How to align your digital brand strategy with your wider objectives

As digital technologies continue to reshape industries, aligning your digital presence with your core business objectives isn’t just beneficial – it’s essential for sustained growth and relevance.

In this post we’ll cover:

• What elements make up your digital brand strategy
• Aligning wider objectives with digital strategy objectives
• How digital experiences can directly contribute to business success
• Measuring success and ensuring continuous improvement

What is your digital brand strategy?

A digital brand strategy is essentially how you use digital tools, assets and tactics to set your business apart from competitors and engage with your target audience. You might also see it referred to as a digital marketing strategy, or just a digital strategy.

For our purposes as a web and digital product development agency, we would consider and focus on the following elements as part of your digital brand strategy:

• Your website
• Any digital products that make up part of your customer-facing ecosystem – portals, platforms, apps, software
• Integrations between your digital experiences and core business software like CRM
  Website content and SEO

We should also mention that your digital brand covers wider elements like social media and other marketing efforts, which should also align with your wider objectives in order to deliver a cohesive strategy. This is a good resource from HubSpot on wider digital marketing strategy.

In order to have maximum impact, it’s vital that your digital brand strategy aligns with the wider objectives of your business – that you’re not just investing in digital tools or engaging in digital marketing tactics for the sake of it.

Aligning your digital and wider business objectives

We’ve covered on the blog before how to use your wider business goals to set objectives for a website project. But at a higher level, it’s important that what you’re doing with digital, and the experiences that your customers have, align tightly with your values and goals as a business.

Here are a couple of examples of business objectives and how they might translate into digital brand objectives.

Harnessing digital platforms to deliver your brand strategy

Now you can hopefully see the alignment between wider business objectives and digital brand strategy, let’s unpack a little more how each of the objectives we’ve mentioned above can be addressed and delivered through digital.

DIGITAL BRAND STRATEGY AND GAINING A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

We can think about gaining a competitive advantage through in two ways: extending your reach beyond your competitors’, and offering something they can’t. By focusing on delivering an elevated digital customer experience, you’ll hopefully already be one step ahead of your competitors. But there are more things you can do behind the scenes with your digital strategy to get even more of an advantage over your competitors.

Implementing custom integrations between your website, digital platforms like portals and funnels, and your core business systems can unlock a whole host of efficiencies and insight that will set you apart. For example, integrating with your CRM can help you capture user/customer data that can be used to inform future marketing campaigns. Integrating with business management software can help you fully automate processes between the customer and your sales or delivery teams, meaning you offer a faster and more efficient service.

Increasing your reach versus your competitors can also be accelerated by improving your organic performance (rankings and traffic from search engines). Delivering an elevated website experience helps with this as elements like speed, loading efficiency and user experience are ranking signals. Additionally, once you have a good platform in place, you can utilise content marketing and other SEO strategies to further improve your rankings.

Digital brand strategy and improving customer experience

As we’ve just touched on, an effective digital brand strategy will harness digital tools and integrations to streamline processes behind the scenes that improve the customer experience. But obviously you can (and should) focus on delivering customer-facing tools, platforms and processes that directly improve the customer experience.

Self-service platforms and portals are a great example of this. Connectivity-as-a-service provider Tiviti worked with us to develop and launch a customer portal which would help them deliver their service offering and give customers complete visibility and control over their subscriptions. Having this industry-leading customer-facing platform has enabled Tiviti to deliver a revolutionary service in to the telecoms market.

Digital brand strategy and reducing costs

Investing in developing your own digital tools and platforms can help you reduce costs in the long run. Relying on out-of-the-box, third-party solutions can prove costly if you’re paying high subscription fees. You also have no control over the roadmap and development of new features, and getting the software to work with and slot into your processes may require additional investment in custom integrations or modifications. Getting a custom solution developed means you own the roadmap and the ongoing development, and there are no subscription fees, so you can lower the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Adopting the right development or project management methodology for your digital strategy can also help you reduce costs. We’ve found that businesses that invest in ongoing development and maintenance of their website and digital products can save up to 26% on development costs compared to making wholesale changes over longer periods.

Measuring success and iterative improvement

Hopefully, and if you execute your digital brand strategy correctly, then the impact will be reflected in the key performance indicators (KPIs) you use to measure your core business objectives. Most obviously these would include things like revenue, profit, customer retention, customer satisfaction scores, churn rate, and market share.

More specifically, KPIs you would measure the success of your digital strategy against might include:

• Website traffic
• Organic rankings
• Usage and engagement statistics (bounce rate, time on page, etc)
• Conversions/enquiries/sales that can be attributed to digital channels

Ongoing measurement and review of both your digital brand KPIs and business objectives in the context of digital is vital to gauging the success of your efforts. But it’s also important to use these metrics to inform your ongoing strategy and ensure you’re always improving through iterative development.

Key takeaways

• Digital brand strategy is how you use digital tools and assets to gain a competitive advantage and engage with your customers
• Aligning your digital strategy with your wider business objectives is vital in order to have a joined-up approach
• Utilised in the right way, digital tools and platforms can help you increase reach, gain a competitive edge, improve customer experience and reduce costs
• Ongoing measurement against KPIs and iterative improvement as a result of these reviews is also vital

Want to learn more about how you can deliver a digital brand strategy that will provide real value for your business? Find out more about our discovery service, or get in touch to discuss your project.