How to Design A Digital System for Any Business

Are you overwhelmed? Do you want to scale faster?

You might be wondering how you’re going to survive the brutal paces of having to figure out complicated internet software.

In today’s age, having a solid digital presence is no longer an option. It is a necessity. Skimping out on it can keep your business stuck in the back and unable to innovate. These days, technology is not hard. It doesn’t have to involve tons of technical expertise and complex connections and more work. 

I'm going to show you how to reduce overwhelm and scale your business by building out your digital system. 

Foundations

Before you even start diving into technology, here's what you need to be thinking about.

You need to be thinking about your vision, which is where you dream of your business getting to. Where are you right now and where do you see yourself and your business? What is the end result you envision from developing a digital strategy? Is it more time, is it allowing you to scale, or is it to solve a specific problem you have? You need to ask yourself what issues you are facing with your current system and going through these questions will allow you to get better clarity before you set out on your plan.

What is your goal?

Step #1: The Four Frameworks

The first step is going over what I call the Four Frameworks, which will be the blueprint that allows you to design a high-performing end-to-end digital strategy for any business. The Four Frameworks are the Marketing Framework, the Sales Framework, the Delivery Framework, and the Nurture Framework.

The Marketing Framework revolves around getting the leads in the door and increasing awareness of your business. The second framework is the Sales Framework, which is how you convert those leads into customers. The third framework is the Delivery Framework, which is actually delivering your product and delivering the value that you promised to your customers. And the last framework is the Nurture Framework. How do you develop that relationship and retain your customers and develop networks for your customers to stay close to your brand?

There are Four Frameworks you need to think about: 

Marketing, Sales, Delivery, and Nurture.

The Marketing Framework

Let's dive into the first framework to develop a digital strategy for marketing. You first want to look at who your target audience is and where they're located on the internet. The crucial item is to be hyper-targeted and deeply understand what their desires are. A good question to ask is “What keeps them awake at night?” Move beyond the typical demographics of age, gender, and location. Being hyper-targeted means thinking about what they look up on Google, who they follow on social media, what newsletters and blogs they read, etc. The step after that is to look at the result that you're going to get to them. 

What is the result you're going to get to them? What is the transformation that your customers will go through after using your product or service? 

Then write out the framework that you use to deliver the results. The framework that you use to deliver the result is the step-by-step process you use. It’s kinda like your recipe. Once you have that framework, you can use that framework to develop your hook and start driving traffic to your digital presence, which will allow you to get contacts and add more leads to your system. This is building out your lead funnel, which is kinda like bait for customers. So you are driving traffic to your bait, which will provide value to your leads in exchange for an email address. That is the basic overview of designing a strategy for your Marketing Framework. 

The Marketing Framework consists of your ads, your copy, and content you've produced that can bring in organic traffic (Important note: content is not king, promotion is king).  And then you have to think of the traffic, which is the visitors coming to your digital presence and increasing awareness and building up ways to drive in leads. Many businesses neglect the Marketing Framework under the excuse that the product is enough, but the “build it and they will come” mindset does not work anymore.

The strategy for the Marketing Framework is to create a system that consistently brings dream customers to your door.

Sales Framework

And the next framework is the Sales Framework, which is closely related to the Marketing Framework. The Marketing Framework is focused on generating leads and the Sales Framework is focused on converting those leads. One main component of the Sales Framework is thinking about how to move customers through your different products, or if you have one product you will think about promoting that product in a short amount of time. This means you need to be focused on how you provide the result to your customer. 

How do you convert leads and how do you take them through a customer journey that can give them many different types of your products across your value line?

You might have some cheap products, and you might want to lead through a cheap product into a really expensive product for example.

Strategizing the system you use to convert leads into customers allows you to make a process that is as repeatable as possible. 

Another important aspect of the Sales Framework is understanding how to handle non-buyers. How do you nurture them and try to drive them back into your Sales Framework to convert them if they did not buy the first time they saw you? 

You want to think of developing a system that can consistently sell without large amounts of effort. For example, an info business would have three ways of converting: through webinars, through video sales letters, which is just a landing page with a video and then a normal sales letter below it, or through a normal sales letter without a video. These can be shown to the customer in an email sequence used to convert or as the backend to your marketing funnel. Again, a funnel is the steps that lead your desired customer from a visitor to a lead to a buyer in a consistent manner.

The Sales Framework creates a strategy to

convert leads into customers digitally.

Delivery Framework

The third framework is your Delivery Framework. The first step in developing your strategy is to look at what process you use to deliver your result and, and document that delivery process in a step-by-step manner. 

