Is It Time To Re-Evaluate Your Digital Strategy?

Yes.

I know we’re kind of selling the horse before showing you the cart here, but the answer is unequivocally yes. Let us explain:

Every organization has a “digital strategy.” Some are more explicit than others – anything from a year-long roadmap towards digital transformation to a vague idea that could be sketched out on a cocktail napkin. Digital strategies ultimately guide how your organization builds out its technology, adapts to changes in the market, and builds a sustainable engine that delivers real ROI for your digital marketing and organizational efforts. 

Of course, if such a strategy can fit on a cocktail napkin, chances are you’re on the outside looking in as digital experience takes center-stage during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. But that’s ultimately why it’s important to re-evaluate your digital strategy: markets change. Quickly, even, when there’s a massive health scare forcing everyone to the internet for the only venue where they can socially connect with others.

Given that we’re in unprecedented times, it’s important to re-evaluate your digital strategy and see what you’ve done to prepare yourself for the changing tides. And, well, if you haven’t prepared, then you have a great excuse to start!
 

How Fast Can You Adapt?

Adaptability is key to a great digital strategy, but you wouldn’t think that given some of the most popular solutions on the DX market. Big, monolithic suites  force you to stay in one digital ecosystem, tied to technology that you may or may not need, without the flexibility to customize it to fit your specific needs.

It should not surprise you, then, that adaptability is often a huge struggle for many organizations. They build a great digital strategy, focused around achieving the goal of transforming the way they do business online, and go to work diligently executing on it. Then, suddenly, it all falls apart and they can’t figure out why.

Adaptability is not necessarily a major overhaul. Especially given the wrenches coronavirus has thrown into day-to-day business, it can be something as simple as being creative with the technology you already have in place. Think about restaurants and grocers transitioning to contactless delivery and online ordering while strengthening their digital traffic capacity.

The fact is, if you are looking at your digital strategy, you need to ensure that you have the ability to adapt, and quickly. Otherwise you’ll be knee-deep in a pandemic and looking at months-long delays to get to where you need to be…like the grocers and restaurateurs who didn’t think ahead.
 

Is Customer Data A Centerpiece of Your Strategy?

The goal of a successful digital strategy needs to be first and foremost centered around your customer. Better understanding, better engagement, better follow-through. In order to do this, though, you need to tailor your digital technology to meet each of your customers’ specific needs. This requires a lot of customer data.

In light of the coronavirus pandemic, this has become doubly true. As people flock towards online engagement, they are expecting experiences that are on-par with, if not superior, to the level of engagement they would receive in-person. Pairing customer data to your content to deliver personalized, one-to-one experiences is tantamount, but it requires having a digital strategy keyed in on effective data management.

Data management can take a lot of different forms. But in general, you’re looking at taking the data you’re collecting and connecting it into all of your other systems to deliver actionable decisions. A Customer Data Platform (CDP), similar to the one Jahia is natively integrated with, helps ensure you have the capabilities you need.
 

What Else Can You Do To Stay Ahead?

There are so many more pieces to digital strategy. How to build one, for starters. Learning the tricks to personalization and utilizing analytics to improve how you’re talking to your customers. And of course, engaging on multiple channels at once.

We don’t have enough time to get into all of them here, but we’ve prepared a document that should help.

In the meantime, our advice to re-evaluate and improve digital strategy during this pandemic is simple – understand your strategy’s weaknesses, be observant of market forces, and be ready to act decisively to stay ahead of the curve! 

Do that, and you’ll already be ahead of the vast majority of your peers.