How to take your small business digital during coronavirus

We are amidst challenging times where social distancing has stunted many business’ growth. While in other times, the digital space was primarily used to complement a physical presence as a lead generation mechanism, the current situation has afforded a new opportunity to enter the digital space. The beauty of digital is in the fact that virtual interactions with your customer may completely replace existing physical interactions.

Despite the allure of a setting up shop completely virtual, there are so many ways to get it wrong. As Tabrizi et al. from HBR succinctly put it, "A Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology".

A Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology

This is because most digital transformation initiatives fail, at a very sobering failure rate of 70% in 2018. Add a global pandemic on top of that and “Houston, we have a problem!”. There is clearly a lot that goes into the success of a digital transformation. However, from the digital strategy and digital marketing perspective, a lot SMB's actions do leaves a lot left to be desired.

Here, we discuss a few guidelines on how we do things at Elegant Minds. We have successfully used this workflow with our past clients with significant success. The players may have changed, but the game remains the same.

Building a winning digital strategy

Craving a niche in the digital space requires a digital strategy. Even before starting your advertising campaigns you, as a business owner need to honestly ask yourself if your business can adapt to the digital landscape. Understand your key objectives. Are they to increase awareness about your product or leads into your website or perhaps greater customer interaction? These objectives are a function of your product, business and your aims. Once these objectives are settled, set realistic goals on what you can achieve. These goals allow you to derive Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The cool thing about the digital space is that measurement and tracking is somewhat easy in an implementation sense.

This is a good time to apply your knowledge about your business onto a digital space. Your industry-specific knowledge of your product and its market will only increase your probabilities of success. To this end, understanding who your customers are, their demographics, where/how they interact with your product and their purchasing behaviour is crucial in coming up with an effective digital strategy. Finally, research the technology aspect and how you can leverage existing tech to achieve these objectives.

We can’t stress on how important the digital strategy is. Once your strategy is settled, everything else just falls in place. Your strategy decides how you build your website, Facebook page, Google My Business listing. And you advertise through digital advertising platforms.

Create the perfect digital medium for a seamless conversion.

Seamless conversions call for creative and careful digital optimization; it is the only way to keep your customers once they have found you.

To create the perfect digital medium, you need to pay attention to a whole host of factors. Content, SEO, Design...and so on. First and foremost, Content is king. Simply put, the content of a website is more than the sum of the words that are on your webpage. A website’s content needs to concisely and succinctly convey your product’s core value proposition and remain relevant. This keeps the bounce rates down. Not to mention the increased SEO benefits from Google and other search engines. Furthermore, making sure your web pages have quick load times makes sure you aren’t penalized by search engines and ensures users don't leave out of frustration. Finally, understand the benefits of a good UI/UX, as most users are drawn to aesthetically pleasing and intuitive interfaces. Every minute detail counts!

Use digital advertising to reel in a larger audience.

Whatever your key objectives are, a well-executed advertising campaign along with a great product almost always increases Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS).

If you have never used digital advertising for your product, well you are in luck. Many advertising platforms offer free advertising credits to those starting out. In many such cases, these are sufficient for many Small-to-Medium businesses like Google Ads who offer all Australian business with a $100 credit for ad spend.

There are a host of different platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram Ads, and much more. Finding the right combination will depend on how your customers find you, which is a difficult thing to identify if you already lack a digital presence. However, using prior information such as a thriving Instagram Page or how similar business work may inform which platform is most effective. At this stage, it is also worthwhile looking at how you set up your advertising campaigns including keywords, search queries, imagery and landing page. Thorough research ensures that potential customers are clicking through your ads and you aren't wasting valuable dollars on targeting the wrong crowd. Furthermore, different platforms use different pricing systems (Pay-Per-Click/Pay-Per-Impression for example). Understanding the differences between these metrics and the various bidding strategies may stretch a constrained advertising budget.

Measure, Analyze and Experiment

Becoming a contender in the digital space is an iterative process.

Far too many businesses think that a website or a Facebook Page is a set-it-and-forget-about-it thing. This belief is plain false. Remember when we said that measurement and tracking were easy? This is partly true, as one doesn’t need to tinker constantly setting up a Google Analytics or a Facebook Pixel. However, digital tracking and analytics generate a great deal of data. Making sense of this data is an insurmountable challenge for many. And it is a missed opportunity if businesses don’t leverage the valuable insight lying inside these messy datasets.

Frequent optimization and analysis is key to stay ahead of the competition. Digital Analysis involves formulating a hypothesis about some observation, then careful measuring variables while controlling all unintended variables. Then one must critically analyze these measurements whilst trying to minimize inherent bias. The primary purpose of this exercise is to ensure your digital activities are inline with your digital objectives. That everything is working. If not, going back to the drawing board and working on all the previous steps is required. Another purpose of this analysis is to inform mission-critical business decisions or even allow for new digital opportunities. These opportunities allow you to polish your digital strategy and restart the digital marketing cycle.

The digital space may seem superficially simple. However, anyone who spends any time in it knows that it isn’t. We get it! At Elegant Minds, our ethos is “simplifying digital” hence our services are made to make digital simple and accessible to businesses. Get in touch with us to take your digital presence to new heights.