A good way to plan this out is using the Escape and Arrival Framework, which I learned from Frank Kern. It is very simple: just write down the starting point of your customer, which is where they want to escape from, and then write down the ending point of your customer, which is where they want to get to. Then write down all the steps that take them to that end result, and you don’t necessarily have to provide a product for each step, but awareness of all the steps is critical.

 Once you have the steps down, you can see which steps you provide a solution for and break them down even further. Then you can think of how you, how you scale that process. You also want to look at your digital delivery strategy, which allows you to think of how you can deliver your product or service in a digital format. That will allow you to do your job more and more efficiently and effectively and scale your business. Another important part of delivery is backend automation. How do you automate data entry? How do you automate internal workflow processes and through using backend tools such as a CRM like Salesforce, HubSpot, or AgileCRM, or any other related tools? How do you get your internal processes such as communication, document, document storage, and other stuff like that as consistent and as efficient as possible?

Systemize delivery and automate the backend.

That will allow you to deliver results to your clients quickly and repeatedly and also help you be more focused on providing the impact and not on administrative tasks. To do that, you want to document the result processes. To sum it all up: document how you get your client to the result they want, and how you automate the delivery processes and how you automate the backend processes such as administrative tasks and internal workflows.

The Delivery Framework is based on two things:

automation of delivery and automation of internal processes

Nurture Framework

The fourth and final framework is the Nurture Framework, which is how you retain customers and keep them in your community. The customer experience goes beyond the initial value exchange. You don't want to have the value exchange and then turn your head on your customer. You want to retain them and nurture them and keep them in your community. The way to do that is by developing what's called a customer network. A customer network is just a way for your customers to stay together, to increase brand loyalty, and to develop an excitement towards your business, and that can be done through tools such as Facebook groups or Slack communities for example. It doesn’t matter what tool is used, but it matters what value you bring to develop that customer network and the social connection you create in that community. You also want to think about how you can provide content and value after the sale. How do you keep showing them that you can be trusted and build a relationship to keep your customers coming back to your products? So the Nurture Framework boils down to content creation, building a customer network and engagement with your past customers.

The Nurture Framework allows you to connect with your customers, make them love you, and keep them coming back.

So just to recap, the Four Frameworks are the Marketing Framework, the Sales Framework, the Delivery Framework, and the Nurture Framework. To start your digital strategy, you begin with developing a strategy for each of those Four Frameworks before you start looking into technologies and spending time with that, you want to be crystal clear about these Four Frameworks.

Step #2: Digital Strategy

The next step is the actual digital strategy that can be built off the Four Frameworks.

This step is actually looking at the technology to build up your Four Frameworks and scale your business. So now you have the frameworks... What's next? Now you get to do the fun part, which is finding the tools you will use for each of the Four Frameworks. You want to think about the requirements for your business case and document two things: your tools and your processes.

Your digital strategy revolves around two things:

your tools and your processes.

Tools

Finding software is kinda like going to Home Depot for your tools.

What are the requirements for your solution? What tools are available for that framework? For every framework you want to look at the tools that would help you go through that framework, You’ll have a certain set of tools for the Marketing Framework, and you might have some tools for the Sales Framework. You might have different tools for the Delivery Framework. You might have some tools that will help you deliver digitally. And then you have the Nurture Framework, what tools will you use for engaging with customers and creating those customer networks we talked about earlier. Instead of starting from scratch, which is usually not the best idea, you want to look at how you can leverage the tools you already have instead of going out and completely changing your system, which might take a lot of time and money, and effort, and could be risky. You want to look at how to use your current arsenal to its utmost capabilities. Then you want to be thinking about how your tools can be used across multiple frameworks so you can maximize efficiency.

You don't want to have a disjointed system where all the frameworks work well separately, but they don't flow together. A more effective way is to look at tools that can be used across multiple frameworks to maximize your efficiency. Let's say you can have one tool that will not only provide you with landing pages and allow you to get your leads (Marketing Framework) but will also allow you to make the sale on the same tool, send out conversion emails (Sales Framework), and connect your client to your product once the sale is made (Delivery Framework) and engage with them afterward (Nurture Framework).

There are three categories of tools: the front-end tools, which will be what a customer sees on their side, then there are the backend tools that will help you automate your processes, your workflows, for example, and file storage. And then there are what I call the "duct tape tools" that will connect tools across the Four Frameworks and connect the backend with the front end, which would be a tool such as Zapier, automate.io, and other tools like that. And one tool can and should fit in in more than one of these categories to build out a seamless system. 

