Strategic planning is essential in long term and consistent building of a brand in the digital space, serving as the base of creating and operating the digital ecosystem tailored to our resources as we wrote before in the first part of this article.
Digital strategy is no guarantee of anything in itself: we need to monitor its effects and validity constantly. It is vital to understand the way our users behave, just as to understand the results of our digital activities to execute communication that is efficient, well-founded, and able to respond to changes, even to start fresh, when needed.
In the second part of our article, we talk about measuring and analyzing customers' behavior.
Measurement strategy
Online is great as it can be measured – we hear often. Online communication can indeed be measured better than offline, but practice shows many brands do not use all available opportunities.
We also very often face the fact that „measurement-centered" thinking is missing, measurement approach is not appropriate: measuring is discussed too late, at the very end of the planning phase, if at all. "My website is just up, set up measuring quickly!" The question comes right away: fine, but what is your goal with it, what do you want to measure and why? After a few rounds of meetings comes the measuring expert with suggestions, which also mean you have to redesign the website: unnecessary extra rounds, work hours from graphic designers, developers, and project managers, plus more time and money.
Two pieces of advice:
- Use the opportunities of measuring and measure everything you can!
- Have a measurement strategy: you will be better off if you think of measuring from the beginning of the project, looking at it from the measurer's point of view, no matter if it is website design or campaign planning!
You can of course ask for the help of a measuring expert, but without you, they can't do anything: only you can name your strategic goals, the data that matters to you, and why you want to get certain things measured. Your measuring expert will only tell you how you can do all of it.