Digital strategy is a core component of any successful business. Too often though, businesses lose themselves in the tasks of tactical execution by writing blog posts, updating social media and sending emails so that they forget something very important.

They forget to refine their strategic approach to achieving their business goals through digital outlets.

That's where we come in. Brain Box has seasoned digital strategists ready to help you achieve your goals. Read more on our approach to digital strategy below:

What is digital strategy?

Digital strategy can mean different things to different people, but the most-accepted definition of digital strategy is an approach to solving business problems through digital means.

Digital strategy can include:

• Website maintenance: Designing, building and maintaining a website that converts users in alignment with your strategic business goals
• Email marketing: Collecting relevant email addresses and engaging users with value-added content
• Content strategy: Using digital content like webinars, thought-leading blogs and more to engage users and drive conversions
• Social media: Using organic and paid social content to drive your target market to become buyers
• Automation and analytics tooling: Automating menial tasks and leveraging analytics to make the most of our human resources and learn over time

Because there are so many digital outlets you can use to reach your marketing and business goals, it often makes sense to pull in a team of outside experts. Brain Box's digital strategists can provide the guidance, perspective and expertise you need to shine online.

Digital strategy principles

At Brain Box, we take a unique and proven approach to digital strategy, keeping these core principles in mind.

Design for the end user

First and foremost, a digital strategy should focus on the end user. At Brain Box, this means we grow to deeply understand your users by developing user personas – a representation of your target audience, what they care about, what their problems are and how we solve them. We refer back to those user personas as we develop your digital strategy to ensure we're always designing, writing and planning with the user in mind.

Define and work toward business goals

All digital strategy activities should tied back into business goals. This means the goal isn't to acquire 100 new email subscribers each week – that's a marketing goal. The business goal is to increase sales 10 percent month over month. One way of working toward that goal is to grow your customer base, which we can do through showing product demos through email marketing. We'll work with you to define these business goals at the onset of our project so that we can develop a digital strategy with marketing activities that accomplish them.

Measure and iterate

We don't call a digital strategy "done." It needs revisiting every three to six months to ensure the tactics we anticipated to be effective are working for you. We leverage a suite of digital tools to measure the effectiveness of each piece of your digital strategy, replicating major successes and learning from challenges to execute the most-effective strategy possible.

Digital strategy process

At Brain Box, we approach digital strategy with a holistic lens, keeping your business goals top-of-mind and considering how we'll work together to execute each piece of your digital strategy. While we tailor our approach to meet the needs of each individual client, every digital strategy project has a few main phases:

Phase 1: Goal definition

Before we develop a strategy, we need to deeply understand your business and your goals. We start each digital strategy process with a discovery meeting. During this time, we'll ask you questions about your business, your competitors, your users and more to inform our work moving forward. We'll also define the goals of the digital strategy so we're all rowing in the same direction. Your goals might include:

• Earn more users
• Grow e-commerce sales
• Increase downloads
• Increase in-store visits

Whatever your goals are, we'll define them early and refer back to them throughout the project.

Phase 2: Strategy development

Once we have a grasp on your business and the goals at hand, we'll develop your digital strategy. This step involves evaluating what kinds of digital content, marketing activities, tools and tactics we'll use to solve your business challenge.

Phase 3: Tactical execution

We'll develop a plan and timeline for executing the strategy we developed together, assigning deadlines and prioritizing tasks to maximize the effectiveness of our efforts. During this phase, we'll also integrate tooling, like automation and analytics platforms, to streamline execution and learn over time.

Phase 4: Iteration

A digital strategy isn't something that someone sets in motion and forgets about. Quite the opposite, it's healthy to revisit your digital strategy regularly to make enhancements and adjustments. We'll meet with you quarterly to do just that, helping you reach your business goals faster.

Work with Brain Box

Many businesses leverage an outside partner for help when developing their digital strategy. It's smart to get input from experts who can provide an outside perspective and apply their industry expertise to solve your problems. If you're looking for a digital strategy team in Ontario, contact the Brain Box team today to set up a time to chat with a digital strategist about translating your business goals into an executable strategy.