Digitisation is a massive area to cover and can seem overwhelming to tackle in one shot. In this week’s blog we’ve listed 5 bite-sized steps to break digitisation down into manageable parts to digitise your business.
In short digitisation means translating your business and your brand online to leverage all the upsides of digital – 24/7 transactions, intelligence around market and spending and actionable insights to boost business outcomes.
Befriend data
Data will provide the insight to your market so do pulse checks constantly. There’s a bunch of free online tools available for measuring how your website is performing, which is critical in tracking and testing what works and what doesn’t. Google Analytics lets you to analyse your website traffic, what parts of your campaigns are converting the most and at what points visitors leave. Google Search Console checks your site for search results, click rates and any errors like broken links, plus tests if Google can make sense of your content, which is essential when it comes to SEO.
Capture leads
Capturing leads requires having the systems and strategies in place to take traffic to your website and convert them to sales. There’s no single right way to capture leads but doing so digitally is comparably quicker and cost-effective to traditional advertising like print, billboard or arguably the most outdated, junk mail. Google Adwords, Facebook, Instagram and Display let you to take a targeted approach to reaching a high volume of leads in the right market. To do so, you should give them something of value like free content in exchange for their details which they fill out on a landing page. You then have a list of leads to market to, but don’t be salesy in converting them – instead think about explaining your product or services in a valuable way without a hard sell to fast. When it comes to spending, start small like $200-$300 per month and invest what you can afford to lose – it shouldn’t drastically set you back.
Tips:
- Do a test of all the tech and see if you can strengthen the call to action especially if your leads aren’t converting.
- Simplify your links with Bitly so you can cleanly post them anywhere and optimise and track every touchpoint. The beauty of Bitly is you don’t have long links marring your posts, and analytics put insight around every click so you can continually test and refine.
Email marketing
You’ve successfully captured leads to create a mailing list, the next step is converting them to customers. This is where you need to finesse your email communication to connect to your market and build up rapport through content that’s truly customised and presents viable solutions and value-adds. Topics you could cover include industry insight, new blogs, products or services, new releases, special deals or a curated collection of content. You might want to give them something free like a business plan template, marketing campaign calendar or ebook. MailChimp is one of the leading platforms that’s simple and intuitive to use.
Boost SEO
With 80% of people using search engines to find product, SEO is critical in getting seen. There are two types of SEO – on-site which is optimising your site and existing content and off-site which takes actions outside your website like linking to raise credibility and ranking. While search algorithms are constantly shifting, relevance, trustworthiness and authority are set ways to continually boost SEO so external link building should be a continued approach. Many successful businesses leave SEO to the experts so consider sourcing the services of a reputable Australian-based company.
Tips and tricks to boost SEO:
- Online reviews on sites like Google, Facebook or Trip Advisor truly impact purchasing decisions so do a push to clients and friends to positively review your business.
- Social media posts linking to your website encourage clicks boosting SEO. Post captivating content relevant to your market.
Ensure your online store is simple to transact in
There’s a score of ecommerce platforms to build your online store which automate everything and integrate customer support through a suite of services like chat. Leading ecommerce solutions like Shopify and Magento have everything covered for quick and straight forward transactions. Whichever platforms you pick, ensure you test it out from a customer’s perspective.
Power post
Social media is a time zap but thankfully tools like Buffer schedule and automate posting across every platform. Inbuilt tracking included.
Organise
OneNote is a digital notebook capturing and organising everything across your devices. It lets you jot ideas, keep track of meeting notes, capture anything and logically store it to easily recall later.