In a workplace with a growing number of digital natives, we forget how much structure and planning are needed to maintain a healthy, productive digital communication strategy. Considering that digital communication comes to us almost intuitively, we often disregard the need for organising and planning our overall approach – thereby making our digital communication less than ideal.

To improve this, here's a rough idea of 5 tips you should keep in mind when creating a digital strategy.

Tip 1: Understanding your audience

The key to all effective communication – digital, interpersonal, private, public, or any other form – is knowing with whom you're speaking. In the digital realm, this is made a lot easier by using analytics; however, on top of purely knowing where your audience comes from, how old they are, or what they nominally like, it is essential to know what they want from you as well as what you want from them.

In other words, you have to understand whether you are seeking an active or passive audience, people to appreciate the content, to interact with you, to solely use your services, or buy your goods, an audience that will boost your online presence, or solely use it to gather information and make purchases. Only after understanding this can you know the goal of your digital communication strategy and then begin planning the steps necessary to ensure that those goals are achieved.

Tip 2: Diversify your content – give your audience multiple choices

A side of digital communication that is often overlooked is the element of an ever-growing audience. The audience changes – it matures, their taste changes, they change their preferred online platforms, their needs change and so on. If you hope to understand your audience while simultaneously maintaining it, it's helpful to offer a wide range of options and types of content.

You offer your audience the ability to choose the exact type of content/interaction/product they want. Additionally, you're closer to securing a more efficient mechanism of communicating with your audience members, as they feel more comfortable with the idea of reaching out to you if they do not find the content they might prefer.

A perfect example of diversifying your content are websites and services like the 32Red blackjack game, which performs better than other online casino services precisely because they offer a wide range of seemingly similar activities. This diversity enables the users to choose which game suits them best and allows a better system of recommending games to new 32Red users.

In simpler terms, 32Red works well because it offers similar content but with slight variations – offering the users the ability to choose the exact variation that suits them best and, in so doing, help reassess the recommendation system, as well as the available content provided by the online casino.

Tip 3: Ensure a feedback loop with your users

As both the first and the second tip emphasise, one of the key elements you will need is the ability to hear what your users have to say and the option to adapt accordingly. In all digital markets, the user is the main target of business – they are the focus of your actions, the element that procures profit, the inspiration behind new developments, the audience of all content you post – and an overall crucial part of any other endeavour you might take.

For this reason, ensuring that users have an easily accessible, safe, and reliant method of providing feedback is essential. When users can provide direct feedback, your job of figuring out their needs becomes more straightforward – as does knowing your audience. Testing your market, adapting to its needs, developing diverse content, planning future tasks, and any other part of your digital business communication becomes more intuitive.

Tip 4: Scheduling future activities

This tip might seem surprisingly intuitive, but it is a step often overlooked precisely because of how simple, logical, and intuitive it is. Anything that changes your user's average experience needs to be annotated and announced. Besides activities that directly change the average user experience include potential sales, events, more prominent interactions, changes in visual identity, procurement of a new product line, etc.

Anything that changes in any capacity should be announced earlier on. This way, audiences can get ready for an upcoming change and get excited about it (even potentially bringing new members into your community).

Tip 5: Crisis management

Nobody likes imagining worst-case scenarios, especially when it comes to your brand, business, or general life plans. However, preparing for the worst-case scenario and having a sound crisis management plan is an absolute lifesaver in digital communication.

To do this, all you need to think about is how things could potentially go wrong, what might need addressing, through which channels you ought to address the said situation, what your general approach will be, and what mechanisms of stability and reassurance can you offer – and what your final goal in easing the problem is.

The general goal of crisis management isn't to foresee every chaotic situation that might pop up. Instead, the goal is to have some message that can be displayed to your audience if anything terrible happens and have a rough general strategy of what you ought to do for you to neutralise the situation that has occurred.