“Digital strategy” usually turns out to mean a list of channels. That’s a marketing plan, and it belongs in a different document — ours is here.
Strategy is the longer question underneath it. Platforms like Instagram, Google, and Houzz never signed a contract with you. They set their own rules for how you can use them, and they can rewrite those rules whenever they want, usually to make more money for themselves, and you get no vote.
Here are two versions of that actually happening. Instagram’s organic reach for business accounts has been declining for years, across the board — a change Instagram made unilaterally, and no firm chose it or can undo it. A firm that put most of its marketing energy into growing a following there watches that reach shrink with nothing to show for the years of posting. Or: a site built on a platform that doesn’t allow content export. The day that firm wants to switch providers or redesign, there’s no migration — it’s a blank page and years of project pages and copy to rebuild from scratch, because none of it was ever really theirs to take with them.
For a practice that intends to be around in twenty years, which is most of them, this matters more than any campaign.
The inventory
Sit down once and write out what your firm actually has, and who controls each item. Most firms have never done this, and the exercise is uncomfortable in a useful way.
Done right, a firm owns its domain name, registered to the firm itself rather than to a former employee or a web designer; its website’s content and images; its email list; its photography, or a clear license to use it as intended; its brand’s source files, meaning the vector logo, the fonts or their licenses, and the color values in writing; and its analytics history.
What gets “rented” instead: the social following, since every platform’s reach for business accounts has declined and none of them owe you an audience; the search ranking, which is earned rather than owned and revisable by a single Google update; the Houzz profile, the directory listings, and the Google Business Profile; and, increasingly, the website itself, if it sits on a hosted platform you can’t export from.
The strategic instruction is simple. Invest in the owned column. Use the rented column to feed it. A firm with 10,000 Instagram followers and no email list has an audience it does not control. A firm with 400 email addresses and a well-written site has a smaller audience it can reach on purpose, forever.
The three that go wrong most often
The domain. A domain can end up controlled by someone who has nothing to do with the firm anymore — a designer who registered it years ago and has since moved on, or a personal credit card that expired without anyone noticing. Check the registrant today. It takes only a few minutes, and it’s the single point of failure for your entire online presence, which is a strange thing to leave to chance.
Photography rights. Architectural photographers license work in varying ways, and the license you bought years ago may not cover the uses you’re planning now. Get the terms in writing per shoot, and store them somewhere findable.
Brand source files. Covered in our note on logo design, and it recurs here for a reason: it’s the thing firms discover is missing at the worst possible moment.
Platform choice has a ten-year tail
Platform choice matters less for its features today than for what happens on the day you want to leave.
Before committing a site to anything, ask three things: Can I export the content in a usable form? Who can edit this without a developer? What does it cost in year five? A platform that answers those well is worth more than one with better templates.
The same test applies to any CRM, email tool, and project management system. Anything holding your data should be able to hand it back.
And a related discipline: keep the number of systems small. A four-person practice running six platforms is generating maintenance work with no owner, and that’s how things stop getting updated without anyone noticing.
Digital operations are strategy too
Two things sit in this territory that most firms treat as IT problems and are actually strategy.
The first is where the work lives — the drawing files, the project photography, the client correspondence, and the finished-project assets that marketing needs later. If pulling together three images and a paragraph about a completed project takes a day, you will not market that project. A predictable place where finished-project material goes, at handoff, is worth more than most content plans.
The second is what happens at project close. The moment a project finishes is when the photography, the testimonial, the referral ask, and the case study are all easiest to get — and it’s the moment everyone moves on to the next job. Making that a step in the process is one of the highest-return operational changes available to a practice.
Measurement you’ll still have in five years
Analytics accounts get rebuilt, tools get replaced, and firms routinely lose things in a website migration.
Two habits protect against that: keep the analytics property when you change sites rather than starting fresh, and keep a simple manual record — qualified inquiries per month and where each came from, in a spreadsheet you control. The second one will outlive every tool you use, and it’s the record that actually answers the question you’ll be asking in year five.
Where this connects to everything else
Strategy is what makes the tactics survivable. The channel triage tells you where to spend attention this year; this document is about making sure what you build this year still belongs to you in ten.
We do this work as part of what we run for shelter clients, usually at the start of an engagement, and it’s frequently where the first real problem surfaces. Tell us who your domain is registered to — if you have to go and check, that’s the finding.