“What is digital strategy?”

At Boucher + Co., we get asked that question a lot. Most people we talk to have not heard of the term. Gerard Boucher, our CEO, frequently responds with a brief “It’s the future of marketing, of course!”

In a nutshell, digital strategy is the plan, tactics, execution, and analysis of your online and mobile marketing efforts, and how those efforts affect your business and its bottom line.

Gerard will be the first person to tell you that having a digital strategy is really important for your business. After all, he takes digital strategy very personally. When he was 11, he launched a Harry Potter fan site from his suburban bedroom, and had to drive traffic to it. He quickly noticed that his visitors doubled each day for several months straight as he promoted the site on numerous message boards, chat rooms, sites, and affiliate programs. Soon he was receiving thousands of unique visitors a day – and they were highly-engaged on the site. From the early 2000s until around 2008, digital strategy was largely built around those marketing channels, and they worked great.

These days, digital strategy is based off of a completely different set of channels – social media, SEO, pay-per-click advertising, blogging, and content marketing, to name a few. The game has completely changed, and you need to be utilizing all of those marketing channels in one cohesive strategy in order to see the strongest business results.