Don’t be scared by technology, most tools will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Processes

Once you’re done figuring out the tools, the next step is looking at the processes. What digital processes need to be put in place to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of your strategy, and how can you best integrate your frameworks and the different tools you're using as well as looking at your business workflow and checking that your business workflow is clear and consistent. 

Processes are kinda like your assembly line.

The business workflow is the process you go through in building your product as well as the internal communications and approval processes and other backend processes. Here are three categories of processes. There are three types of processes: the delivery processes which is how you create your product and deliver your product to the customer, the back end processes, which will mostly be administrative tasks, manual data entry (which you won't be doing a lot after this), and then internal workflow processes such as approvals communications, documentation, et cetera.

To develop consistency, you need to develop your processes.

This digital strategy design is going to allow you to go from being completely unorganized and all over the place and having things fall through the cracks and transform to become systemized through a well-designed digital system that will allow you to go across the Four Frameworks more effectively. Customers will love the process, and you will be spending a lot less time in your day-to-day operations. You'll be able to spend more time on your business and working on your business, providing value to your customers, providing more impact, and growing and scaling.

Your tools and your processes are the DNA of your digital strategy.

Step #3: Implement

The last step is to implement the solution that you've defined using your Four Framework strategy and the tools and processes that you've documented. I'll show you how to create a solution in a short amount of time.

MVP Mindset

To be able to see results quickly, you need to have the MVP mindset, which is the ability to create a minimum viable product. The minimum product here would be the minimum viable digital system. You want to iterate quickly and create a long-term implementation roadmap. So let's say in one week, I can have this system set up that will do this very well. And it will save me this amount of time. It might not be the best solution or the most complete solution, but it will be a step up from where you are on your way to your transformation. You want to keep iterating using your roadmap until you're completely automated and you're, and you can scale very efficiently. You want to start small to reduce overwhelm, and you don't want to, you can have big goals going from your vision that we talked about in the foundations, starting from your vision, from the foundations, and then, and then building out the steps, the steps, it will take you to get there.

And then you want to implement those and, and, and, and iterate quickly, which means implement, build, implement, release, implement, build, and keep going through that process.

Be imperfect and iterate quickly.

Testing

Another important thing is testing. There are a lot of things you might not think of when things are automated compared to when you were doing things by hand. So begin by developing test cases for your workflows, making sure that if something goes wrong you will know exactly what would go wrong and making sure that you have every possibility or most possibilities accounted for, because you're going to have to start thinking algorithmically when you're automating your processes, as opposed to doing things manually, and then you also want to be tracking your data. What you don't track, you don't control. So you want to be tracking your data, how things flow, as well as what things could be more efficient, and what things are not working out. And then you keep watching and tracking. Make sure to keep rebuilding test cases as your business requirements change as well.

Think algorithmically.

Roles

Another important aspect of implementing your digital system is defining roles. For every framework, there will be roles that need to be documented so that the transformation process is carried as smoothly as possible. ‘Roles’ are just tasks, and more than one ‘role’ can be assigned to a single person as necessary. This will help you increase the implementation effectiveness by breaking down the process into little bits and assigning someone to champion it. Let’s go through some examples. Let’s say we want to build a Marketing Framework for a bakery that wants to sell more cakes. One role would be writing copy for a landing page, another role could be writing a free report on the best cake recipes, and another role could be running advertisements on Facebook. All these roles set up the foundation for the Marketing Framework and maintain it, and all the other frameworks will be similarly outlined.

Every framework has its roles, and every role needs a champion.

Conclusion

This is an overview of digital system design, how to create a digital transformation in your organization to reduce overwhelm, scale your business, and revolutionize your operations. The first step is to start with your foundations. You want to document your vision, you're why, why you want to scale your business, and also the issues you currently face with your processes. And the next step is going over the Four Frameworks. This involves developing a strategy for each of the Four Frameworks: your Marketing Framework, your Sales Framework, your Delivery Framework, and your Nurture Framework. The step after that is identifying the tools and processes which involves choosing the actual software and documenting the workflow that will work for your business case. And then the last step is to implement, iterate and test your solution, to see results as quickly as possible. You're going to get results very quickly. It's kind of like working out. When you haven't worked out at all and you just start working out, you're going to see results very, very quickly, and you're going to be amazed. So get started small and start implementing your solutions right away. 

Designing digital systems for your business is key to getting ahead and staying ahead in today’s market.

Thanks for reading this!

Sincerely,

Ahmed Roach

P.S. Lots of people get overwhelmed with technology.

Here’s why.

They don’t plan it out in advance. They get drowned in software, tools, and strategies.

Get a PDF copy of this report and the accompanying blueprint at ahmedroach.com to start designing your system.