With school back in session for the 2018-2019 academic year, we’ve returned to enjoying the nightly homework sprints we (fondly) forgot about over the summer. The other night my son was working on a project for his leadership class regarding a ‘survival strategy’ and had to plan how to organize a diverse group of people stranded on an uninhabited island. Over the course of a couple hours he devised a pretty straightforward plan involving six steps that may (or may not) play out smoothly in reality, but regardless – there was still a plan!
Don’t lose your way
How many of us can say the same for our business? I’d say most of us can safely say at the early phase a plan was present—the usual pile of spreadsheets and napkin drawings, I’d imagine—but as time goes on, how easy is it to wander through our business years without a defined route of where we want to go? Once we have a product or service to offer and the money is coming in, do we spend enough time continuing to hone our strategy to ensure both growth and reliability in the future?
Getting specific, are you thinking about your company’s digital strategy? As a provider of digital marketing services we’re obviously biased towards making sure a company’s website and online marketing efforts are dialed-in, but we feel that there are enough facts out there to justify our position. Just take a look here and here, for a couple examples. In the current economy having a digital strategy is critical to the survival of your company.
But here’s where we at BlueTrunk wants to clarify something – as complicated as the term ‘digital strategy’ sounds, it just doesn’t have to be that tricky. Just like many things in life, a little ‘elbow grease’ goes a long, long way in terms of delivering results.
Don’t let implementing a plan for digital marketing hold you back – it’s easier (and more effective) than you think!
Your business operates in the real world. So real people, doing real communication, resulting in real money changing hands are the basic, relatively straightforward components of your company’s success. Business has worked this way for centuries. But how do these people find you? How do they communicate with you? How do they pay you? Making sure these three questions are answered and working is the ‘elbow grease’ mentioned earlier, and it really is this simple! Your digital strategy simply needs to ensure that people can find you, contact you, and initiate a transaction with you – which more often than not now takes place online.
A simple digital strategy goes a long way
As little as a decade ago a company could possibly get away without having any sort of a digital presence, but those days are almost completely behind us. There aren’t many companies without at least a website. But even if you have a website, stiff competition online has made fighting for visibility online tricky. Part of your digital strategy should involve tactics to get your website tuned so people searching for your products can find you. This process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO, for short). While it might sound like black magic to some, there are actually simple, proven steps you can take to make sure your website is meeting the basic requirements of effective SEO – steps that can help elevate the visibility of your website online.
The same level of care can be applied other aspects of digital marketing, such as posting business-related content on Facebook and Instagram, and making sure your website loads on mobile phones just as fast as it does on a computer.
It’s true that performing a search for “digital marketing tactics 2018” will results in a dizzying array of confusing topics and trendy words sure to panic any business owner, but the reality is that ticking off a few basic boxes will go a long way in enhancing your company’s online visibility. Creating a basic digital strategy is still a strategy nonetheless, and simply putting one into place and acting on it will do wonders for your company.
If you’re at all interested in working on a potential digital strategy for your business—or at least getting one started and running—don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We love to help put these things in place, and there’s a really good chance it’s going to be easier than you think!