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What it is
Digital strategy is the plan that decides what you will be good at this year, with which budget, in which order. It suits businesses at an inflection point. New markets, new leadership, a migration just finished or a growing suspicion that the tactics are not adding up to anything. The work covers market and competitor analysis, a channel and budget plan across being found, chosen, talked about and proved, a roadmap with owners and a quarterly review against reality. Expect choices to be made and written down, including what you are deliberately not doing this year. We do not promise the plan will work, because no honest plan can. We promise the reasoning behind every decision is visible and that you can hold us to the sequence we agreed. Most businesses do not have a strategy problem. They have six tactics running at once and no order to them.
A plan with no budget attached is a wish with a deadline. That is the shape of most marketing plans, and it is why the reporting never quite settles the argument about what is working. Strategy is choosing. Which of the four things you will be excellent at first, with which budget, in which order, and what you are happy to be mediocre at until next year. The last one is the decision that makes the rest possible, and the one most plans avoid writing down. Saying no to a channel is the whole job, and it is why the plan is short.
We build the plan with you and write it down. The market position, the channel mix, the budget allocation across being found, chosen, talked about and proved, the milestones and the names beside them. Then we review it quarterly against reality, because a plan that is never revisited was a wish. Plans improve by being argued with, and the quarterly session is where that happens deliberately instead of by accident in a corridor two weeks before the budget round. The document is written to be used, and it changes as the evidence changes rather than as the fashions do.
What we are careful about is the difference between a strategy and a list of tactics with a theme. Every recommendation in ours rests on an assumption you can read and challenge. Some of those assumptions will turn out to be wrong. The value of a written plan is knowing which part failed and being able to change that part without demolishing the rest, and that is only possible when the reasoning is on the page instead of in someone's head. A plan everyone understands beats a clever one that only its author can follow.
What we do
Market and competitor analysis
Where you stand, where the gap is and what competitors are actually doing versus what they claim in their marketing. The useful part is usually the channel mix they run quietly rather than the one they talk about publicly, and the budget that quietly goes with it rather than the press releases.
Channel and budget planning
Allocation across being found, chosen, talked about and proved, with the reasoning shown for every pound. The plan says what each channel is expected to do and what would have to be true for the split to change, so the budget is a decision rather than an argument that restarts every quarter.
Roadmap with owners and milestones
What happens in which quarter, who owns it and what done looks like. A roadmap with no owners is a mood board, so every line in ours carries a name and a date, and the first quarter is planned in detail because that is what anyone can honestly commit to.
Quarterly review
A standing session to test the plan against what actually happened. What worked, what did not and what changed in the market while you were working. The plan gets updated in the room and every change is recorded with the reason behind it, so the logic stays intact as the facts move.
How we work
Audit
We gather the evidence first. Your numbers, your market position, what competitors actually run and how your channels currently perform against each other. The uncomfortable part is usually the true cost per acquisition by channel, which surprisingly few businesses have ever seen honestly.
Plan
The strategy gets written with you. Position, channel mix, budget split, the order of work and the assumptions each choice rests on. You approve it, and every option we rejected is recorded with the reason, so nobody relitigates it in month four.
Build
Execution begins, whether we run it, your team runs it or a mix of both. The roadmap assigns owners and dates and the first quarter is planned in detail. Beyond that the plan stays looser on purpose. Pretending to know month nine loses credibility.
Prove
Quarterly reviews that test the plan against reality rather than against last quarter's slide. A working session that changes the plan when the evidence says to, with the decision and the reason recorded. The measure is whether the business made better trade-offs.
What it costs
Strategy is priced as a fixed project, and the size of the number reflects the scope of the analysis rather than the size of your budget. A single-market plan against a handful of competitors costs far less than a group review across territories and business units. Workshops with more stakeholders add time, because getting agreement is real work and worth doing properly. What matters most is who does the thinking, which is why the person who runs the sessions writes the plan. Execution is quoted separately if you want us to run it, and the strategy stands on its own if you do not. Nobody is locked into anything by buying the plan.
Who it is for
For businesses at an inflection point. New markets, new leadership, a platform migration just finished or simply tired of running tactics with no order to them. Regulated markets such as iGaming, fintech, healthcare and law often need a strategy that shows a compliance officer or a board why the plan is shaped the way it is. For local service businesses it is usually about choosing between the five things pulling at the budget and agreeing to do two of them properly. In practice the buyer is a managing director or marketing lead who wants one plan the whole team can point at when the argument starts again.
Two kinds of business come to us: local service businesses and companies in regulated markets. See everything in Be proved.
Questions we get asked
Is strategy a separate engagement?
It can be. Many clients start here and then run the execution with us. Others take the plan and brief their own team or their other agencies with it, which works perfectly well because the document is written to be used rather than admired. Either way it is a fixed project with a start and an end, not a retainer in disguise. What you pay for is the thinking and the decisions, and those belong to you the moment the work is done. We would rather write a plan you can run without us than one that only we understand.
What do we get at the end?
A written plan you own. The position, the channel mix, the budget allocation, the roadmap and the assumptions each decision rests on, including the options we rejected and why. No slide deck padded with filler and no dependency on us to understand it. You should be able to hand it to a new hire on day one and have it make sense without anyone in the room to explain the gaps. It is a working document with the reasoning attached, and it is written to be argued with rather than admired.
What does a digital strategy include?
An honest read of your market and competitors, a decision about which channels carry the growth, a budget split with the reasoning shown and a roadmap with owners and dates. It also names what you are not doing this year, which is usually the page clients find most useful and the one most plans are too polite to write. Without that page, everything stays a priority, which is the same as nothing being one. The plan is short enough to read twice and specific enough to brief anyone on.
How long does a strategy project take?
Weeks rather than days, and it depends on how many people need to be involved and how much evidence we have to gather first. We agree the timeline before we start, because a strategy squeezed through in a single workshop is a list of everyone's opinions with a cover page on it. The gathering and the testing of the plan take longer than the writing, and the writing takes longer than people expect. Rushing it produces agreement rather than a strategy, and those are different things.
How much does digital strategy cost?
It is a fixed price agreed from the scope, and what moves it is the number of markets, channels and stakeholders involved. We would rather quote once for the real work than sell a cheap discovery phase that exists to justify a larger retainer afterwards. If the honest scope turns out smaller than you expected, the price follows it down. The number you get is the number you pay for the plan, and the work is done by the people who sold it to you rather than handed down to someone cheaper.
What if we already know what we want to do?
Good, bring it. We test the plan against the evidence and against what competitors actually do rather than what they announce. Sometimes we agree and the work becomes sequencing, budgeting and naming who owns each part. Sometimes the data argues back, and that disagreement is the part worth paying for before the money is committed. A plan that survives contact with the evidence is worth far more than one everyone liked on the first reading. Most teams arrive with a preference and leave with a decision.
More Be proved services
- AnalyticsNumbers you can trust before you spend a penny more.
- GA4 & GTMSetup and governance that stands up to an audit.
- Looker StudioOne dashboard, plain language, the figures that decide things.
Tell us what you need from digital strategy. We will tell you what we would do about it.