4 Ways to Revive Your Digital Strategy in 2016

There is a lot that can change in just one month in the digital space – make it 12 months and there is some serious catching up to do if you aren’t prepared. To remain competitive these days, brands need to engage with customers regularly. There is no shortage of opportunities for engagement, particularly across popular social platforms including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

Many brands are losing out on maximising their digital strategies as they’re not up to date with the latest changes. To drive engagement, businesses need to pursue digital strategies that start by leading conversations and setting customer expectations. They should also be providing opportunities for customers to lead the way, by sharing content that demonstrates thought-leadership and encourages the customers to comment, like and share it. This in turn drives more traffic to your website.

To help keep you up to date, here are 4 tips to revive your digital strategy this year:

Focus on optimising for mobile

Many businesses are still creating websites that fail to deliver a satisfying experience on mobile. With a growing majority of users browsing via mobile devices, your brand will suffer if you are not delivering a mobile-friendly experience across your site. Parallax sites are therefore becoming more popular, where the majority of content is on one single page, which can be navigated easily. This avoids the issue of text that is too small to read, and makes site navigation more user-friendly.

Google released its latest search algorithm on April 22nd, which ranks mobile-friendly websites higher in organic search results, and penalises websites that aren’t mobile-optimised. To avoid this, companies can check out Google’s mobile-friendly test, to trial run the mobile-readiness of their site.

What are your customers talking about?

If you would like to generate greater conversation with potential customers, keep your engagement straightforward and share relevant and valuable content. This will make them more likely to engage and share your content. The average attention span in the UK is becoming increasingly shorter and more fickle with the avalanche of content presented to us daily, so make sure that the content you’re sharing is concise and clear.

Ask for engagement

It doesn’t matter whether you’re providing information, asking for customers to sign up or promoting a product, your visitors and customers should almost immediately see and understand what is actually expected of them. This can be on your website or at the end of blogs as a call to action, suggesting a number to call to get in touch, or somewhere to find more information. It can also be across your social media and email campaigns, where you are able to share links to direct potential customers onto your website.

Use traditional techniques for better ROI

There are many businesses that feel that adding things like a mobile app to their digital strategy is important. The truth is that responsive design websites have actually removed the need for apps in some cases, and blurred the line between what can be done through a browser on mobile and an app.

Instead of focussing on high-cost strategies that are unnecessary, brands should look to leverage technologies and existing channels such as social media where there is little cost and high potential. Optimise your social platforms by adding badges, link, descriptions and a profile picture to increase visibility and engagement.

An effective digital strategy requires your time and effort, and managing it in-house can be difficult. Companies are often looking to implement a digital strategy, just to compete with competition. However, without the expertise to do this, businesses can waste a lot of time and resources. Outsourcing to a digital marketing company can help to keep costs down, whilst giving you the experience and expertise of an in-house team.

If you want to know more about how we can help you to revive your digital strategy in 2016, give one of the Iconic Digital team a call today on 020 7100 0726.

Author: Steve Pailthorpe – Follow us on Google+