Why Businesses Need to Get Control of Their Digital Estates

Do you know how many websites your company operates, and how many social sites your business manages? Not just the officially sanctioned, firm-wide sites, but the employee-operated ones on social apps and blogging platforms? If you are unsure, you are not alone. Most business executives I talk with today are struggling to understand the scope of their digital estate. And it’s completely understandable. But the costs of a sprawling digital estate are unacceptably high. 

What is a digital estate? 

A digital estate consists of: 

• All the digital touchpoints that a business operates. 
• Their underlying infrastructures, such as the content management systems a business uses to publish and manage content. 

The concept originated as a way of understanding the myriad websites a company operates. But the notion has expanded to include social sites (ranging from LinkedIn to Twitter), third-party sites (such as Google Business Profiles), and basically anywhere else a business manages its brand, both on the desktop and mobile devices. 

The digital estate is a useful way for a business to understand: 

• The scope of its brand presence.  
• Vulnerabilities that may exist. Each element of a digital estate is a potential risk to a brand’s reputation if not managed properly. 
• Opportunities to build trust. Conversely, each element of a digital estate is an opportunity for a business to connect with an audience with content that resonate for each platform (e.g., video on YouTube, interactive investor content on a corporate website).  

In the era of globalization, large companies have seen their digital estates expand, and it’s easy to understand why. Businesses have developed multiple sites for a variety of valid and understandable reasons, including as a surge in merger/acquisition activity, an expansion of their customer base, and the proliferation/growth of apps and platforms. Consider that there were 126 initial public offerings on the London Stock Exchange in 2021. Each of those offerings represents the building of a completely new digital estate that addresses audiences ranging from investors to job seekers to employees, involving websites, social sites, and apps.  

Why businesses need to mind their digital real estates 

Businesses need to have a strategy for their digital estates. This strategy needs to encompass an audit of the scope of their digital estate (both the authorized parts and the parts that sprouted up outside the domain of the central marketing/communications team), a rationale for what’s included in the digital estate and what is not, and a go-forward plan for managing it. Doing so yields a number of benefits such as: 

• Maximizing reach and relevance. Businesses need to stay on top of the different ways their various audiences, ranging from job seekers to investors, want to interact with them. A digital estate is constantly evolving. For example, TikTok did not even exist just a few years ago, but it’s becoming a more important element of many brands’ digital estates depending on the nature of their business. And the rapidly developing Metaverse is opening up a whole new lens through which a business views its digital estate.  
• Privacy. As privacy regulations become more strict around the world, businesses need to know all the ways their business interacts with people and ensure proper privacy controls are in place. Failure to do so could result in substantial fines.  
• Security. Unfortunately, malicious parties are constantly looking for ways to compromise a business online, resulting in astronomical ransomware costs and other enormously harmful damage. A business needs to understand the scope of its digital presence to understand how to protect itself.  
• Reputation. Digital estates ranging from TikTok to Instagram to the corporate site need to be managed with proper oversight to project the integrity of the brand. 
• SEO. A business that operates multiple sites and pages spanning career sites and investor sites has a more challenging job ensuring that its content is findable and that SEO problems such as publishing duplicate content do not happen. 

But more and more businesses are struggling to keep up with the scope of their digital estates. They need help. 

Why brands are struggling 

Being a corporate webmaster alone is a difficult enough job. Nowadays, guardians of the brand’s estate have it even harder with content sprawl occurring. Why are digital estates so hard to manage now? A number of reasons stand out, such as: 

• Low barriers to entry. It’s just too easy for a brand to continue piling on with more content. Any employee or group of employees can decide to start blogging about their brand with a Medium account in a matter of minutes. Opening and operating multiple corporate social sites for brands with several locations is easy to do – but not necessarily easy to manage. 
• Lack of governance. Businesses too often lack good ground rules for who is ultimately responsible and authorized to have oversight over how the brand is represented across the digital world. 
• Lack of awareness of the downsides like SEO. Businesses don’t always understand, for instance, that duplicate content can undermine their brand by making that content harder to find in search. 

But times are changing. More businesses are realizing there’s a problem and that something needs to be done. 

What’s changing 

One of the reasons businesses are becoming more willing to take control of their digital estates is that they are being held accountable against performance metrics such as SEO. As metrics have improved, businesses have become more aware of the costs of an out-of-control digital estate, including poorly ranking content, low dwell time, sites that don’t convert, and so on. Businesses have entered a new phase of maturity as they examine their marketing funnels and align content against every stage of the funnel. They can see where breakdowns are occurring and why. The metrics often point to poorly managed touchpoints (the elements of a digital estate) along the buyer’s or customer’s journey. 

What to do 

As noted, everything starts with a strategy for the digital estate. For instance, a business with a very strong master brand may want to take a different approach for the nomenclature approach and brand architecture for its digital estate versus a decentralized “house of brands.” 

A digital strategy review needs to cover far more elements than I can properly cover in a blog post. But to give you a small taste of what’s involved, here are some of the points we cover with our clients when we assess their digital estates: 

How can we improve the customer experience across the current estate in the short term?  

• What sites are part of the current digital estate?  
• How do we categorize the different types of sites that the client operates?  
• How can we mitigate any performance problems – relating to the customer experience.  
• How can we optimize user journeys between a central UK site and other websites, considering the ERP and cross-selling objectives.  

What are the company’s long-term objectives – in communications, brand, sales and marketing, and digital?  

• How will the way the corporation and its brands interact with customers develop over the next few years?  
• What will the relationship be between the brands and customers?  
• How should the digital estate be developed to become more efficient, effective and future-proof?  

How have your internal systems planning, or implementation, developed?  

• How has the client’s planning for internal systems (PIM, DAM, ERP integration etc.) developed since this process started, and how will the customer experience inform the recommendation? 

We’re applying the above questions right now as we help a company with 50 websites (many of which are separately hosted and managed) scattered across different teams. The company is faced with a multitude of challenges, including maintaining a consistently high-quality customer experience and brand reputation.  

We’re working with the client on a strategy that will corral its digital estate to provide a single, cohesive experience. 

There’s a lot of work to be done, but we are getting there! 

And that’s what managing a digital estate is all about: putting in the work to manage it right. 

Contact Investis Digital 

To learn how to take control of your digital estate with a Connected Content approach that provides consistency and cohesion, contact us. This is what we do.