What is a Digital Strategy?
A Digital Strategy is defined as an organisations vision, goals and opportunities to benefit from digital methods. Simply put, it is a Strategy to get Business/Sales from Digital means. With recent developments from the Irish Government to introduce a National Digital Strategy, SME’s (small to medium business enterprises) are being given extra incentive in the form of a voucher scheme worth 2,500 euro per business. Find out more here.
Over the next few weeks, we will be creating blogs that encompass the vital parts of a Digital Strategy for business. This week we are focusing on where the core of your strategy should start.
Your Website
The starting point of any Digital Strategy for a business should be their website. The website should be both informative and engaging. The website should be visually appealing. People don’t like reading a load of text. They would rather watch a video instead (future post on this). The main point of the website is to inform people of what you do. If you can show your web visitor what your message is whilst keeping them engaged you have made a great start. So how do you make a site that is informative and engaging?
Static vs Dynamic Websites
Do you know of a website that has not been updated in months/years? Chances are it is a static website. Static websites are generally sites that are updated by someone with knowledge of web development. Whereas, dynamic websites give the website owner the ability to update and add content without needing to know anything about code. Dynamic features include a content management system such as WordPress or a e-commerce system where the business sells directly from their website.
Content Management System
CMS’s are a great way to keep your website up to date. WordPress and Joomla are the most common CMS’s. They allow for easy editing and addition of content. These days content is King on the internet. The more content you have on your site the better. Search engines also prefer sites that have regularly updated content. One way to keep your site updated is to have a blog. Blog posts are a great way to get people on to your site.
E- Commerce
E- Commerce is the buying or selling of products or services using electronic payment systems over the website. By having e-commerce on your website, you have a great competitive advantage for your business. You will have an online store that can avoid the overhead costs of having an actual physical store location. Your store will be assessable to worldwide market 24 X 7 with no physical location limitation.
Another factor that must be considered is how people view your site.
Responsive Web Design
Today, more and more people are browsing the internet with smartphones and tablets. The problem with conventional websites is that they were not developed with smaller devices in mind. They were built with specific size in mind; that of computers and laptops. The screens of phones are a lot smaller. To over come this, people have to pinch and zoom with their fingers to navigate a website. This is bad user experience and the user will probably move on. Responsive web design is a new web standard that fixes this problem. With a responsive site, RWD adapts the layout to the viewing width of the device being used. There is no need for pinching and zooming.
RWD should be a major consideration in a digital strategy for businesses. Google prefer responsive design. They state that on their website and that means that your site will get higher rankings because your site will maintain “link equity”. Your site has been around for a while and that’s good. Google likes sites with a bit of history.Click Here and you’ll see Google says so!
Next week, we will be looking at methods for getting your business out there via social media in creating a digital strategy.
