Forming your Digital Strategy
So you have a website and it’s live but only a small percentage of customers are choosing to buy online, how do you take it to the next level? What channels should you focus your budget on?
Where do you start?
Forming your digital strategy can feel overwhelming, there’s so many digital channels to choose from and lots of agencies out there offering services. How do you best allocate your budget to ensure the best ROI (Return on Investment). The usual starting point is PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising or Google Ads- Bings out there as well!), this is a great channel to begin with, but can be an expensive way to acquire traffic, so it shouldn’t be your only one.
To help increase traffic and awareness and support PPC as a channel I would recommend engaging a good SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) agency, in my experience it is one of the best returning channels and creates credibility for your business via organic search.
My next recommendation would be to focus on building your e-mail database. Make sure you give visibility to this on your homepage whether it be submission fields at a couple of points within your homepage or in the form of an e-mail pop-up. Don't forget your consent statements as well (got to stay on the right side of good old GDPR). Once you've began building your e-mail database, take some time (and dedicate some resources) to creating a programme of e-mail content and schedule - including an engaging welcome program to make sure you put your best foot forward with new customers. Investing in a good e-mail platform when it comes to optimising your e-mail database is essential. The ROI from e-mail as a channel (when done right) can be massive.
Finally work on cultivating strong and engaging content for your organic social channels as this can help increase engagement with your customers without increasing your budget output. As most people know businesses' reach across organic social has been on the decline in recent years, however it's still a great channel to allow customers to get in touch with businesses and allows businesses to showcase their brand personality if this is a customer's first interaction with them. Considering this incurs little cost to business to set up and run (cost of resource aside), it is a must have digital channel for all businesses online.
These are my recommendations for getting your Digital Strategy started, where your initial investments should yield some impressive gains - when executed well. There are other digital channels that can be incorporated into any business strategy once you have the foundations in place to build upon for growth.
