On this page
- Why is a digital strategy still important?
- What is a digital strategy, and what questions must it answer?
- Digital strategy vs digital transformation
- Digital strategy vs IT strategy
- What about AI — do you still need a strategy?
- Why do digital initiatives fail without a strategy?
- What does each leader look for in a digital strategy?
- Do you still need a digital strategy in a down market?
- The real cost of skipping strategy
- FAQ
Why is a digital strategy still important?
Because it is the difference between digital investment that compounds into growth and digital spend that quietly evaporates. The fashionable view says a digital strategy is dead — that digital is now mainstream, part of a global approach, so “digital strategy is just your business strategy”. On most of that, I agree: it no longer makes sense to build a stand-alone digital media strategy, a digital touchpoint strategy or a digital product strategy in a silo, without considering your other channels, touchpoints and products, and how they complement each other to address customer needs and attention.
Key point — What is dead is the siloed digital plan. What is not dead is the need for a conscious digital strategy to steer the one thing that still fails at scale: turning digital marketing, sales and service into measurable growth. — Audrey Benoit, Belly & Brain
This is where the “digital is your strategy” slogan quietly skips a step. A digital strategy today is not there to justify a website, a mobile app or a media budget — that is mainstream, day-to-day business. Its job is to make your commercial digital transformation succeed: how you attract, convert and serve customers across channels, and increasingly how you use AI to do it well. Get that right and every initiative pulls in the same direction. Skip it and you get motion without progress — which is precisely why roughly 90% of transformations fall short.
What is a digital strategy, and what questions must it answer?
Definition — A strategy is the shortest route to attain an objective, given your assets, means, market and customers. A digital strategy applies that to growth: the shortest route to more customers, more value per customer and a sharper customer experience — with a plan for the enablers (skills, data, martech, ways of selling and serving) you need to build along the way.
Two things follow. First, a strategy is not a list of projects — it is a route with a destination. Second, the enablers are part of the plan, not an afterthought: if the data, the skills or the customer insight are not there, building them is the strategy.
What questions should a digital strategy answer?
Before any tool or platform is chosen, a real digital strategy answers five questions. If you cannot answer them, you do not yet have a strategy — you have a wish list.
- Why transform? The commercial reason, not the trend.
- What is the business case? The investment, the return, the payback.
- What value are we creating — for the business and for our customers?
- How fast can we go, and by which route? Sequence and pace.
- What capabilities, data and culture do we need to build or sustain?
Digital strategy vs digital transformation: what is the difference?
They are not the same thing, and confusing them is one of the most common — and most expensive — mistakes. In short: the strategy is the route; the transformation is the journey. You do not replace one with the other; the strategy governs the transformation.
| Digital strategy | Digital transformation | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The plan: the shortest route from where you are to a defined growth objective. | The change itself: the programme that reshapes how you market, sell and serve. |
| Question it answers | Why, what value, how fast, by which route? | How do we actually build and roll this out? |
| Horizon | Direction-setting; revisited as the market changes. | Multi-year execution programme. |
| Owned by | Leadership — a commercial decision. | Cross-functional teams — marketing, sales, service, tech. |
| Fails when… | It is vague, absent, or confused with a project list. | It runs without a strategy — becoming a costly martech migration or a stack of tools nobody uses. |
Good to know — A transformation without a strategy still moves — it just moves in every direction at once. That is why 90% fall short: not because the teams lack effort, but because nobody defined the route.
Digital strategy vs IT strategy: what is the difference?
An IT strategy answers “what technology do we run, and how do we run it reliably and securely?” A digital strategy answers “how do we create business and customer value through digital, and what has to change to get there?” The IT strategy serves the digital strategy — not the other way round. When a growth transformation is driven by IT alone, it optimises systems while the business case, the customer value and the commercial culture go unaddressed.
| Digital strategy | IT strategy | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary question | How do we create business and customer value through digital? | How do we run technology reliably, securely and cost-effectively? |
| Starting point | Customer needs and growth objectives. | Systems, infrastructure, architecture. |
| Measures of success | Growth, conversion, customer value, new revenue. | Uptime, security, cost, delivery, technical debt. |
| Owned by | Leadership and the commercial side of the business. | The CIO / IT organisation. |
| Relationship | Sets the direction and the “why”. | Enables and serves the digital strategy. |
What about AI — do you still need a digital strategy?
Yes — and this is where the argument gets sharpest. “AI is your strategy” is simply the 2026 version of “digital is your strategy”, and it leads to the same place. Marketing, sales and service teams are launching AI pilots everywhere — content engines, lead scoring, sales copilots, customer-service assistants, personalisation — but most never reach production or show a return.
Short answer — AI does not remove the need for a digital strategy; it raises the cost of not having one. AI amplifies the direction you already have — so with no clear objective, no business case and no clean customer data, it mainly helps you go nowhere faster. — Audrey Benoit, Belly & Brain
The numbers echo the transformation story. Gartner forecast that around 30% of generative-AI projects would be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025, pointing to poor data quality, unclear business value and rising costs — in other words, missing strategy, not missing technology.
A word of caution on the “95%” figure — A widely shared 2025 MIT report (the NANDA “State of AI in Business” study) put the failure rate at around 95% of enterprise generative-AI pilots showing no measurable return. That number is heavily contested: commentators have questioned its methodology and sample, and noted that “no measurable ROI yet” for pilots only a few months old is not the same as failure. Treat it as a directional signal, not gospel — read charitably, it still points the same way as Gartner's: the gap is strategy, not technology.
