If you’ve made it to this blog, chances are you’re looking to increase the online presence of your business. This can be done in a variety of ways, through a website, social media, link building, advertising, etc. Think of anything that would be classified as an online opportunity. But, how do you know what you should be focusing on, and what you should be doing to optimize your businesses digital strategy?
The way I look at it, is there are 3 key steps you need to take in order to create a digital strategy that works for you:
Step 1: Identify your Goals, Challenges & Opportunities.
Step 2: Lay out a vision of what you can do to meet or fulfill those Goals, Challenges & Opportunities.
Step 3: Prioritize your vision, plan out what to do, and how to review and amend it.
Still unsure of how to do it? Here are some guidelines:
Step 1: Take a blank piece of paper, and divide it into 3 columns labeled Goals, Challenges & Opportunities. Start with the Goals column. What do you want your digital presence to do? Write it down. Each Goal should be it’s own line. Then, move to the Challenges column. Look at the goal you wrote down. What are the challenges you face in achieving that goal? Write it there. Go down your goal list, indicating a challenge for each goal. Next, move to your Opportunities column. What is the opportunity you have for achieving that goal? What is your competition NOT doing? What do you excel at? List an opportunity for each goal.
Step 2: Now, it’s time for your vision. What creative ideas do you have to fulfill the goals you laid out in Step 1? What resources do you have access to? Put together a list of creative ideas you have to achieve your goals. You may want to break the list out goal by goal, you may not, depending on how closely they are related or not.
Step 3: It’s time to Prioritize and Take Action. Let’s look at your vision list. What’s easy to do? What’s hardest to do? What is somewhere in the middle? Prioritize that list from easy to hard. Then look at each one and determine what you think will give you the best return on investment (ROI). Is there something easy that will give you a high ROI? You should start there. I often find it helpful to do this looking at a calendar and give yourself specific dates.
Let’s do an example, to help walk you through this.
- Your Goal is to get more traffic to your website
- Your Challenge is you just started your website and have a low budget.
- Your Opportunity is you don’t have many competitors at the moment.
- Your Vision is to drive traffic to your website.
You’ve identified you can do this a number of different ways including: Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Giveaways, Online Partnerships, Search Engine Optimization, Directory Listings. - Now it’s time to prioritize.
You’ve created a content calendar, and know you have a new blog on your site every week for the next 2 months. Posting about this on Facebook is easy, and so, perhaps taking a low budget and boosting the posts about your latest content will generate more traffic, and more business. You decide this is a fairly low risk, so you will do it 1 month with a plan to review results at the end of each week. At the end of the month you will decide whether you are generating more traffic to the website or not, and decide whether to stop running your ad, continue your ad at the same budget, or increase your budget further.
Make sense?
It’s important to put everything down at first, but start with one goal, and one or two pieces of your vision at a time, that way you can reevaluate continuously and understand what is working, and what isn’t and adjust accordingly.
Creating a good digital strategy isn’t just a one and done thing. It’s a constant moving wheel that needs to be adjusted and reevaluated in order to truly work at meeting you goals.
We’re here to help you create the number one essential piece of your digital strategy: a website that works. Once you have that, we’ll help you get your online presence up and running, and most importantly working for you.
