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A digital strategy can be defined as a business strategy on a digital platform. How you and/or your team is going to work to achieve your digital goal (Wikipedia “digital strategy”, 2019). To make a good strategy you will need a well-defined goal for your activities. We will further discuss how to make a good digital strategy, how to choose platforms to use and how you can define your digital goal.
Defining your goal
Goals and tactics are not the same, for example, making your webpage or blog look better are not a goal. It could, however, be converted to an activity that you have to do to achieve your goal for example, on conversion could be “optimize the site for usability. Simplifying navigation by making the site aesthetic more pleasing for users and highlight the different features on the site”. A goal can also be defined as the ¨why? ¨, why are you doing it? It could be to clean up the environment, to help those less fortunate, you need to find a goal that you feel strongly about. The goal in most cases cannot be to make money, especially for businesses. Earning money should be a consequence of what you do to reach your goal. To come up with your goal I have made a list with 5 steps to setting goals based on what I’ve learned the last year from school.
5 steps to goal setting:
1. Find something that you are passionate about.
Setting a goal that you are passionate about helps you to stay motivated to reach that goal. For example, say I really love animals and I want to make a blog about animals. Since animals and their wellbeing is something that I am passionate about, my goal could be to help homeless animals find a home. Then you can write your blog about helping animals. Focusing your content around this is essential in your strategy to make this goal happen. We will discuss strategy more, later in this post.
2. Setting well defined or SMART goals.
Use the SMART method to set goals and objectives. SMART stands for specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time- related, and is a tool you can use to help you define you goals (Wikipedia “SMART criteria”, 2019).
- Specific: be specific about your goal, narrow it down to an area that you want to improve. It does not need to be a geographical area. So, we can now change or goal to be “help dogs in Oslo find a home”. Here we have narrowed it down to dogs from animals and from a not- specified geographical area to Oslo.
- Measurable: the goal needs to indicate when the goal has been reached. For example, help 50% more of homeless dogs in Oslo find a home. In this example, the “50%” is how we quantify the progress of our goal.
- Assignable: specifying who will do it. Am I going to do it myself or am I hiring someone? One way is to help local businesses by spreading awareness of them or by donating to them. This is, of course, the “easier” way. The goal is now “Help 50% more homeless dogs in Oslo find a home by donating to and spreading awareness of local dog rescue business.”
- Realistic: what you realistically can do with the resources you have available. If I am going to make a blog, I probably won’t make much if any money on it in the beginning. So, the more realistic goal would be “Help 50% more homeless dogs in Oslo find a home by spreading awareness of local dog rescue business.”
- Time- related: when do we really want or goal to be met. Is this going to take us a week, 3 months, 2 years? If your goal can be achieved within a short time period, you are probably thinking too small.
To conclude the goal setting part of this post we can set a final goal that is well thought out. Our final goal is “Help 50% more homeless dogs in Oslo find a home within three years, by spreading awareness of local dog rescue business.”
Choosing a platform
Choosing the right platforms to use can be difficult and overwhelming. You need to find out who you want do reach with your content and what platforms your segment uses the most. Let’s use or previous example with the animal blog. Who is reading the type of content that we want to produce? Most likely girls in the age of 16-45 years, that love animals. Al tho it’s not a very specific segment, it can help us to navigate witch platforms to use. Based on some statistics from 2018 on social media use, we can find out what platforms or segment uses the most. In the picture under we see that Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest and Instagram are the most used platforms by women. In or age group the platforms most used are Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Snapchat. Here we have a good base to choose platforms on.
Making a strategy
When making a strategy there are some things you need to do.
1. Strategy formulation. It can be a good idea to formulate your strategy into a quote. The formulation should reflect your goal and purpose, while also having an indication for when the goal is reached. It should also say something about how we are going to do it. If we use our previous example of a goal to make an example of a strategy formulation It could look something like this “Help homeless dogs in Oslo find a home, by spreading awareness of local dog rescue business by making an alluring blog surrounding the subject”. An example of a shorter version could be “we see value in helping dogs in need”.
2. Set up a media focus plan. When you should push content on which platforms.
3. Set up a media publishing plan. What content is being published when? Here it could be useful to have a publishing plan for each part of the focus plan. Say your media focus changes every quarter, in a year you need to have fore publishing plans.
4. OKR. OKR stands for objective key results (Wikipedia “OKR”, 2019). Defining what you need to do to achieve your goal is essential. The OKR method is a great way to set this up. For example, you can use your goal as your objective and sett smaller goals as your key results. So, if we use the previous goal in an OKR, it could look like this:
O: Help 50% more homeless dogs in Oslo find a home within three years, by spreading awareness of local dog rescue business.
KR1: Partner with a dog rescue business.
KR2: Have an average of 1000 blog readers pr. month.
KR3: Get readers to adopt dogs from partnered rescue.
5. Business model canvas (Wikipedia “Business model canvas”, 2019). The canvas is a visual way of looking at a business. It shows the businesses value creation and value capturing. the canvas is a great starting point to help you develop a strategy.
Sources
Wikipedia “digital strategy” 2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_strategy Read 20.05.2019.
Wikipedia “OKR” 2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR Read 23.05.2019.
Wikipedia, 2019 “Business model canvas” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Model_Canvas 18.03.2019. Lest 24.05.2019.
Wikipedia “SMART criteria” 2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria Read 22.05.2019.