WHAT DOES A DIGITAL STRATEGIST DO?
Published: Nov 21, 2024 - The Digital Strategist translates brand stories and business objectives into innovative digital content programs across paid, owned, and earned media, ensuring the content aligns with tone, style, and voice. This role involves leading audience insights to craft actionable strategies and collaborating with editorial and creative teams to produce impactful content that supports client goals. Additionally, the strategist manages junior staff, provides ongoing analytics, and delivers optimization recommendations to drive continuous improvement across digital platforms.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Digital Strategist
1. Digital Strategist Duties
- Sales Support: Assist the sales team with ALA (TMS) presentations and demonstrations.
- Project Management: Ensure quality and timeliness of development activities by creating, communicating, and managing project and feature schedules.
- Training: Design and conduct training offerings for new TMS customers.
- Implementation Management: ALA implementation management for new TMS customers.
- Helpdesk Process Design: Create a helpdesk process for external users to escalate issues.
- Issue Resolution: Weekly reviews with IT and ops leaders to escalate issues and implement resolution plans.
- Testing and Validation: Test ALA applications and validate workflows as necessary.
- Communication: Increase communication between end users and project leaders.
- Knowledge Management: Develop and maintain ALA knowledge portal.
- Process Improvement: Identify areas of opportunity for productivity improvements.
- User Acceptance Testing: Participate in testing ALA functionalities and provide feedback.
- Customer Success: Customer success manager for SaaS clients.
2. Digital Strategist Details
- Digital Strategy: Translating a brand’s story and business objectives into strategic and innovative digital content programs across paid, owned, and earned media.
- Brand Advocacy: Becoming a brand champion for clients, ensuring content is appropriate for tone, style, and voice.
- Audience Insights: Being the go-to expert on audience behavior and distilling insights into actionable tactics.
- Content Collaboration: Partnering with editorial and creative teams to brainstorm content aligned with audience insights and client goals.
- Team Management: Managing junior staff and developing strategic skill sets for social copywriting and community management.
- Platform Expertise: Providing guidance and ensuring adherence to best practices across digital and social media platforms.
- Analytics & Optimization: Conducting ongoing analytics reporting and offering editorial, platform, and program optimization recommendations.
- Industry Research: Providing creative inspiration and curating relevant industry news, case studies, and best practices for team members and clients.
- Editorial Strategy: Setting editorial strategy to ensure consistent and compelling content across all delivery streams.
- Executive Engagement: Engaging with customers’ executives (CxO level) in both business and IT departments.
- Customer Success: Leading and supporting customers to achieve strategic goals and ensure business value through Microsoft technologies.
- Digital Transformation: Guiding customers through end-to-end digital transformation journeys, from ideation to high-quality implementation.
- Technology Assessment: Assessing IT investment needs and supporting customers in deploying key technologies effectively.
3. Digital Strategist Responsibilities
- Requirements Gathering: Work with the client to gather Digital Strategy project requirements.
- Documentation: Draft Digital Strategy specifications.
- Implementation: Implement product feeds, tags/pixels, event tracking, 301 redirects, canonicals, and set up Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics.
- SEO Guidance: Guide SEO best practices for new site launches.
- Quality Assurance: Perform Digital Strategy Quality Assurance (QA).
- Problem-Solving: Solve complex Digital Strategy problems.
- Meeting Facilitation: Lead and participate in client and internal meetings.
- SEO Audits: Perform SEO audits and provide strategic recommendations.
- Mentorship: Mentor junior digital strategists.
- Process Improvement: Work with the team to improve Digital Strategy processes.
- Technical SEO: Conduct audits, analysis, and implementation of technical recommendations to improve site performance and resolve web crawling issues.
- Schema Expertise: Provide strong knowledge of schema.org and JSON-LD.
- Performance Optimization: Reduce crawl budget, remediate site performance issues, and implement 301 redirects.
- Tag Management: Optimize robots.txt files, implement canonical tags, and identify/fix redirect loops.
4. Digital Strategist Job Summary
- Digital Strategy Development: Accountable for creating integrated digital strategies connected to the overall media plan.
- Client Relationship Building: Strengthen SBU relationships through collaborative digital strategies to deliver client impact.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with all SBUs to ensure high-standard delivery.
- Plan Stewardship: Maintain stewardship and accountability of the digital plan, regularly evaluating and monitoring execution.
- Process Adherence: Ensure all media plans align with agency values, philosophies, and processes.
- Opportunity Evaluation: Lead preparation and presentation of digital media opportunities, trends, and issues to clients.
- KPI Awareness: Monitor client KPIs and objectives, ensuring tracking for required check-ins.
- Strategic Influence: Influence decision-making by highlighting appropriate strategies and benefits for clients.
- Product Integration: Identify and integrate key digital product opportunities into daily plans.
- Thought Leadership: Deliver digital thought leadership with Digital Strategy and Partnership Directors.
- Best Practice Implementation: Connect to the Digital Centre of Excellence and ensure execution of best practices.
- Media Partner Engagement: Maintain connectivity with media partners to deliver high-standard solutions for clients.
- Team Participation: Attend and actively participate in UM Digital Centre of Excellence meetings.
5. Digital Strategist Accountabilities
- Media Insights: Provide insights on emerging media and new digital opportunities.
- Competitor Analysis: Analyze website performance, keywords, and the digital landscape of competitors.
- Digital Strategy Support: Design digital strategies, activations, UX, or analytics projects to meet communication objectives across channels.
- UX Development: Develop basic UX concepts, including user journey mapping, sitemaps, and wireframing.
- Performance Measurement: Measure the efficiency and effectiveness of digital channels.
- Team Collaboration: Serve as the day-to-day digital contact for Account Management and Creative teams.
- SEO Compliance: Ensure Shopify and Magento (Adobe Commerce) clients comply with SEO best practices.
- Reporting: Develop reports to track progress and value.
- Presentation Skills: Present findings to clients and internal teams in a clear and succinct manner.
- Technical SEO: Work on technical SEO initiatives using tools like SEMrush and Screaming Frog.
- Team Development: Support the elevation of investment team digital acumen.
- Product Insights: Provide client-specific insights for new product development.
- Industry Engagement: Support the identification and development of partner and industry points of view.
- Financial Oversight: Oversee digital media financial controls, including purchase authorizations, billing, and budget control reports, ensuring timely resolution of discrepancies.