Digital Strategy: A Primer

Written by Lindsay DeVellis, Senior Strategist

At Brooklyn Digital Foundry, all our work begins with — and is measured against — a strategic frame. Many of our clients, whether institutions, non-profits, or global brands, haven’t worked with a strategic creative partner before, so we often begin by defining the terrain.

Digital strategy is a relatively new field, rife with questions, experimentation, and differing approaches. At the base of digital strategy is, of course, strategy, which is well-established compared to its digital progeny. Broadly speaking, strategy is defined as a course of action, designed to achieve a specific outcome within a defined time period.

Successful strategy considers both long- and short-term needs of two audiences, marrying the needs of the business with the needs of its customers. To do this, strategists must deeply understand those needs, the market in which those needs operate, and the end goals driving the project. Achieving this level of understanding requires strategists to build trust with stakeholders as well as users, and constantly maintain an objective, unbiased perspective toward findings.

There are many ways to approach digital strategy, and no one-size-fits-all answer. The goal of this post is to share our perspective on digital strategy, colored by our work and experience. Through this exploration, we hope you take away an understanding of what digital strategy means to us, and the benefits of a strategic approach to design and technology for digital initiatives.

What is Digital Strategy?

The definition of digital strategy is fairly simple: it defines how an organization should use digital technologies and platforms to achieve their business goals. The nature of digital enables reciprocal feedback loops between execution and results. We’re able to generate and analyze data quickly; whether plotting a new information architecture, iterating on user experience, or reviewing post-launch performance, we respond to insights quickly and pivot along the way. By factoring in rapidly-changing technology and short-lived digital campaign lifespans, strategy becomes more fluid, flexible, and dynamic than ever before. In this way, digital strategy can drive dynamic relationships between platforms and marketing initiatives.

You see, digital strategy is not a document handed off and kept in some sacred place. It is not a powerpoint (no matter how well-thought and compelling) given once to c-level executives. The currency of digital strategy is timeliness. A successful digital strategy leaves room to find the right answers at the right time. At Brooklyn Digital Foundry, we take a malleable approach to strategy; our work flows in the direction of the insights we discover along the way.

So now we’ve outlined a series of ingredients necessary to digital strategy — speed, flexibility, tenacity — and we’ve acknowledged that digital strategy is an evolving landscape where choosing the right tools is half the battle. If all that dynamism sounds terrifyingly open-ended, our method is what illuminates the path. We use the four following pillars to ground our work and provide the foundation for the many activities we pursue to reach our clients’ goals.

The Four Pillars

Research

Research is the starting point for any strategic engagement. As an external team, we bring a fresh, unbiased perspective to our clients. The first step is always to dive in and build familiarity. We need to understand the client: their questions, their aspirations, their hangups, their challenges, their experience, and more. We need to understand the market in which they’re working: competitors, trends, opportunities. We need to understand the product: what it does, what its strengths and weaknesses are. And of course, we need to understand the audience: their motivations, fears, influences, interests, touchpoints, behavior, and the context in which they interact with the product.

Research helps us gain understanding of all these angles, and it comes in many forms. We use both qualitative and quantitative data to paint a rich picture of the situation and opportunities at hand.

Types of Research Used by Brooklyn Digital Foundry

  • Stakeholder Interviews - The goal of interviews is to understand what drivers push the project, in addition to overall stakeholder expectations and marks of success. We like to run ours 1-on-1 with each stakeholder, to get the most out of each person’s perspective and to ensure quieter voices are heard.
  • Data Analysis - As the saying goes, “the numbers don’t lie.” We use data sets to analyze existing audience behavior and to provide an objective context for decision-making. For example, we use Google Analytics to discover sought-after content and popular pathways to that content, or fundraising data to determine appropriate gift brackets for donation forms.
  • User Research - User research can be done in many ways from 1:1 interviews, online surveys, social listening, recorded usability tests, and more. User research helps us validate assumptions and bring empathy to our work. It is crucial to creating a product or platform that people will actually want and enjoy.
  • Competitive and Market Research - We survey competitive and comparative landscapes to not only identify opportunities for differentiation, but to explore what trends, behaviors, and needs are setting user expectations across different categories.

Facilitation

Research isn’t worth much unless it’s absorbed. As strategists, we work with our clients to come to a shared understanding of the research and why it matters. We continually look for ways to build trust and open dialogue amongst multiple stakeholders, and facilitated workshops are one our most effective tools.

It’s worth noting the same is true for our internal teams. Collaboration with designers and developers helps us transfer our research in engaging ways to bring an otherwise static project brief to life.

