What a digital strategy should include

A digital strategy should include eight parts, in this order. The order is the strategy. Change it and you get a channel plan.

1. The one outcome the business needs this year, stated as a number the board cares about.
2. Who buys, how they decide, and who else has to agree before they can.
3. The position: what you are claiming, and why it is credible coming from you.
4. The proof that carries the position, because a claim without evidence is a slogan.
5. The channels, chosen because they reach that buyer with that argument.
6. The budget, split between building the position and capturing demand.
7. The list of what you will stop doing, which is the part nobody writes.
8. How you will know, and when you will look.

Channels appear in the second half, and they appear as consequences.

Most strategy documents contain parts five and six only, and the result gets called a strategy because it has a cover page. Our own version sits in the strategy chapter.

Open the last strategy deck you were sent. Somewhere in the first ten pages there is a slide with platform logos on it, then a content calendar, then a media split, then a timeline. Nowhere in the document is there a sentence saying what the business needs to be true by December.

This happens for a structural reason rather than a lazy one. The document is usually written by whoever will deliver the work, and the work they deliver is channels. So the strategy is shaped like the supplier, not like the problem.

The consequence is that the plan cannot be judged. If the outcome was never stated, no month can be a bad month, and the review meeting becomes a discussion of whether the posts were good. That is also why strategy matters more than the word suggests. It is not a planning ritual. It is the thing that makes the following twelve months of spending answerable to something.

Pick one outcome. Not five objectives with sub-objectives. One.

It has to be a commercial outcome, expressed the way your finance director would express it, and it has to be something marketing can plausibly move. Twenty new clients in the enterprise segment. A pipeline large enough to support the second office. New business arriving from somewhere other than referrals, for the first time. Three tender invitations a quarter in a category you are not yet known for.

The discipline is in the word one. Firms that name four outcomes have named none: the first hard trade-off, and there will be one by March, has no rule to settle it.

A firm that names four outcomes has named none. The first hard trade-off has nothing to settle it.

Write it at the top of the first page. Everything below either serves it or gets cut in part seven.

Next comes the buyer, described as they are rather than as a persona template. The useful questions are few, and most strategy decks answer none of them.

• Which job title signs, and which job title starts the search. They are rarely the same person.
• Who else is in the room, and what each of them is afraid of.
• What triggers the search: a regulation, a funding round, a failure, a new arrival in the job.
• Where they check you are real, and what they find there now.
• What would make them choose the safer supplier instead of you.

In the Gulf that last question usually decides the deal. Buyers shortlist on reputation and referral, then validate online before replying to anyone. So the order of work is settled for you. Fix the pages a buyer lands on before you raise the media budget, not after. How that sequence actually runs is set out in how companies actually buy.

A digital brand strategy is not a colour palette and a tone of voice document. It is a claim: what you want to be known for, narrow enough that a buyer could repeat it to a colleague.

Most firms claim quality, expertise and partnership, three ways of claiming nothing: the competitor claims them too and the buyer cannot test them before signing. A usable position is specific enough to be wrong. We only work with professional services firms. We publish our fees. We answer in Arabic within the hour.

Then the proof, which is the work. Published case studies with the method visible. Named clients. A founder on camera saying something a competitor would not risk saying. Numbers where you have them, and a plain statement where you do not. A figure with no source costs more credibility than the gap it fills.

Proof is also the honest answer to anyone asking for the best strategy examples: not the award winners, but firms whose published work says exactly what they do and who for, in a way a buyer can verify in minutes.

Only now do channels appear, and each has to earn its place by answering one question: which part of the buying process does this move, for this buyer, with this argument.

Full funnel is a useful idea underneath the jargon. Somebody has to hear of you, be persuaded, then act, and different channels do each job. Email and thought leadership carry the middle, where most B2B decisions are made and most plans are silent. If your plan only buys the bottom, you are competing for demand your competitors created.

Omnichannel means less than it is paid to mean. It matters where a buyer moves between a showroom, an app and a call centre and expects to be recognised at each. For a consultancy selling to Riyadh boardrooms it is a word in a deck. Digital commerce is where the distinction is real: the channel is the shop, so product data, delivery promises and payment options are strategy rather than execution.

Two channels run properly beat six run thinly. The constraint is rarely the media budget.

A budget is a strategic statement, not an administrative one. Split it three ways and argue about the proportions until they match the outcome at the top.

• Building the position: research, publishing, video, the work that makes you known before anyone is ready to buy.
• Capturing demand: search, paid, the site itself, everything that converts people already looking.
• The capability to do both: people, tools, production. Firms underfund this, then wonder why the plan stalls in month two.

Then write the stop list, the shortest and most revealing page in any strategy. The sponsorship nobody can explain. The blog publishing weekly into silence, which we ran ourselves and have put a receipt against in the one-page marketing plan. Every line needs a date it ends and the name of whoever tells the person currently doing it.

A strategy with no stop list is an addition to the workload, and it will be abandoned by March. What the money should buy, and what it compares to, is set out in what marketing should cost.

Two genuine changes, and one thing that has not moved at all.

The first is production cost. Drafting, editing, translation, research summaries and variant creative are all cheaper and faster. True for every competitor too, so it is not an advantage but the new floor. It also makes volume content nearly free to produce, which is precisely why publishing volume has stopped working.

The second is how buyers search. A growing share of research starts with an assistant that returns an answer and a shortlist rather than ten links. Being in that shortlist depends on the same things as before, only more so: clear pages saying what you do and who for, named people, published work, third parties mentioning you.

What has not changed is the strategy itself. AI does not decide what your business needs this year, who has to be persuaded, or what claim you can defend. Those remain judgements about your market, and a plan that treats AI as its strategy has skipped parts one to four.

The last part is the measurement, and it should be short. One outcome, reviewed monthly, with the two or three numbers beneath it and the review date already in the calendar. If the report needs forty slides the strategy was never specific enough. Which numbers earn a place is the subject of the KPIs worth reporting.

What a digital strategy should not include is easier to list.

• Invented personas with stock photographs and a name.
• Benchmarks and industry percentages whose source nobody can produce.
• A twelve-month content calendar written before a single piece has been tested.
• Any channel included because a competitor is on it.

A real one names one outcome, one buyer, one claim, a short list of channels, and what to stop. If the document cannot answer what changes in the business if this works, it is a plan for activity. Ours fits on a page, which is the argument in the one-page marketing plan.