about the mapped components, just put the common content and service types like “a website, promotional short video, emailing, …etc”. Because you will be creating detailed versions of those items during the next step.

Now, you have your customer journey mapped with relevant content and services. It is time to start identifying the existing contents & services and the gaps that need to be created against the journey steps. During this step, you can be as specific as possible in terms of the content and the services like “an un-branded website about a specific service, a short promotional video about a specific topic, an email campaign with 3 emails focusing on a specific service,… etc”. Once you’ll complete this part, you should have a clear understanding of which content is ready/available mapped to your customer journey and what needs to be created as new to fill the content/service gaps in your journey steps.

And after finalizing all these activities now, you are ready to start building your Content and Service Calendar to let your marketing teams know about the availability timeline of the content and the services that will be shared with your customers.

Of course, having the content & service calendar is a successful milestone, but it is not the end. You still need to create your Content Marketing Strategy – I’ll be writing another article focusing on this topic.

Congratulations, you have your Digital Strategy and the Tactical Plan available now. It is time to start implementing them and measuring their impacts for continuous improvement.