Facilitation Methods Used by Brooklyn Digital Foundry

  • Goals Exercise - A great exercise to run at project kick-off. Stakeholders write down their individual responses to a few high-level questions around project success and failure. This gives each person a voice, surfaces alignment or lack thereof, and opens the floor for discussion.
  • Page Layout Workshop - As with other team activities, workshops are a productive way to collaborate with internal and external teammates to find common ground on a particular topic. For page layout workshops, we print out predetermined elements (eg. features, images, text, titles) of a website or application and ask participants to group them together to form a page. Not only does this help visualize structure, it’s also a great technique for thinking through content, tradeoffs, and how stories are created.
  • Information Architecture (IA) Exercises - Our favorite IA activities to run are tree tests and card sorts. Both provide valuable insight into how content is best organized and labeled. They can be as enlightening for the participants as they are for the facilitator. In a tree test, we set tasks and ask individuals what they’d click on to complete those tasks. A card sort asks participants to organize individual pieces of content into categories that make the most sense to them. These activities straddle research and facilitation, as they can be done with project teams, stakeholders, and users alike.
  • Prioritization Exercises - Until we come across a project with unlimited time and budget, prioritization of features and functionality is essential to define scope. When people want different things, we run workshops to gamify the discussion by assigning points, votes, or money to the players. This democratizes the process, quantifies relative values, and makes tricky decisions more lighthearted.
  • Brainstorming and Sketching - Brainstorming can often go awry if the structure is too loose. We’ve found open collaboration works best when there is a clearly-defined challenge (or goal) to solve for. We always have an action plan, send out homework in advance, and ask participants to come prepared.

Definition

A good digital strategist is able to turn insight into recommendation. This is where we organize our thoughts and ideas, and translate them into actionable direction. Recommendations can surely evolve over the course of a project, but having tangible documentation built on research and insight is crucial for our work. Clear definition helps new team members get up to speed, ameliorates miscommunication, and serves as a useful reference on lengthy projects to make sure we stay on track.

Things Defined by Brooklyn Digital Foundry

  • Key Performance Indicators - Goals are established at the start of every project, but key performance indicators can change as the work progresses. We continue to add fidelity to initial goals so that KPIs can be easily measured later down the road.
  • Brand Identity - A brand is much more than a logo. We supplement visual identity with positioning statements, values, tone, and voice to produce a well-rounded and holistic identity. These guidelines allow content creators and communicators to authentically represent the brand in any medium.
  • Information Architecture - Information architecture is the organizational model that allows people to find the content they’re looking for. Above, we defined some IA activities that begin to reveal how people think about that content. We use insights from those activities to define site structure through site maps, which in turn help inform navigational wireframes, page templates, and prototypes.
  • Personas and User Flows - We synthesize user research into personas for reference throughout the project. Personas are fictional representations of real individuals within a certain audience. Flows help us think through the path users will take to complete a given task, and are useful in identifying the right content and layout.
  • Modules, Templates, and Features - Even a single-page site can have multiple components; defining a list of required parts and pages ensures a holistic view and that nothing gets lost along the way.

Testing

Testing allows us to validate our work. While we do everything in our power to make smart decisions based on research, facilitation, and definition, we are human nonetheless. As such, we are all susceptible to cognitive bias known as “the curse of knowledge.” Essentially, since we are privy to the reasons behind the decisions made, it’s difficult to truly put ourselves in the shoes of the target audience, who has no such knowledge. As the saying goes, you can’t unknow what you know, so testing is a simple and valuable way to work around bias and validate assumptions.

Before executing a test, it’s important to define what we want to know. We ensure tests are targeted and have a pinpoint purpose; if not, the results may be too broad or inconsistent to analyze. When done right, testing early in the project (and throughout!) saves time and money down the road.

Testing Approaches Used by Brooklyn Digital Foundry

  • Usability Testing - Usability testing identifies just how easy it is for users to complete any given task on a product. It is the primary type of testing we do, and takes a few forms depending on the scenario and constraints. Usability testing is great because of this flexibility: it can be done in-person or remotely; on finished products or prototypes; with five users or forty.
  • A/B Testing - Whereas usability testing is mostly qualitative, A/B testing relies on quantitative, measurable results. An A/B test plots two variations against each other to determine which is the better version. As it relies on controls and variants, this type of testing is good for specific details like colors, sizes, buttons, names — anything you can nail down to a single characteristic.
  • Tree Testing - A tree test is a way to test the success of an information architecture. This test is design-agnostic, and focuses on using only words and labels. By asking individuals what they’d click on to complete a given task, we can get data on preferred user flows and perceptions of content.

As strategists, our number one priority is to ensure the product we design fulfills the short- and long-term business needs of our clients. The only way to be successful in that is to truly understand the audience, and to define a solution that marries user needs with the needs of the business. This balancing act relies on our ability to build meaningful connections between data and people, spark open and productive dialogue, set clear parameters, and validate our work at every step. In short, digital strategy is the heart of today’s successful responses to interactive challenges.

Brooklyn Digital Foundry

Written by

Digital that makes a difference. We’re a brand, web, and content agency that gets results. https://brooklynfoundry.com

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade