As the new year starts, with it comes fresh energy so it’s a good time to focus on how your business is performing online. But where do you start? Here we’ve shared our checklist that we use to guide our own digital health. Use it to see where your digital challenges are and guide your goals for the coming year. Okay so let’s get started! 1. Business planning
- Make sure you have a business plan in place to help with your business growth. This is crucial to all your other strategies, regardless of whether they are digital or not.
- If you don’t have a business plan, make sure you work with someone to write one, or write one yourself.
- Use your business plan to set out the goals and objectives for your business over the next 12, 24 and 36 months.
- Check back with your goals and compare your current business achievements against your benchmarks.
2. Digital strategy
- Do you have a digital strategy guiding your online presence?
- Have you updated your digital strategy to match your business plan and your marketing plan?
- Are you managing your digital strategy solo or have you considered recruiting more staff to manage this part of your business?
3. Your website
- Do you have a website for your business?
- Does your current website meet the needs of your business or organisation? Eg: is it easy to update and is it still ‘fit for purpose’? Does it do what you need it to do?
- Does the tone of your website appeal to all your customers, key stakeholders, partners and funding bodies?
- If you could improve your website, what areas would you focus on?
4. Increasing revenue
- Have you considered selling online to gain more revenue from your website?
- If you have considered ecommerce, did you know you can sell digital products or ‘virtual’ services as well? Some things you can sell are online courses, podcasts, ebooks or premium content.
- If your website already sells online, are your sales healthy? To gauge how your sales are doing have you done any split testing or conversion optimisation to see how well your site is converting?
- Have you considered selling advertising on your website?
5. Building your online audience
- Does your current marketing plan include online marketing?
- What kind of SEO (search engine optimisation) or SEM (search engine marketing) are you using and are you seeing growth in your audience?
- Is your website converting visitors into leads?
- Are you using your website’s blog to increase your audience and add value to your brand?
- What kind of email marketing are you using – if any?
- Are you tracking your audience with analytics tools like Google Analytics?
6. Social media
- What social media profiles are used most by your audience?
- Do you have an active social media profile in these preferred spaces?
- Are you happy with how your brand is performing in these spaces? Are you getting much engagement?
- If you don’t use social media for business, what are your reasons for this?
7. Branding
- Does your business have clear brand guidelines?
- How cohesive is your branding across your website, social media and marketing channels?
- Does your brand still reflect your business?
- How is your brand performing amongst comparative brands?
Use these questions as a guide in your next strategy session, and before you get overwhelmed, remember Rome wasn’t built in a day so prioritise and delegate. Use S.M.A.R.T goals (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Timely). If you need to talk to someone about the state of your online presence, get in touch with us and we can help you find a strategy that works for you.
