Most businesses I talk to aren’t short of marketing activity. There’s a website, a couple of social accounts, maybe an email tool someone signed up for two years ago. What’s missing is the thread that ties it all together. So when the boss asks “what did all that actually get us?”, nobody has a straight answer.
That’s what a digital strategy is for. It doesn’t need to be a 40-page document either. It starts with a customer problem and one business result you want to move.
Start with one business outcome
Pick one. Seriously, just one to begin with.
For a service business that might be getting more of the right enquiries (not just more enquiries). For a product team it could be getting new users to finish their first useful task. Decide what success looks like before you start arguing about channels. “More visibility” sounds nice in a meeting, but you can’t do much with it until you say who needs to see you and what you want them to do after that.
Then write down where you are today, using whatever numbers you’ve already got. Gaps are fine. Just mark them as gaps instead of dressing up a guess as a fact, because in three months you’ll want an honest comparison.
Map the customer journey
Walk through how someone finds you, sizes up the offer, asks their questions and finally becomes a customer. Then go and talk to whoever answers the phone or handles sales. They hear the objections that never show up in analytics, things like “I couldn’t tell if you work with smaller companies”.
Here’s a common one. Someone comparing agencies usually wants to see what you do and a few examples of past work before they’ll book a call. Push them straight to a long enquiry form and a lot of them just leave. They don’t trust you yet, and why would they?
Choose priorities your team can deliver
Write out every improvement you can think of, then be ruthless. For each one, ask roughly how much it’ll help, how much work it is, what it depends on and how sure you really are. Whatever makes the cut gets a name next to it and a date to look at it again.
A short plan people actually carry out beats a beautiful roadmap nobody has time for. We’ve seen plenty of the second kind.
For the first round, keep it small. Fix one important service page, tidy up the enquiry journey and check that enquiries land with the right person. (You’d be surprised how often they go to an inbox no one reads.) Only add more once you can see what those first changes did.
Review decisions, not just activity
When you review, put the results next to your starting point. Note anything else that changed in between, like a busy season, a new price or a big client leaving. Then make an actual call on each piece of work: keep going, change it or drop it.
At Applelounge we work through this with clients as listen, plan, optimize and execute. It isn’t complicated. It just means learning about the customer before deciding anything, and coming back to check once the work is live.