Without an online presence of your service or product, doing a business today might cost you a lot of time, money and energy. So you got yourself a new shiny HTML5 website, created your Facebook fan page, published few blog posts and now cannot wait till you see it all paying off.
Let me jump in.
With all these efforts you’ve certainly done a great job and placed one of the essential cornerstones for the success of your business, but it’s not the website, Facebook fan page or an app itself that can make a mark on your revenue streams. In fact, seeing your ROI, unfortunately, requires constant further engagement with these digital tools.
This means having a solid digital strategy which includes knowledge about new technologies and trends as well as profound research about your target audience.
How to get your investment working harder and more efficient? Reach out for a consultant!
What can a consultant help you with?
A digital consultant is a person who figures out how and where your business should exist and operate digitally in order to maximise your profit.
Whereas a developer can sure build you a site, a web designer will make it look good, and a copywriter makes it ‘sound’ good, a digital consultant can adjust all these efforts and turn them into a perfect fit for your business goals.
Things change at an increasingly fast pace when it comes to the digital world and what works just alright today can have an optimized, much more efficient alternative tomorrow. Digital consultant is the one who keeps an eye exactly on these changes and new trends, and with knowing a little bit about your business, he can come up with a tailored-made digital strategy for your company.
What does this include?
Research of your competitors
A good advisory starts with knowing what your competitors are doing and having ideas on what you should do to do it better or different.
A digital consultant will conduct a competitive research to see where your top competitors are investing their money in and give you information about whether it is worth for you to keep pace with them or pursue your own path. It could be that they’re trying to figure it out themselves, and so they’re jumping from one new technology or platform to another.
With hiring an expert, you are gaining a partner who will lead you through existing opportunities and help you to choose right.
Website design and development
Although building websites is a specific domain requiring a solid amount of programming skills, digital consultants often prove themselves being very valuable also here.
Keeping an eye on the new trends enables a consultant to advise on the web design, the way how to structure your content, navigation and creating a seamless user experience for your customers.
Marketing your website
Having a good looking website won’t ensure people will come and familiarise themselves with your product or offer. It’d be similar to hoping that a new coat on its own would get you, new friends. A consultant’s job is to make the most of your investment, and digital marketing is a huge part of his duties.
So what’s in the package?
Why should you find one, too?
To sum up, a digital consultant is the person who keeps a track of all the important new developments in the online world that may have an impact on your business and thus takes a great deal of workload off your shoulders. He’s the one who translates these new trends into an extensive and long-term digital marketing strategy, points out new revenue streams and set the priorities.
Last but not least, hiring a digital consultant is an excellent opportunity how to gain a valued partner to share your business plans and dreams with. It happens that small business owners feel alone in the world from time to time, and it often feels psychologically satisfying to have someone working collaboratively with you and helping you grow your business. Thinking of giving it a try? Get in touch and let’s talk about where you would like to take your business next.
1. Online Marketing
One of the easiest and most efficient ones is reaching out to your target group via online advertisements.
There are a couple of formats you can opt for (especially Google AdWords, Twitter and Facebook Ads) and all of them allow you to set specific preferences and target your ideal customer profile by identifying her age, gender, location or interests ( target audience ).
A good consultant will guide you through the process and help your message to get in front of the right people at the right time.
2. SEO
Similarly, a digital consultant will help your website by picking right keywords, optimising links structure, image names to advising on content strategy. SEO combined with well-targeted online ads can significantly increase the chances of being found by your potential customers.
3. E-mail Marketing
Another part of a comprehensive online marketing strategy is e-mail marketing. Whereas many of you may think that e-mail is being pushed aside as people seem to rely heavily on social media channels, you should know that in 2014 there were 3 times more e-mail accounts than social media accounts.
A good digital consultant will help you set up an optimal frequency of these e-mail, inspire you on the content ideas and eventually suggest a software that will efficiently consolidate your customer database and automate the sending-out of the e-mails in case your database is way too big.
4. Social Media
Even though there seem to be more e-mail accounts, social media is a powerful tool that just cannot be ignored in today’s digital marketing strategies.
There are various ways how to use these channels for the growth of your business, and the truth is we’ve seen a lot successful as well as less successful efforts.
Hiring a digital consultant will help you understand which platforms that are the best for the demographics you want to target, what is the digital tone of voice that suits your target group the most or what are the best time-slots for reaching out. Once all of the above steps are executed, you shouldn’t forget to have a look at the performance of each of them, so you can identify those steps that are worth pursuing as well as those that need to be optimized.
A good digital consultant will suggest you tools for analyzing the traffic to your website and your social media reach as well as guide you through the results .
