Do You Really Need A Digital Strategist?

Without a strong digital strategist on your account, you are most likely running an incoherent collection of digital executions and underutilizing digital within your overall marketing mix.

It’s no longer news that you have a digital budget, or have a digital campaign, or a digital agency on your roster. Websites, banners, emails, eCRM, mobile, social media… and whatever-is-next…

Been there, bought that, executed that… and even looking forward to the next frontier. Really?

Do you really need all these channels? Are you making the best use of them? Are these fully integrated into your usually larger non-digital channels? In other words, do you have a digital strategist?

Digital strategy or digital advertising strategy must not be an afterthought in your marketing programs. Strategy helps articulate the effective role and application of digital within the context of brand objectives, brand attributes, audience characteristics, competitive digital landscape, and a few other contextual realities. As the experienced strategist knows, “strategy is not planning”. ‘Strategy’ is the articulated idea; ‘planning’ is the articulated details for executing the idea. Planning is strategy in action, or the strategy action plan.

Hurdles digital strategists face
Because of the carryover from the traditional advertising era (aka history effect), marketers have come to expect digital planners on their accounts and have no qualms paying for their services. Digital strategists, though, are not so lucky. Unless the planner provides strategy services as a precursor to the plan developed, adding a strategist to the digital roster could be a challenge. A few hurdles faced by digital strategists include:

1. A lack of clarity on the role of digital strategists, making the selling of the value proposition difficult for the client
2. Inadequate strategy skills and talents to deliver strong, credible, and high impact strategic digital ideas
3. The inability of strategists to deliver a perceptually valuable digital strategy that does not elicit the “I could have told you this myself” response
4. Clients’ expectations for a plan of action as a key deliverable from the strategy and planning exercise rather than a brilliant but potentially abstract strategy presentation
5. The episodic strategy role played by some talented account or brand leadership teams, undermining the perceived need for a strategist

What you may be missing
Despite these challenges, the role of a strategist in articulating the winning role(s) or the opportunities for harnessing digital within the overall marketing mix is essential for winning with digital. Many brands proceeded directly to campaign planning and tactics formulation, only to reverse-engineer to some ‘strategy’ or rationale for the plan. The case for strategy usually occurs when the marketing boss requests the underlying case for the plan, or when the marketer finds a missing framework for evaluating a brilliant idea that surfaced mid-campaign, or when the campaign starts going off the rails—as campaigns sometimes do. The upshots of the absence of articulated strategy or the reverse-engineered rationale are the same:

1. A lack of a coherent guide, anchor, or framework for decision or course correction mid-campaign
2. Continuous suggestions of ad-hoc or disparate ideas without coherence to existing executions or the plan
3. Mid-campaign doubts about the rational of the current course of action in spite of the acknowledgment of the “great presentation” and pomp approvals at every step of the planning process
4. An inability to identify the true implications of insights emanating from periodic campaign evaluation and analysis

Digital strategy is a must for effectively realizing the potential of digital marketing. With luck, marketers and advertisers may win without digital strategy…

But:

You will increase your chances of winning and harnessing your digital investment with a well-articulated digital strategy, formulated by a very capable digital strategist.