Showing posts with label digital strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital strategy. Show all posts

Saturday, 27 August 2016

What is Digital Strategy?


Our use of terminology forms the currency of communication and understanding, particularly in times of rapid transformation. Therefore the first task is to define what we mean by Digital Strategy. More than 50% of business executives say they have a digital strategy; a Gartner survey has found. What exactly do they mean?

Let’s start with the term digital.  Companies today are rushing headlong to become more digital. But what does digital mean?  For some, it’s about technology. For others, digital is a new way of engaging with customers. And for others still, it represents an entirely new way of doing business. None of these definitions is necessarily incorrect.

However, such diverse perspectives often lack alignment and shared a vision about where the business needs to go. This often results in piecemeal initiatives or misguided efforts that lead to missed opportunities, sluggish performance, and false starts. There must be a clear and common understanding of exactly what digital means to develop meaningful digital strategies that drive business performance.

It’s tempting even for us to look for simple definitions, but to be meaningful and sustainable, digital should be seen less as a thing and more a way of doing things. To help make this definition more concrete, we’ve broken it down into three attributes:

  • Creating value at the new frontiers of the business world,
  • Creating value in the processes that execute a vision of customer experiences, and
  • Building foundational capabilities that support the entire structure.


Strategy is, of course, a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.  It’s the art of planning and directing overall operations and movements. At its core, the essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in the specific activities a company performs.


Repeating the past is no guarantee of success, therefore understanding the direction digital strategy is headed is paramount.  At the highest level, there are two options available. The first calls for extending digitization by repeating the current digital playbook to cover new functions and processes.  Transforming activity, and therefore the business, is the second option for digital strategy.




Experience changes our understanding. Digital is more than a set of technologies you buy. It is the abilities those technologies create.  Digital Strategy is therefore about transformation, and human performance is at its core. This enhanced human performance creates value that leads to revenue.

Thinking of digital as a set of technologies (analytics, big data, mobile, cloud, social, etc.) limits the digital potential of the instrument rather than the application. A smartphone, for example, has information intensity and connectedness, but it requires applications to transform value and disrupt industries. 

Every business is a digital business in the sense that digital transformation represents the next frontier of high performance. Everything is possible with digital technology, but a digital business and digital leadership must know how to separate what is possible from what is profitable. That difference extends a premium to the business – a digital premium. And finding this digital premium is the job of the Digital Strategist.

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Written by Andrew B. Giles. Andrew is the head of digital innovation and strategy at Goodbuzz Inc. You can follow him @Goodbuzz and on Facebook
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Goodbuzz is a digital agency based in Toronto, Canada. We help brands create and capture value from emerging trends in technology, society and the workplace. We prototype the future - and believe the best way to predict it - is to create it.  Follow us on Facebook or Twitter or if you have any questions contact us directly.


Thursday, 11 August 2016

The Evolution of Digital Strategy

The business of marketing has become an ever-expanding sprawl of options and complexity. There are multiple partners with niche expertise rather than truly broad- based integrated offerings.  Moreover, the traditional Advertising and Public Relations agency model’s are dead and competitors from unexpected quarters are moving in, forcing us all to work harder: whatever it takes to stay relevant – and valuable – to our clients.


To succeed today clients need broad-based, integrated offerings – not one individual agency’s niche area of expertise.  Therefore the role of the Brand Strategist has never been more valuable.  Today’s Brand Strategist must be a polymath. Their expertise must span a significant number of different subject areas and draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.  Today’s Brand Strategist must also have a solid understanding of all media past and present: specialists and authorities in any number of disciplines.

We would further argue that if everything is digital, then nothing is.  And now that our "old media" as well as our modern channels are digital, the very term has perhaps outlived its usefulness. "Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence," as technology guru Nicholas Negroponte put it. So, by definition, today’s Digital Brand Strategist is simply a Brand Strategist.

The task may appear Herculean, but the goal has not changed.  Today’s Brand Strategist must understand the complex world we have come from, the world we are in, and also be forward-thinking to anticipate future trends and create a path that ensures the success of a product or service. 

