Digital Strategy
Do you have a digital strategy or a list of tactics?
July 2026 · Mike Zeederberg
There's a version of a digital strategy document that most organisations will recognise. It runs to thirty or forty slides. It has a section on SEO, a section on social media, a section on email, maybe a section on paid media. It covers a lot of ground.
The challenge with that kind of document is not that the activities in it are wrong. Often they're sensible. The challenge is that a list of activities is not the same thing as a strategy, and the difference matters more than it might seem. The good news is you don't have to throw the channel work away — you have to reorder the thinking, so the audience comes first and the channels come last.
What strategy actually does
A real digital strategy is the thinking that sits behind the activity. It answers questions like:
- Who are we trying to reach, and what do they need from us at each stage of their journey?
- Where can we have the most impact, and where are we currently underperforming?
- What does success look like, and how will we measure it?
- Which activities are we going to prioritise, and which are we going to set aside for now?
That last question is particularly important. Good strategy involves trade-offs. It means being clear about where to focus so that the things you do, you do well, rather than spreading effort thinly across everything.
The unlock: the customer journey
The practical way to make that shift is the customer journey. Mapping how your audience actually moves — from first becoming aware of a need, through researching, comparing, deciding, and returning — gives you a single framework that sits above every channel. Suddenly SEO, social, email and paid stop being separate line items and become answers to a more useful question: where in the journey does this audience need us, and what job does each channel do at that moment?
That's the sequence that turns a list into a strategy: start with the audience, use the journey to decide where to play and what to say, and only then get channel-specific about execution. The tactics don't disappear — they get prioritised, sequenced, and given a purpose.
Where the real opportunity is
When strategy is built this way — from a genuine understanding of the customer journey, alongside a clear view of the business objectives — something useful happens. The activities that make the list are the ones most likely to make a real difference, not the ones with the loudest internal advocates or the largest historical budget allocation.
It also means that when something changes, when a platform shifts, when a competitor moves, when the business context evolves, there is a framework for responding. Not just a list to revise, but a set of principles and priorities that can guide the decision.
How to tell which one you have
A useful test: if someone asked you tomorrow why your budget is allocated the way it is, could you answer in terms of customer insight and business objectives? Or would the honest answer be 'because that's roughly what we did last year'?
If it's the latter, that's not a failure. It's a starting point. The opportunity is in building the clarity that makes future decisions easier and more confident.
If you'd like to talk about what a more grounded digital strategy process could look like, we'd be happy to have that conversation.
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