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Digital strategy should be a continuous and iterative process, informed by a steady flow of measurement and used to guide tactical adjustments in pursuit of the client's primary online objective.

This thought was taken from Gavin Heaton's two excellent posts last week about digital strategy.

Continuous Digital Strategy

Strategy is an ever-evolving process which is revisited across the lifecycle of any project. ...each of these steps are to be touched on in rapid iteration in the planning, execution/implementation and evaluation phases of any project.

Strategy Drives Decisions

It is easy to think that once you have set your strategy, that a button is flicked and that the focus switches to execution/implementation. But this is rarely the case....The are always, always, competing priorities – and what may appear to be strategically necessary one day will be out of favour the next. This is frustrating, time consuming and expensive for all involved. The opportunity, however, is to focus on a flexible approach to strategy – and this means using strategy not as a way of aligning messaging or building a campaign or a brand. It means using strategy to drive decisions.

I encourage you to go read the full posts: Part 1 and Part 2

In the marketing industry this approach is too often a luxury, rather than the norm. These posts resonated for me because I happen to be in the midst of a strategic adjustment for a project I'm working on right now. And fortunately a few key things were in place in order to afford me the ability to work like this.

Let go of the campaign mindset. Digital is not like traditional marketing. And one of the most important ways is that digital never ends. If you go in with a traditional campaign mindset you may be successful at generating a flash of attention, only to watch it evaporate as quickly as it was earned (or bought). If you're not sticking around to transform that attention into new relationships, you're wasting your effort.

We're not perfect. The internet is unpredictable. We do our best to make a well educated guess as to how people will interact with the experiences we create. But these experiences will live in an incredibly interconnected ecosystem and inevitably be affected by factors beyond our control. We should be ready to adapt.

Measurement is for guidance, not for back-patting. The metrics you choose, and the frequency of your reporting should be structured to help you determine if you're doing better today than you were yesterday. If so, where and why? If not, where and why not? What can we adjust in our suite of tactics in order to test a hypothesis about what might work better in the near future.



The great news about all of this is that digital media makes it easy.