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Michael Sanders

3 Ways Businesses Are Changing Their Marketing Due To COVID-19

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Everyone has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but we know that many small and medium sized businesses are feeling particularly vulnerable right now. Brick-and-mortar retailers are looking for new ways to sell amidst a number of physical challenges; doctor’s offices are looking to assuage doubts about in-person visits; and online businesses want to attract new customers. 

Whatever your situation, a half-year of varied customer responses to COVID-19 have given us some insights into the marketing trends that are working and what to expect in 2020 — and beyond. While we all know consumers have shifted more online, businesses need to structure their marketing teams to best tap into that traffic, communicate more effectively, and ensure that social media gets increased attention.  

Marketing Goes Digital

The most obvious marketing response prompted by COVID-19 has been the acceleration of digital. Stay-at-home orders, physical distancing, and remote work & school have changed the way consumers shop and interact. Naturally, businesses are shifting how they attract new clients and retain long-time ones. Deloitte outlines four marketing keys for organizations to make the shift a smooth transition:

  • Keep Your Team Connected – Ensure your team has the resources needed to effectively communicate and coordinate with each other and customers 
  • Engage Customers with Unified Empathy – Listen to your customer and ensure the interactions they are having with your brand are consistent across channels
  • Personalize Digital Experiences – Now is the time shift resources into digital techniques such as remarketing ads to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time
  • Optimize Marketing Resources – Now more than ever, you need analytics experts in your corner to ensure you’re leveraging the wealth of information at your fingertips

Especially when engaging with potential clients, you need to create personalized journeys across the channels and in the settings that they are now using. For example, in recent months, we have seen a sharp reversal in the trend away from mobile devices as at-home users move back to desktop. Without a careful adjustment to your SEO strategy, your website might have the wrong focus, leading to lost customers. You also need to carefully consider how your customers can and will interact with your business. As customers expect a seamless experience, your service channels must deliver a consistent message to maintain loyalty.

Communicate Availability

According to McKinsey, the availability of products and services is the number one reason customers are switching their brand allegiance. For marketers, this means a number of things. The most obvious (if most difficult) tactic is to increase the days of inventory on-hand of products or the availability of time slots for services. With more people working from home and many kids learning remotely, some physicians and doctors offices with whom we work have reconsidered staffing toward more daytime slots and fewer night and weekend hours.   

McKinsey Trends 2020

But what if the overseas lead time for your products precludes increasing stock levels? This is where timely communication is paramount. Depending on industry, we’ve seen returning traffic increases of up to 1200% in the months following the COVID-19 pandemic, as users return again and again to a website. For high-volume items, consider placing a banner on your cite to indicate when the product will be in-stock. If you aren’t collecting customer emails, now is the perfect time to create a subscriber list so that you can be proactive with notifying customers of availability.  

Social Holds The Key To 2021

Organizations should be prepared to dedicate more resources to social media marketing in 2020 and beyond. Social media budgets accounted for almost one-quarter of total US marketing budgets this summer, up from 13% this winter. During the pandemic, marketers are increasingly making customer retention a priority. Presented with a list of 5 objectives and asked to choose their primary one, more than twice as many marketing leaders pointed to customer retention (32.6%) as acquisition (14%).

And the primary method businesses are using to engage and retain is social media. Your customers are looking for ways to interact with others in a social-distanced world; to connect with others and even to be distracted from everything that’s going on. Social media is the perfect platform for brands to engage with customers in this way and create opportunities for now and into the future. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn can help you start and maintain meaningful conversations with your most important assets.

Toward Marketing In 2021

Being prepared for the post-COVID world means setting up your marketing and customer service teams for success, communicating more effectively, and ensuring that you’re having good conversations with your clients and leads. Stop wasting valuable resources on pre-pandemic tactics — re-allocate your marketing spend to attract and engage the right customers, in the right place, at the right time. If you still have questions, contact DaBrian Marketing Group today.

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5 Signs You’re Attracting The Wrong Customers — And How To Fix It

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5 Signs Wrong Customers Reading PA

Understanding your ideal customer(s) is paramount to your digital marketing success and the growth of your business. Many organizations attract the wrong type of website traffic, leads, and clients. Narrowing your focus and refining your buyer personas will help you stop wasting valuable resources on the wrong types of people and enable you to bring in more ideal customers for your business.

One key factor is to ensure you are targeting not your current customers, but the customers that will drive your business forward. Chances are, you are attracting more potential clients who will not be profitable or engaged. In this article, we examine five signs that your business is attracting the wrong customers — and how to fix the underlying issues so that you bring on more of the clients your business wants in 2020.

1. You Still Haven’t Defined Your Customers

If you still haven’t defined your current and ideal customers and shared that knowledge among your employees, you’re firing blind. The most critical attribute to discover about your customers is their buying intent. Knowing why the people who buy your goods and services chose your product or service is paramount to understanding both what is driving the marketplace and your key differentiator within it.

