Old methods are no longer working in a digital landscape; owners and website operators need clarity about their digital strategy as well as how to leverage demand, traffic and while maintaining their core business.
With how quickly the landscape changes, sometimes small incremental changes do very little for your overall digital strategy, without providing valuable feedback to what worked and what hasn’t. With changes coming quickly, sometimes only far leaping, bold and innovative strategies can create an impact that is not only observable, but measurable and beneficial for your business.
However, most strategic exercises do generate favorable outcomes. But with the fast pace of the digital landscape, it is difficult to pinpoint which strategies were favorable and how successful they are in the long run.
Digital consumers and visitors demand special attention. The difficulty for owners, operators and developers in many organizations is a clear connected understanding on what “digital” means for strategy.
Whether as a physical store, e-commerce, informational site, or even a simple blog, all these presences can disrupt businesses and further create economic uncertainty. Responding to digital competition by creating new digital properties and shifting resources away from your core business can also be threatening to the core business itself that is now either starved for resources or struggling with learning how to adapt.
Digital strategies need to be considerably immense, to bypass myriad of changes on the digital landscape.
Fighting Ignorance
Many organizations born online aren’t even fluent on what it means to be digital, much less, comprehend the ways it can change their business operations or competitive playing field. Owners and operators of sites too often fall prey to short term “ooh that’s shiny” strategies without a clear understanding of how they will generate value or impact your site. An example is someone on the team says “having other sites links to us will help us rank,” and then receive links from low authority, spammy, non-relevant sites that actually cause more harm than good.
The lack of understanding slows down the goals of your site and core business while creating negative impacts that may be difficult to reverse. Having only a remedial understanding of the tools, trends and technologies that are available are dangerous.
Raising your technology IQ
There are many instances of how to raise your team’s collective technology IQ. One case study, a global industrial conglomerate was facing the need to digitize. However, the organization didn’t believe that its leadership had the expertise to push for the changes needed to move into the digital age.
Hence, the organization created a digital academy which assisted in educating its leadership about relevant digital trends and technologies. This gave first-hand experience and knowledge to many of them, which was further supported by a forum where follow up questions, thoughts and ideas could be shared with other colleagues and teachers who could address concerns. The digital academy also brought in experts when needed to help further the available resources to demonstrate specific areas essential to the digital move.
An assessment was made throughout the organization, which help leaders and managers understand potential shortcomings and needed resources as the move to digital was made. A digital strategy was then implemented with input from management so that potential scenarios and concerns could all be addressed.
Overcoming the unknown
There are not many companies out there recreating the wheel. Many sites in e-commerce, health, finance, are dominated by a select few players on the field. This can shatter confidence and prevent bold new strategies from taking place – why change what’s working?
What happens is if you’re afraid to challenge the big players on the field. Your organization won’t have the creative spark needed to disrupt the field and essentially change the business model of doing business.
The thing is many organizations are already faced with this scenario. Car makers are faced with the growing trend of people using services like Uber or Lyft, public transportation or living in walkable areas where a car is not essential.
Every organization is faced with how their business model changes if people find a substitute.
When creatively analyzing this scenario, organizations will come to understand how different organizations will react in a changing digital landscape. It also propels a high sense of urgency to change old habits, ways of thinking and even acting.
Don’t guess
Pursuing an aggressive digital strategy involves a leap of faith: moving into new areas, overhauling existing collateral, merging with new technologies.
Sometimes being the first move on the digital landscape comes down to balancing speed to experience and knowledge. New strategies sometimes have no proven methodologies, giving rise to guesswork, ambiguity and potential scenarios for pitfalls.
Learn as you go
When creating new digital strategies, modeling the potential outcomes can help organizations decide which strategies are more favorable. Is there sufficient value in a strategy when weighed against the options of cost, learning, testing, resources versus the potential gain if successful.
Getting bogged down in the finer details can slow down the decision making process. Instead look towards milestones you want your organization to achieve.
Milestones
Take advantage of real-time data and analytics provided to you.
There are a myriad of ways to collect hard data about the traffic you currently have, their actions on your site, behavior and outcome.
This allows for organizations to rapidly change strategies that are slow or ineffective.
Breaking up large goals into smaller, approachable milestones are also beneficial. This allows teams to focus on specific actions towards a more realistic goal, versus a broad, non-defined one.
Though originally conceived with business units, the fail fast mindset helps organizations to quickly learn from mistakes and optimize areas where resources could be shared.
Your closest competitor, the ones you really need to worry about aren’t being mild in their competitiveness. Neither should you.
This doesn’t advocate a risky strategy, but rather a strategy that closes the gaps and creates realistic outcomes. Small non-inspiring strategies may help, will some minor growth and success, but won’t last as the landscape continues to change. Not stepping up to the leaders in your area and becoming a leader yourself can create stagnation, and further hinder the ability to adapt in the future.
Here at Back Office, we’re always a the cutting edge, learning how evolved our clients digital presence to become successful in a competitive landscape. Contact us and let us know what areas you need assistance in and what it is that you are looking for.