An AI initiative asks the very same five questions as any growth transformation — why, what business case, what value for customers, how fast, and what capabilities and data do we need. Treat AI as a strategic choice tied to commercial value, not as a set of tools to try out, and it stops being a science experiment. If you already have a dedicated AI roadmap, the digital strategy is what keeps it pointed at growth — the discipline behind our SEO / GEO & AI visibility work.
Why do digital initiatives fail without a strategy?
Because effort is not the same as direction. When digital marketing, sales and service initiatives lack a strategy, they fail in recognisable patterns. The surveys blame a long list of causes — lack of customer knowledge, culture, prioritisation, leadership, data — but they all boil down to one thing: no real strategy. Here are the symptoms, grouped by where the gap actually sits.
| Where the gap sits | What you see on the ground | What was actually missing |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Lots of campaigns and pilots, none scaled; every team runs its own funnel. | A shared growth objective and a defined route. |
| Value | Work measured by activity (“we shipped the campaign”), not by revenue or customer value. | A business case tied to value creation. |
| Prioritisation | Everything is a priority; budget spread thin across channels; nothing reaches critical mass. | A sequence and a pace (“how fast, by which route”). |
| Capabilities & data | New martech and CRM bought, but the data is messy and teams cannot or will not use it. | An explicit plan for skills, data and adoption. |
| Leadership | Growth delegated to a channel or a tool, disconnected from the commercial strategy. | Ownership at leadership level. |
Watch out — The most expensive failure mode is the “headless” test-and-learn programme: teams test the waters and pick up new tools without ever thinking in terms of business value. It looks like progress. It rarely delivers any — and today its newest, costliest form is the scattered pile of marketing and sales AI pilots that never reach production. — Audrey Benoit, Belly & Brain
What does each leader look for in a digital strategy?
A digital strategy only gets funded and sustained when it speaks to each decision-maker in their own terms. The same growth plan looks different from each seat at the table. Address all four, and you turn “interesting” into “approved”.
| Leader | What they look at first | What makes them say yes |
|---|---|---|
| CEO | Strategic fit and competitive position. | A clear “why”, tied to growth and to where the market is going. |
| CFO | The business case, payback and risk. | Quantified value, a realistic investment, and a plan that de-risks the spend. |
| Marketing / Growth Director | Customer value, acquisition and conversion. | Evidence it sharpens the customer approach and moves acquisition, conversion and retention. |
| Sales & Customer Director | Pipeline, sales productivity and customer experience. | A route that feeds better leads, shortens the cycle and improves how customers are served. |
Do you still need a digital strategy in a down market?
Yes — arguably more. A downturn is the moment a digital strategy earns its keep, because it forces the one discipline that scattered initiatives lack: prioritisation. When budgets tighten, a strategy tells you which two growth initiatives to fund to critical mass and which eight to pause. Without one, cuts fall evenly across every channel, and the whole commercial engine stalls together.
The real cost of skipping strategy
Running a digital transformation without a strategy or strategic plan — headless test-and-learn with teams “testing the waters”, or new tools implemented without thinking in terms of business value — is costly, lengthy, demotivating, and fails to deliver. Too often it ends up looking like a costly martech migration or a stack of marketing and sales tools nobody uses, with no real commercial opportunity or customer value behind it.
The irony is that the strategy step is the cheap part. It is the missing route that makes everything after it expensive.
Frequently asked questions
Do we still need a digital strategy if digital is already embedded everywhere in the business?
Yes — not as a stand-alone silo strategy, but specifically to guide how you grow through digital marketing, sales and service. Without it, initiatives tend to default to costly, unfocused test-and-learn exercises.
Why do most digital transformations fail?
Industry surveys point to a mix of causes — lack of customer knowledge, culture, prioritisation, leadership and data — but these usually trace back to a single root cause: no real strategy behind the transformation.
What is the difference between a digital strategy and digital transformation?
The digital strategy is the route — why you are transforming, what value you are creating, how fast and by which path. The digital transformation is the journey — the programme of work that actually reshapes how you market, sell and serve. The strategy governs the transformation.
What is the difference between a digital strategy and an IT strategy?
A digital strategy starts from customer needs and business value and sets the direction. An IT strategy starts from systems and infrastructure and keeps technology reliable, secure and cost-effective. The IT strategy serves the digital strategy, not the other way round.
What questions should a digital strategy actually answer?
Why you are transforming, what the business case is, what value is being created for the business and its customers, how fast you can move and by which route, and what capabilities, data and culture need to be built or sustained.
What happens if you skip the strategy step?
Initiatives without a strategic plan tend to run as headless test-and-learn exercises or tool-first rollouts — costly, slow, demotivating, and unlikely to deliver real business value.
Do we still need a digital strategy if we are already investing in AI?
Yes — more than ever. AI amplifies the direction you already have, so without a clear objective, business case and clean customer data it mainly helps you move faster in the wrong direction. Gartner expected roughly 30% of generative-AI projects to be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025 — a strategy gap, not a technology one. A digital strategy is what turns AI pilots into commercial value.
Is a digital strategy still worth it in a downturn?
Yes. In a down market a strategy is what lets you concentrate limited budget on the few growth initiatives that will reach critical mass, instead of spreading cuts evenly and stalling everything at once.
In summary
In summary — The siloed digital strategy is over; a conscious digital strategy is not. Its job today is to make your marketing, sales and service transformation succeed where roughly 90% of transformations fall short — and to stop the rush into AI from repeating the same mistake. A strategy is the shortest route to a growth objective and a plan for the enablers along the way. It answers five questions — why, what business case, what value, how fast, and what capabilities, data and culture. Skip it, and the programme becomes a costly stack of tools nobody uses. Define it, and every initiative after it gets cheaper and faster. — Audrey Benoit, Managing Partner, Belly & Brain