2. You Haven’t Defined Yourself

If you truly believe in something, someone will probably disagree with you and get upset. And that’s ok. If you aren’t upsetting anyone, it’s likely that your brand is so vanilla that it doesn’t mean much of anything, to anyone. It’s impossible to gain the vocal champions you need among clients to spread the word about your business if you don’t stand for anything. Your goal should be to have a clear vision and mission statement and attract clients that share your values. Check out our blog to learn how to find your brand voice.

3. You Compete Primarily On Price

There are only a few valid ways to compete — and if you are Walmart, go ahead and compete on price. Are you Walmart? I didn’t think so. If you don’t have the lowest cost structure and compete on price, eventually you’ll go out of business. That’s just how numbers work. Stop chasing low value clients who prompt you to do 80% of the work but 20% of the profits. The ones worth your while aren’t the ones who talk about price until you’ve established your value. And once you’ve established your value, you have the flexibility to charge more. It’s really that simple.

4. You Don’t Do Enough Discovery During Sales & On-Boarding

Before your marketing team can effectively do anything, they need to intimately understand the pain points and goals of your new clients. If your customer service, project management, and/or salespeople don’t have the right tools or exert enough effort to have a firm grasp on the motivations of new customers, it will be next-to-impossible for your marketing team to consistently deliver value-driven solutions.  

5. You Have A Disorganized Sales & Marketing Process

If your company doesn’t continue to put energy into re-establishing your brand, over and over again, you will find that your brand value erodes over time. A disorganized brand will attract disorganized clients, and that spells death for your business. You want a firm brand (again, it’s ok to alienate some folks) that evokes a belief in everyone on your team — and by extension, it will evoke a belief in the people with whom you want to work.

Fixing The Issue

Now that we’ve established the “wrong” customers, how do you go about attracting the right customers? Everything boils down to a strategy that aligns your brand, profit model, and target buyer persona with each other. Try these three fixes for starters:

  • Create Your Target Persona 

Note: the operative word here is “target”. That means you need to stop being all things to all people. You have to drill down and discern what is the core audience your business aims to serve. It may be a role, an industry, or a service — it might even be some combination of all three. Either way, focus on a narrow niche and get to know it better than anyone else in your market. That will lend credibility to your offering and allow you to earn a better profit for your services (see below). Here is a previous article to help get you started on writing to target personas. 

  • Create Your Profit Model

When businesses attract the wrong types of customers, it’s often due to a bad pricing strategy. If you price too low, you’re going to attract bargain shoppers who bleed your time and resources. We are not advocating that you overcharge: we’re just saying you should reframe your business and brand story so that it focuses on the value that you can bring to customers. Sell them on your unique ability to solve their problem and you’ll be surprised what they’re willing to pay. 

  • Create The Right Story

Your brand narrative acts as a beacon to attract and retain the right (or wrong) types of customers. Creating the right story typically involves the following elements: 

  • Distill your core values and your brand purpose
  • Create a mission statement if you don’t have one
  • Dig deep to understand why you started the business in the first place 
  • Find elements that make your brand unique

When telling your story, try and visualize the ideal customers. Craft your story to appeal to them. Introduce story elements that would filter out customers that are wrong for your business. For this, you need to go back to the buyer persona creation step.

Wrapping it Up

Being prepared for the post-COVID world means knowing whether you are attracting the right — or the wrong — customers, and why. Understanding where you’re going wrong from among the five common errors is a start. From there, narrowing your focus and refining your buyer personas will help you stop wasting valuable resources on the wrong types of people and enable you to bring in more ideal customers for your business. If you still have questions, contact DaBrian Marketing Group Today.

Our Commitment to Clients During COVID-19

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During these unprecedented times we wanted to provide an update and communicate suggestions to our valued business partners. We hope these recommendations can both help you proactively manage your own clients in the coming weeks and emerge from this challenge well-positioned for growth.

DaBrian Marketing Is Here For You

Pursuant to Governor Wolf’s recent order, we have closed our physical location on Blair Street. However, each member of the DaBrian team is working regular business hours from his/her respective home office to ensure the timely completion of all client deliverables. Besides regular, monthly project work, we also want to help you stay top-of-mind with your own customers.

FAQs to Communicate To Your Clients

Here are some suggested topics to communicate to your client base as it relates to modifications your business has implemented due to COVID-19:

  • Are you open for business as usual?
  • Has your offering changed?
  • Have your business hours changed?
  • Do you have a product? When do you restock?
  • Have you added/changed deliveries?
  • If closed, how will you keep in touch with clients?
  • How can you use Facebook live and social ads and posts?
  • Do you have a special offer/price on product or service?

How to Reach Your Customers

Consider the different media you may need to employ to get the answers to the questions above detailed to your customers. This could include an update to your local listings, a banner ad or resource/FAQ page on your website, social media posts, and/or an email communication. We can help with both strategy and marketing execution for any required channel. