Five different flavors of a digital strategy

Yummy. Digital strategy!

Wikipedia defines a “digital strategy” as:

[…] the process of specifying an organization’s vision, goals, opportunities and initiatives in order to maximize the business benefits of digital initiatives to the organization.

What does that mean? I have seen many different flavors of a digital strategy over the years. Here are a few. Do you know any more?

A community (social) strategy. How to build loyalty amongst customers. How to make customers help each other solve problems. How to make customers extend and complete your products. How to make customers love you. Skills needed: community management, social media.

A multi channel strategy. How to make sure the mobile, tablet, desktop, TV and whatever else experience of your digital presence fits together, both from a technical standpoint but more importantly, how your organisation can manage it. Skills needed: change management, IT architecture.

A media strategy. How to use video, blogging, microblogging, live streaming, Facebook etc. as media channels to build on online presence. Every company is a media company – but how? Skills needed: content marketing, (low cost) video production.

A conversion and growth strategy. How to make sure that you get as many visitors to your web site as possible and that as many of the visitors as possible do what you want them to do, like buy your products. Aka “growth hacking“. Skills needed: agile development (for speed of changes), search engine optimization, web analytics.

An innovation strategy. How to make sure you keep pushing forward and explore new business models, new products and new markets that digitalisation enables. Skills needed: customer development, business model canvas, lean startup.

Selling is about framing it right

In order to make a sale, you need to frame the product or service in a way that makes the benefit and value clear to the buyer. 

An example, from real life. Trying to get my 2 year old daughter in the bath.

– Honey, do you want to take a shower?
– Noooooo!
– Do you want to take a bath?
– Noooooo!
– Do you want to bake foam-cookies?
– Yeeeeeaaah!

Sold!

The only skill you really need

I’m a software developer by training. This has given me some amazing opportunities to create just about anything that’s digital. Knowing how to program when software is eating the world is truly a gift and I highly recommend everyone to learn at least the basics. 

I have however felt for a long time that I would want to be better at not only building software but also making it more, well, I guess beautiful is the word. My aesthetic ability is far from where I want it to be. 

I even think that, could I start my career over again, I should have chosen to focus much more on design and user experience. I wrote a blog post a few years ago about making it work, making it pretty and making it fast – in that order. Perhaps I should re-prioritize, making it pretty is the most important goal for a new project. The reason: if you can’t get people emotionally attached somehow to your product it doesn’t matter how many features it have, it will fail anyway.

But, after having a few beers with a wise friend two things dawned on me:

• You can’t be good at everything. Accept it. Yes, you can learn but the more wide your skill set is, the less deep it will become as well. Obvious, yes, but worth reminding oneself of from time to time.
• If anything, there is one meta-skill (and, yes, it is a skill – some people are better at this than others) that you really should try to be better at: getting things done. Executing. Doing stuff. Getting other people to do stuff. Making things happen. Moving the needle. If you’re good at that, you can do anything.

Accept your limitations. Focus on getting things done. That’s it. 

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Update: great post. Get disciplined, not motivated.