Vertica has been advising and growing Danish and foreign companies for more than 20 years. Here, you can find out how we do it and download concrete tools to get you started.
Insight analysis and digital strategy – get your direction straight
To be successful, digital initiatives need to be based on a foundation of knowledge. If you don't have a clear goal of what challenges the strategy should address, it's hard to succeed.
It's about gathering knowledge and focusing on concrete goals for the digital business. Whether you're in B2B or B2C.
That's why we split the work into two phases: insight analysis and digital strategy development. We offer them as separate services or as a complete package. Here, you can see how they each drive growth in your e-commerce.
Insight analysis: focusing on your customers' needs
We always put your customers first. The first step is therefore to map the customer journey and find out what customers really want and expect when they are in contact with your brand: What challenges they face, how best to meet them.
It's about understanding customer behaviour and how they use your sales channels and the features you offer.
To gather relevant knowledge, we conduct an insight analysis, which is divided into four areas.
The four areas of the insight analysis:
- Establish a framework, expectations, objectives, success criteria and targets.
- Vertica starts the work by gathering knowledge. This is done by getting perspectives from relevant stakeholders in the organisation.
- User observations that map how your relevant audiences interact with your channels, where friction occurs and where in the buying journey optimisation can be carried out. This involves interviewing customers about their relationship with your brand, channels and products.
- Information from qualitative data collection is translated into questionnaires to elucidate and qualify the study with quantitative data.
Throughout the process, insights are continuously collected so that you and your organisation gain knowledge from results and the opportunity to provide input.
Designing a digital strategy is often seen as a management task. But in modern businesses, digital decisions affect everything from procurement to sales, warehousing, logistics and customer service.
Under section two, we therefore involve all relevant stakeholders across the organisation to understand what challenges exist in the different departments and how they can all be addressed in a digital strategy. This ensures that the final strategy is relevant and met with goodwill across the organisation.
We conclude by presenting insights and an analysis of relevant focus areas that might form the basis of a digital growth strategy.
From insight to strategy
The insight analysis forms the basis for a successful digital strategy. Once knowledge of where the business can be optimised has been secured, visions and goals can be defined.
Perhaps you have the opportunity to do an insight analysis yourself? If so, we are ready to help translate insights into a concrete strategy to be implemented in the organisation. Read more about this below.
What does a digital strategy contain?
A digital strategy points the way and defines digital initiatives to be implemented within a 2–3 year time horizon.
When developing a digital strategy, we typically hold a series of workshops. The first workshop aims to review your company's goals and visions, as well as the conclusions from the insight analysis.
We also start a dialogue on how to translate insights into concrete, strategic actions and focus areas. At the subsequent workshop, we prioritise the different focus areas.
Strategic priority matrix
One of the hardest things about planning a digital strategy is prioritising between the possible efforts. We have developed a strategic priority matrix to help you find direction and focus on the efforts that add the most value to your business.
The strategic priority matrix consists of five parameters, against which all actions are assessed:
1. Business value
2. Value for customers
3. Implementation complexity (Capex)
4. Operating expenditure (Opex)
5. Strategic value
Download our prioritisation matrix below to get started. Formulate your efforts and prioritise them according to what creates the greatest overall value for your business.
In order to ensure a concrete and feasible strategy, we recommend that you choose an effort that contains a maximum of 2–3 areas. While this may require some opt-outs, it means there is an enhanced focus on those initiatives that create the most value. If the strategy tries to do too much, it easily becomes unmanageable.
Once the priorities are clear, it's time to define the path to achieving the goals your company wants to achieve. The way forward therefore depends on the path your business takes.
What does a roadmap contain?
When we help your business develop a digital strategy, we emphasise that the work isn't over until the strategy has been executed.
Once your strategy is in place, it's time to draw a roadmap.
The roadmap is a plan for what your company needs to do in order of priority, and it's a powerful tool to ensure execution of your digital strategy.
The roadmap describes all planned actions and assesses the requirements in terms of resources and finances. It provides an overview of focus areas and outlines where you need to take action – and when.
Our main task is to equip you to realise your vision and business goals. A PowerPoint full of buzzwords and plans is not enough to get started on a digital strategy.
Therefore, the finished roadmap is a concrete action plan that describes all focus areas and shows the way towards the goals you want to achieve – step by step.
We recommend that the initiatives in your roadmap should not exceed 3 years in total.
By phasing your efforts and planning no more than three years ahead, you ensure that your business is ready for change and can act when the market and customer behaviour change.
The process for developing the digital strategy might look something like this:
When our consulting process is completed, you are equipped to make the right decisions regarding your digital initiatives.
You are so because:
- You have a clear vision, measurement points and a prioritized list of which digital measures you should implement to succeed.
- You have organizational consensus, so that everyone agrees on which way you are going and how you will get there. Everyone has been heard and feel involved.
- You have a business case and are able to oversee finances, investments, potential and not least the necessary organizational adaptations.
The technical dimension
We believe that the business should drive the choice of technical platform – the platform should not be what sets the framework for the business.
That's why we guide you independently of platform providers based on your specific needs, resources and goals. At the same time, we advise on architecture and system selection based on our years of experience.
Once our consulting is complete, you will be left with a set of recommendations regarding which digital initiatives can grow your business. If you want to make changes to the system landscape or get new external suppliers, we are happy to help with vendor selection.
And of course, we are happy to stay on the sidelines and help your internal developers get the project off the ground, acting as a sounding board and ensuring the quality of the solution.
At Vertica, we have experts in software development, UX, QA testing and business development. Therefore, you have the opportunity to get coaching or implementation in all areas when executing your digital strategy.