Being an on-trend, relevant, inspiring, purposeful, innovative and community-centric brand are the things that will make people pause, listen and pay attention.  Customers want to identify with a brand they can grow with, that earns their trust and makes them feel valued.   People want to evolve with a brand whose products and services help give their business or life meaning and significance.  End to end, a brand must become a consumer’s best friend.

After well over a decade of constructing digital strategies on behalf of clients, one thing has become abundantly clear: most are often confused about what digital strategy is and how to develop one.  When defining and developing any strategy, it’s imperative that clients understand that strategy follows structure, people and an idea.  Second, clients must understand that profit and return-on-investment (ROI) are outcomes, not the strategy itself.

There are numerous approaches to conducting digital strategy, but at their core, all go through similar steps:
  • Identifying the opportunities and challenges,
  • Developing a vision around how the online assets will fulfill those business and external stakeholder needs, goals, and  
  • Prioritizing a set of initiatives/tactics that can deliver on this vision.
It goes without saying that within each of those stages, a number of techniques and analyses may be employed. 

IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITIES
First, you have to define what you’re hoping to achieve for the brand, product, or service. Start by analyzing the following five factors:
  • Presence: Measure of the brand’s digital footprint,
  • Influence: Branded message adoption,
  • Perception: Emotional reaction to the brand,
  • Engagement: People organically participating in conversations,
  • Resonance: Reaction to the overall conversation about the brand.
You need to define your business’ overall mission/objective first – your digital marketing mission must fit into your grand plan.  Therefore it’s imperative that you ask the right questions and that you understand the brand objectives that most closely align with those key business opportunities and challenges.  You also need a very clear understanding of your brand truth. You should also answer this question: what is the overriding objective you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve? 

Once you’ve benchmarked the brand’s current equity and position, you must segment your target customers. Customer segmentation allows marketers to connect all customer touch points and identify what motivates a brand’s core consumers in a multi-channel environment.  

VISION AND CLARIFICATION
Once you have a clear understanding of the target, their path to purchase, goals, opportunities and challenges, it’s time to formulate your message and positioning. Positioning is a marketing strategy that aims to make a brand occupy a distinct position (relative to competing brands,) in the mind of the customer. 

The idea is to identify and attempt to “own” a marketing niche for a brand, product, or service using various strategies including pricing, promotions, distribution, packaging, and competition.  Ultimately, as we have previously explained, this power resides in the marketers' ability to cloak their product in the universal dreams, fantasies, and values of the masses.  We are therefore creating and selling modern myths that leverage the collective pool of cultural, psychological and mythical elements to create a "brand mythology."

Now look at your brand's story/positioning and ask yourself:
  • What is the story/positioning telling my target customer?
  • Why does my target customer care about this story/positioning?
  • What sort of emotions does my story/positioning evoke?
  • How does my story/positioning connect to the emotional needs of my target customer?
  • How will that story/positioning incite action on behalf of my brand, product, and service?
  • What is the source of competitive advantage for your digital business model?
  • How can you manage business complexity in the global digital economy?
  • How do you create digitized platforms that enable new and evolving digital opportunities?
  • How can you simplify your customer experiences without creating burdensome organizational complexity?
  • How can you create new information offerings that generate bottom-line value?
The resulting narrative enables the use of social channels, for example, as a means to convey a product, service, or brand’s benefits.  Brand stories are what drive interactions with customers.  If you need further assistance in refining your brand's positioning and subsequent messaging, we would suggest reading through the wealth of information provided by Beloved Brands.

You now should ideally have an intimate understanding of your brand’s current positioning, goals, objectives competitors and challenges. From here you should be able to ascertain where a winning brand message and position can be found in the future. 



You also now should have a clear understanding of your target consumers demographics, psychographics, and technographic profile keeping in mind that you may have multiple target segments within any target group.  Note:  At any number of agencies we have worked at (or with) in the past, many have also employed the use of detailed Buyer Personas, which can be a helpful exercise – as the better understanding you have of your target(s), the easier it is to engage them.

TECHNOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION
As your target consumer base varies, the technologies and social networks you utilize to reach them will naturally vary, too.  Imagine you’re a retailer and based on your research and planning you’ve discovered that YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and a variety of social retail oriented platforms such as Pinterest or Fancy are best suited to help reach your brand’s target audience.

