Sitting and thinking over the next article, the next one with the biggest wisdom and the best future outlook. An article with the ultimate tips for your digital strategy… There is nothing new, think everything is written more than once.

There is no single one best solution doing digital. My direction is performance driven. Performance can be so much. We are talking about advertising, branding, e-commerce, etc. At the end of the day it’s all about communication at the right time with the right message. Here are some key point’s which are important:

• Performance Marketing (Communication)
• Big Data
• Analytics
• BI (Business Intelligence)
• Predictive Modeling
• Data Silos
• Cross-, Omni- or Multichannel
• User Centric Approach
• User Profiles
• Cookies vs. Fingerprint
• CRM
• …and much more in this direction

You are overrun with the best and ultimate solution you get offered by a software company or an agency? You understand all this points above but you avoid the complexity? Totally understood!

Within digital there is (theoretical) very much possible, but the solutions available on the market can’t deliver this. There is a huge need to develop them ahead. On the other side companies are not using what is available for their marketing. They are using not the entire set on the market and they use their solutions just rudimental. They need to learn what solution providers (software companies and agencies) can offer.

There are 3 barriers I see:

• technical issues
• mindset of people & habits
• short term targets

The last point stops spending time in developing a forward-looking setup.

The direction in all we do should be addressing people and not devices or channels! Breaking down…

1. Data Silos
2. Device Silos

Another point is how to identify people. If you are thinking about cross-device or cross-channel  you will stick with cookie tracking and you need to think about other methods like:

• Finger print or adserving data combined with statistic probability (IP address, browser version, operating system data, device type, browsing behavior, content consumption patterns, location-based data and time of day)
• anonymized login data
• CRM data
• E-Mail
• Customer ID

This is the technical view. The other view is the legal aspect which is, special in Europe, a big point. It’s important to have someone who takes care of it, special the new european data privacy regulation which is coming up. This is important not only fur european companies, it affects all companies who offers products or services within the EU, doesn’t matter where they are.

What to do now?

1. Build your vision of communication you want to reach. Think about what I described here: Communication 2025
2. Think about all these bullet points in the first list here in the article and what this means in theory for your vision
3. Build up internal resources who have the overview and deeper understanding of all these points. Try to cover this with less people.
4. Build up teams internally for all these points or find external partner to do so. Very important is to handle these points not as silos. Try to integrate all these people into one team who are in a deep exchange
5. Follow the Digital Transformation Steps: Vision >> Mission >> Values >> Strategy >> Roadmap / Backlog >> OKR to start your “project”. This helps you to split it into single projects who have the same direction and come to a final target at the end of the day. This target (vision) will be a long term target.