In pressured economic times it’s even more critical to ensure that your digital solutions are working effectively for your business.
The potential of digital to support your business is massive, but knowing how to approach this can be complex. This is true whether you’re looking to:
- create business efficiencies through online processes;
- communicate more effectively with your customers;
- develop your technical platform for web or Intranet growth; or
- gather business intelligence for effective decision-making.
Read our quick guide to Mando Group’s digital strategy service to answer the following questions:
- What is a digital strategy?
- What will it give me?
- How do you do it?
- Can you prove it?
- What’s involved
What is a digital strategy?
Understanding how any digital solution would support your organisation’s aims is critical to making it a success, both now and into the future. Without a strategic review, delivering real ROI for your business can be elusive. A digital strategy provides a clear route to business benefits for your organisation that can be realised by a programme of digital projects or enhancements over an agreed period of time (typically over the next 2-3 years).
At Mando Group we have been providing clients with our expertise in digital for more than 13 years, and have designed and delivered more than a 1000 digital solutions across a massive range of technologies, sectors, and contexts.
With this expertise, Mando Group’s consultancy team work has developed a powerful process for creating an effective digital strategy for your organisation; understanding the bigger picture to meet your business objectives.
What will it give me?
Undertaking a digital strategy will ensure you have:
- an overview of the digital landscape and how this impacts on your organisation
- clarity on where your organisation sits in relation to competitors and other points of reference
- alignment between all digital projects and your wider business goals
- a range of options and a clear explanation of value in your context for each case
- clear priorities for action, including identifying ‘quick wins’ and more strategic improvements to drive your business forward
How do you do it?
Mando Group’s digital strategy follows a tried and tested process:
1. Define the scope
First we establish how wide and deep the digital strategy needs to extend, agree this with you, and confirm relevant competitors or parallels to use in our research. We also sort some ‘housekeeping’ items like your deadlines, budget, and how this will fit into your wider planning.
2. Research, research, research
Next we explore the agreed areas to create a bank of information and examples that feed into our internal workshop and ultimately the final document (for example activity in the social media sphere compared to your competition). We also look laterally for other models or ideas that could impact the competitive landscape (for example emerging technologies or opportunities, or examples of great engagement strategies in unrelated sectors etc…)
3. New ideas
At this stage we open up the research to a broader team within Mando Group (including designers, developers, technologists, marketeers, and business analysts) and get thinking! From this we get out a wide range of possibilities that we collate into broad groups, and follow this up with any additional investigation that’s needed to flesh out options further.
4. Analyse, analyse, analyse
This is where we rationalise the ideas against your business objectives to get to a set of described possibilities that we then evaluate in terms of high level ROI. What this creates is a large ‘menu’ of options with clear justification for what benefits these would deliver.
5. Add business insight and priorities
No-one knows your business like you, so armed with some great options we present our findings and discuss them with you, to establish the relative importance and likely effort to deliver them in the context of your organisation. In doing this we jointly create a visual map and look for patterns that we should give particular focus.
6. Create the digital strategy document
This is where all the thinking, workshops and analysis are brought together into a compelling digital strategy document that supports you now and into the future. As well as being a clear reference point and route map for progress, it can also help you communicate the business case for specific digital projects as part of the wider strategy within your organisation.
Of course, creating the digital strategy document is just the start of the journey, and we continue to work closely with all our clients to help them every step of the way.
Can you prove it?
Untied Utilities
For utility company United Utilities we carried out a full digital strategy looking at multiple factors in the digital arena that may impact on their business success, such as the increased trend towards self-service online for particular customer demographics, the increase of web-enabled mobile devices and the shifting trends of social networking and its impact on brand. We looked at how this changing landscape can create opportunities and threats for United Utilities within the areas of;
- Marketing – engaging with customers to communicate the United Utilities brand across a range of digital media
- Customer experience – enhancingthe customer’s experience of United Utilities throughout their digital interactions
- Technical development – evolving the technical platform of United Utilities to ensure it enables the highest levels of service, reporting & analysis, and so on to support the business and their customers
This digital strategy document enabled us to provide clear recommendations to take advantage of opportunities in the short, medium and longer term, creating a coherent picture of ROI for United Utilities. Since carrying out the process United Utilities have started to implement some of the elements of the digital strategy such as a new application for users to manage aspects of their water accounts using mobile devices, the development of a customer self-service portal, and a stepped approach to social media platforms. Mando Group has supported United Utilities in all these areas and continues to work closely with them into the future.
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What’s involved?
Depending on how broad and deep you want the digital strategy to extend, this exercise will take place over a period of 3-4 weeks and require input from you at key stages of the process. For further examples and to discuss what would be appropriate for your business please contact Jonathan.
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