Let’s say that you’ve also discovered that more than one-third (33%+) of the activity surrounding your brand is based on your target consumer’s mobile behavior. You’d naturally want to define the experience that consumers will have with your brand’s products by channel, across multiple platforms, based on their behavior patterns. This exercise is also known as User Experience (UX) Mapping but the most important things you must ask yourself prior to creating any map are:
  • How do customers search and find information about my product, service, or brand?
  • What social platforms do they favour (Technographic Segmentation)?
  • What’s the purpose of the specific social platforms and technologies we’ve chosen to utilize?
  • How do these mediums play into our mobile strategy?
  • What is going to differentiate me from my competition?
As the world has shifted to digital and social media specifically, consumers look to fellow consumers to inform any purchasing decision.  Influencers are therefore a critical part of the digital market success as we move towards the new marketing models that make up social commerce and consumer experience.

Another helpful exercise at this stage is to create a Marketing Calendar that shows your brand’s marketing efforts across the channels you are leveraging in your marketing programs. Use it for benchmarks related to your digital strategy.  What are important dates for your brand's success?  This could be based, for example, around a Holiday, trade show, product release or any other points in the year that align best with sales. A social media content calendar can also be developed to support your Marketing Calendar.  Always keep in mind that when it comes to engaging prospects or customers that quality is far, far more relevant than quantity.

Creating benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) by channel and platforms is also extremely important during this phase.  This is imperative in order to estimate your brand’s expected return per channel — and whether this return is measured based on awareness, engagement, online sales, or any number of other components.  From an agency standpoint this stage is also imperative to setting realistic expectations with clients.

The ultimate goal of engagement is to create a feedback loop that allows you to meet the goals you set forth in the strategy development phase. In order to be successful, you must continually evaluate and alter your digital strategy based on the information that you gain from your campaigns and digital initiatives. As marketers, it’s important that we measure everything.

Throughout every campaign, you must also utilize social listening tools to get insights into campaign performance, variances in brand health, and language cues that are indicative of purchase intent and overall brand performance.

ENGAGEMENT/ EXECUTION
Extending consistent on-brand, on-message content and collateral across all selected channels is imperative and the cornerstone of brand building.  Approach your constituents with the goal to engage their personal lives and experiences. Be authentic, honest and try not to increase friction or decrease participation. Execution is what brings the strategic plan to fruition. Sounds simple, right?

With a clear understanding of the elements above you’re in a strong position to frame and articulate a winning digital strategy for your brand.  Keep in mind we’re discussing digital strategy versus tactics. The terms tactic and strategy are often confused: tactics are the actual means used to gain an objective, while strategy is the overall campaign plan, which may involve complex operational patterns, activity, and decision-making that lead to tactical execution.

OVER TO YOU
This framework/overview is based on our experience (and is a work in progress) however, what would you adjust based on your experience?  What do you think about it? Is there something irrelevant? Is something missing?  Looking at the sector you are working in, would you approach this differently?




Written by Andrew B. Giles. Andrew is the head of digital innovation and strategy at Goodbuzz Inc. You can follow him @Goodbuzz and on Facebook.

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Goodbuzz is a digital agency based in Toronto, Canada. We help brands create and capture value from emerging trends in technology, society and the workplace. We prototype the future - and believe the best way to predict it - is to create it.  Follow us on Facebook or Twitter or if you have any questions contact us directly.




Monday, 8 November 2010

RICKIE FOWLER (PGA) - BRAND STRATEGY


RICKIE YUTAKA FOWLER is an extremely likeable, handsome young guy who’s also laid-back, genuinely approachable, and largely unknown except in NCAA circles. This despite becoming the only golfer in history to be the NCAA's 'Player of the Year' as a freshman (at Oklahoma State) while also notably breaking all of Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh’s and Phil Michelson’s NCAA records after only a few years of taking up the sport.  He’s also one of the fastest in the sport to have earned a PGA Tour card so if you haven’t heard of him yet, you certainly will.



