What is digital strategy? Part one of an ongoing series

We’ve recently published a white paper about digital strategy which we’ve circulated to selected clients and partners. We’re also serialising it on this blog with a new chapter appearing each week. Get in touch with us if you’d like to find out how to receive the white paper in its entirety.

Chapter One – Why now?

Today, businesses discuss the subject of “digital strategy” with increasing regularity. Yet it is still an emerging field whose meaning and value isn’t fully understood.

This white paper introduces digital strategy to a business audience, exploring the underlying principles as well as some of the specific activities and outputs digital strategists create. Its aim is to promote understanding of digital strategy and its relevance to today’s business landscape.

Why now?

Businesses started to engage substantively with the internet in the late 1990s, and have only increased their involvement since then. So why is it that “digital strategy” has only recently become so prominent?

The answer lies in the way the digital landscape has changed in the last five years. There are more platforms, more services, more devices, more ways to connect. More people are online, generating more data than ever before. Technologies are more modular, easier to link together, and less expensive to utilise.

All this means that making decisions about digital initiatives is less straightforward than it once was. The organisation considering how to engage with today’s digital landscape is faced with a bewildering array of options with no obvious way to proceed.

Contrast this with the late 1990s, when many organisations were presented with a large but simple problem: the lack of a basic web presence. Tackling this problem was not cheap, but the decision to be made was obvious and the strategic direction self-evident.

This is not the case today, when organisations are presented with an abundance of problems and possibilities. Should we create a YouTube channel, or optimise our main customer journeys? Should we focus on organic search presence, or partner with high-traffic websites? Do we need a Twitter account, and if so how should we use it?

When making decisions like this, organisations should not ask themselves “can we do this?” – because the answer is almost always yes. Much more important is the question “should we do this?” – and this is the question that digital strategy sets out to answer.

So digital strategy has grown in importance as the number of digital services, devices, platforms and channels has proliferated. And as this proliferation shows no sign of slowing down, the importance of digital strategy is unlikely to diminish.

What not to do

When Gordon Brown’s press office decided to use YouTube to issue a statement in response to the MP’s expenses scandal, the thinking behind the decision seemed clear – that the intimacy of the medium would help create a more personal connection between the prime minister and the electorate. And, of course, it wasn’t expensive or technologically challenging.

Gordon Brown's YouTube appearance

Of the many options available to the press office, this wasn’t the best choice. The medium’s intimacy had an effect, but it wasn’t quite what Downing Street had in mind: Gordon Brown came across as awkward and insincere. The episode did more damage than good to his personal standing.

A mistake like this would have been unlikely ten years earlier, when the cost of setting up a webcast would have ruled it out as an option. This example illustrates the strategic dangers inherent in today’s abundance of digital options, and underscores the need to ask if something should be done, before asking if it can be done.

Next week

The words “strategy” and “strategic” are encountered often but you’d be surprised how hard it is to get a clear definition of either of them. In next week’s chapter we’ll outline what we mean when we talk about strategy.