birddog

Top Digital Tips – in plain English

If you’re still struggling to work out digital, here are a few basic tips that should help you along the way.

1. Assess your company’s digital strategy – is it fully integrated into your marketing mix?  If it isn’t, why not?  The opportunities the web presents to you as a business are immense, so you should make sure you’re exploiting all available channels.
2. Are you engaged in any social media activity?  Even if you’re not, chances are other people are talking about you and your brand right now – from your staff, your customers, or independent reviewers, someone will be.  Make sure you’ve got a presence in these channels and get engaged.
3. Do you use your own website?  Poor user experience is the number one gripe people have with businesses online.  Frustrating navigation, unnecessary long user journeys, shopping carts that don’t work.  Today’s programming languages enable websites to do pretty much anything; there aren’t any constraints any more, so there are no excuses for the technology letting down the user experience.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong.
4. When was the last time you updated your website?  Websites generally need at least a design refresh every 12-18 months to ensure they remain looking fresh.
5. Are you thinking about the mobile web?  Whilst ‘web-on-the-go’ has been around for quite a long time, it’s only over the past year or so that it has become more and more mainstream.  With more people accessing the web on their mobile on a regular basis, does your offering sufficiently cater for mobile web users?
6. Are you looking to save money in the recession?  If your website is built in .NET – a Microsoft technology, then chances are you’re paying hefty annual licenses for the server software.  You might want to consider a re-build in an Open-Source language such as PHP.  Open-Source languages have come a long way.  So far in fact that they now serve the platform for some of the highest trafficked sites in the world – such as Facebook, Twitter and Del.icio.us – all built in PHP!
7. Search is still huge.  Despite everyone talking about Social Media all of the time, it’s vital that your organisation has a search strategy in place.  This will cover both paid (PPC) and natural (SEO).  After all, over half of all people online start their journey with a search!

Oliver Budworth

Digital Director