7 D’s of Digital: Engineering Game-Changing Digital Strategy

The world of digital is often a nebulous place where well informed decisions are hard to come by. Designs, strategies, and campaigns are implemented just because the biggest fish on the team feels like they will work. But how often do these digital projects fail to deliver the way we expected? More often than we’d like to admit.

How do we bring structure and clarity into a world where both are lacking? The 7 D’s of digital, a systematic process designed to bring structure and clarity to project development and digital marketing is your answer.

Define, Discover, Determine, Delegate, Design, Develop, and Deliver. These are the fundamental stages that bring clarity and structure to your digital processes.

Define

For any digital project, it is super important to determine the project goals and key performance indicators (KPI’s) for your goals before any work is done. Without a clear vision that all team members clearly understand, it’s pretty difficult to create a valuable end result.

Before moving on, you should determine what needs to be measured to indicate the successfulness of the project. These are your KPI’s. For example, if your digital project is to add a blog to your website, your KPI’s might be organic search traffic (traffic coming from search engines) and average time on page. Blogs provide content that is valuable to your audience as well as increasing your websites presence on search engines. Measuring organic search traffic indicates the search engine presence of your website, while average time on page is an indicator of reader engagement, both measures of the successfulness of the blog.

Discover

Research should be a staple of your digital projects. Whether it be creating a blog, advertising on Facebook, or choosing an ecommerce platform, research should always guide your decision making.

Continuing with the blog example, let’s say that we have decided that our project goals are to create valuable content for our audience and to increase our search engine presence. That’s all great. But how can we make these goals a reality without research?

Before we can create an actionable plan to create the blog we need to know

· Who our audience is

· What type of content will bring value to our audience

· What keywords we should center our articles around for search engine optimization (SEO)

· How much the writing should be tailored for SEO rather than utilizing stylistic verbiage our audience might perfer

And that’s just to name a few. Regardless, hopefully it is clear that research is a fundamental step in the process. This can be a tough and extensive step.

Determine

Once you have defined your project goals and KPI’s and done the research necessary to understand the factors that affect the success of your project, you are ready to create an actionable plan that describes exactly how your project will get implemented and how you will measure the project’s KPI’s. Gantt charts (online project management charts) or workflow engines like Trello are great ways to organize this process.

Determining how you will measure your KPI’s can be a difficult task, but there are many tools out there to help you do just that.

I use this article all the time when looking for tools to help me measure project KPI’s.

It is important to include a “why” for all the major steps of this process to keep your team bought in to the process. This also allows you to receive feedback into the steps that may be improved upon, leading to a more efficient process.

Delegate

Now that your specific plan is in place, you can delegate tasks to your team in a way that maximizes project efficiency. When doing this, make sure that tasks are delegated in a way that encourages collaboration so that the subsystems of your product work together seamlessly.

Again, Gantt charts and workflow engines are a great way to organize this.

Design and Develop

This is the iterative process of implementing, revising, and perfecting your project solution. It begins by executing the plan that you determined and delegated. Then, using the measurement tools that you have put in place, analyze the “successfulness” of your solution. Do more research and determine how successful your solution could be. Edit and refine your solution. Re-measure the successfulness of your solution. Do this until your project solution is everything you dreamed it would be.

Don’t be afraid to go back to the define and discovery phases to refine your solution. The biggest adversary to innovation is structure and linearity. And while the 7 D’s of digital is designed to give you a repeatable process for your digital projects, it is important that the process stays flexible so that it allows for as much innovation as possible.

Deliver

The final D, deliver, is how you present your project to your customers or target audience. It basically encompasses the entirety of digital marketing. And while the specifics of digital marketing go beyond the scope of this article, in general it is important that you are making your decisions related to digital marketing in a well-informed, data driven way.

For example, if you are going to be doing an email marketing campaign for your solution, do some testing to determine the best subject line. Take a statistically significant subset of your email list and send half one subject line and half another subject line. Then, measure which subject line yielded a greater click through rate to determine which subject line to use.

Although this was a very specific example, follow this basic format to make sure that every decision you make is based on data and not a whim.

Conclusion

Digital strategy doesn’t have to be a mystery. With logical, data-driven processes and room for creative, innovative thinking, you can skyrocket your company’s digital presence to the forefront of your industry.

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