As of this post, Rickie is currently sponsored by Puma Golf, Rolex, and Titleist (ProV/Scotty Cameron,) followed on social media channels by more than 90,000 (at the time of this post,) has represented the United States at the Walker Cup and the 2010 U.S. Ryder Cup Team - and all before even turning twenty-two. Goodbuzz Inc. was extremely proud to be selected by Rickie's management team SFX Golf to develop a brand, social media, and activation strategy that would position him for success and reach out to a new generation of 'wired' golfers.



THE CHALLENGE

Professional Golf has changed a great deal over the years and never more so than with the advent of social media and a new 'wired' generation. As Andrew Giles, Senior Brand Strategist at Goodbuzz, explains, “Golf as a brand today feels antiquated, inaccessible, and corporate.  It’s a game that may be better accessorized by a defibrillator than Puma Gear – and that’s the primary problem.” Testing only confirmed this notion.



SFX Golf established an overarching goal to create a bulletproof brand that was bigger than the score Rickie posted at the end of a round.  Goodbuzz thereby determined that the brand needed to feel authentic, connected, accessible, and genuinely represent who he is and what he liked.   


STRATEGY
Our Golf 2.0 strategy ultimately requires a new 'connected' way of thinking: an always-on, real-time brand strategy.  Good marketing is good storytelling, and for a brand to be successful in this competitive era, it must have an engaging story. Fortunately, Rickie’s back-story was uniquely interesting, inspiring and entertaining.



As Andrew Giles explained, “Rickie Fowler is a true challenger brand.  If you are cheering for Rickie, you’re cheering for the underdog - the little guy fighting against the establishment. Twitter and social media give these followers a window seat. We ultimately needed to ensure that the Rickie Fowler brand shared little in common with the current PGA positioning.  It had to feel like a fresh, understated upstart challenging the status quo. This naturally led to our Golf 2.0 positioning and strategy.”



To the casual consumer, the power that some brands hold seems like a mystery or stroke of luck. But there's nothing unintentional about it.  To this end, Goodbuzz architected the brand strategy to be equal parts ‘hero’ and ‘rebel’ - a reluctant anti-establishment hero, who’s courageous, overcomes tremendous obstacles and persists in difficult times.  Add a dash of moxie and an extremely competitive position could be established in short order.



Rickie’s primarily “Millennial” constituents access the Internet continuously first and foremost for information and for entertainment and secondarily for connection. Our strategy needed to make Rickie Fowler both relevant and accessible to use social media to let fans come along for the ride.





ECOSYSTEM
The resulting digital infrastructure positioned Rickie Fowler as the next generation of Golf (or what we coined “Golf 2.0.”)  Therefore, whether tweeting, uploading pictures, videos or commentary, Rickie would be extremely approachable and accessible.  A website was developed and integrated with social media feeds and real-time PGA updates.



Rickie's promise to his constituents is nothing short of full transparency and unfettered access to his life (and we’re not talking about ghost-posting either.)  From the beginning, Rickie enthusiastically adopted social media (Facebook and Twitter specifically.)  For example, Rickie tweeted his frustration at hitting an errant fairway shot immediately after hitting a ball. This level of access was unprecedented in professional sports.  Ultimately, Rickie’s exemplary play on the course ensured he was always in the spotlight and driving the discussion. 

Our strategy was to make his followers active participants and stakeholders in Rickie’s success or failure and ensure an authentic emotional connection is made with his brand.  This unique and distinct positioning helps followers separate and isolate his brand from his seemingly antiquated competitors, as they are with him every step of the way.   


Managing and operating a successful sports brand is about winning, yes. But you can’t bet all your chips on doing well all the time, so you need to build a customer base that’s not reliant on winning. If that sounds like a contradiction, it’s not. You need to dig deeper into the relationships you have with fans, so that the satisfaction they get is not just from the score, but from their entire relationship with your brand. Goodbuzz has a passion for the business of sports, and a close connection to golf.

We look forward to walking this path with Rickie and watching him change the world of Golf as we know it. It’s a tall order certainly but he is definitely positioned to disrupt the establishment as we know it. Hold on for the ride.  Note: Rickie Fowler's Brand, Social and Activation Strategies were proudly developed and launched by Goodbuzz for SFX Golf.  What can we do for you?