As your company grows and begins to rely more on internet traffic to drive sales, one of the lessons that you will learn is the importance of a digital strategy. This is what keeps your company visible online and keeps bringing the customers in your target demographics to your site and keeps them spending money. Because of the changes that have been made to browsing habits and the way that people engage with the internet, creating a digital strategy is more complex than ever before, and you would be wise to hire a consultant to help you make a comprehensive strategy for your company. Before you do so, there are three areas of digital strategy that you need to think about how you want to address, so you can be a knowledgeable participant in talks with your consultant.
Visibility
The most important factor in whether or not your website is going to make your company any money is the ability of customers to find it. Yes, you can send direct emails or mailings to potential customers, and hope that they click through to your site and browse what you have to sell, but the vast majority of customers find the sites that they do business with through search engines. To this end, an SEO, or search engine optimization, plan must be part of your digital strategy. With SEO your site will become more visible through back links and mentions on other sites, raising your search engine ranking and the odds that customers will be able to find you when they run a search for keywords associated with your site. At the same time, you have to be careful that you do not spam SEO links or your rankings will be nullified and all of the work you have done will be dismantled.
Social Media
The next stage in business evolution is social media, and if you are serious about growing your business, then you will need to have an eye towards social media. To start you need a Facebook page and a Twitter account for your website. Use these as places where you can announce special offers or promote new items on your site, thus keeping your customers informed and engaged. Be sure that your site has easy access to sharing and linking your products onto social media sites, so that customers can share that information on their own walls and pages. This is free, viral advertising that goes to the heart of the demographics that you want to reach, and it is more effective than almost any other online campaign that you can run. Social media is where business is headed, and if you want to stay competitive, you will need to bring social media into your digital strategy.
Mobility
Finally, you need to be adaptive to the changing reality of the internet. Smartphones and tablets are becoming the de facto method for browsing the internet for a lot of people, and if you do not have a site that is capable of functioning well on these platforms, you are going to lose sales. A good digital strategy will include updating your site to both a desktop and a mobile version, and may even include the creation of an app that users can download to make their shopping experience even easier. If your site is nothing but a slow loading desktop site, you will not be able to attract newer, younger customers that expect more from the places that they shop, and revenue will suffer.
Business is a constantly growing and changing monster, and to be competitive in this arena, you have to have a solid strategy. A good digital strategy will prepare your company for what is happening now, and keep you poised to grow in the future.
I am Melanie Rogers, and I have been a business owner and website operator for about eighteen months. The digital strategy Brisbane based Vivo Group (www.vivogroup.com.au) designed for my business helped to update my site and attract new users through a focus on mobile web design. I highly recommend them to anyone seeking help adjusting to the new internet atmosphere.