Understanding What Digital Business Strategy Is
When we see or hear the words “digital strategy”, most often we think that’s just marketing strategy for digital channels and products. That isn’t digital business strategy, that’s marketing strategy applied to the digital world using specifically digital tactics to win.
Digital business strategy takes into account marketing, sales, delivery, digital products (if you have them), eCommerce and fulfillment along with customer experience & service. It is defining where you will play in a digital space and how you will play to win. If you’re business is purely digital, such as delivering digital products through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), mobile apps and services, then your digital business strategy is your business strategy. If, like many companies, your coming from a real-world business making and delivering real-world products and services, then you will need to consider your digital business strategy as it relates to the digital space. And your digital business strategy needs to be a wholly integrated part of your overall corporate strategy.
Let’s define what we mean by a “digital space” to help with context. A digital space is anything online, on the internet, where the entire customer experience and business is done through devices such as a mobile phone, tablet, laptop, desktop. Where your market is interacting with screens. If you’re still making manufactured goods and delivering them to customers, then the digital component is where, when and how you connect with the market and customers through devices. Your digital business strategy is how you structure the work that falls out of a strategy. The activities, decisions and constraints that will help you to win.
Just like a real-world strategy, you will want to define where you want to play and how you want to play to win, but entirely in digital spaces. This means thinking differently than real-world activities but knowing where digital touches the real-world. If you’re selling some kind of appliance, then the digital business strategy will be the elements that include marketing, sales, customer experience and ordering processes. The digital touches the real-world when payment is received and the warehouse gets the order and must now fulfill it, from picking to delivery. There are digital components to the back-end operations as well, such as supply chain management and internal workflows that can be done digitally.
Playing in digital spaces has become incredibly complex and requires thinking and moving faster as change happens constantly. Business strategy in the real-world can look out over a year or more and you can play a longer game to win. Playing to win in digital spaces means paying hardball, team members need to be agile and the company needs to both respond quickly and constantly be aggressive in defining the space. Pure-play digital businesses know this and it’s often how they disrupt and out manoeuvre real-world businesses.
The core premises of digital business strategy are agility, speed and being aggressive. If you can’t harness these elements then you’re at a higher risk of losing when you play. Playing in the digital world is not for the feint of heart.
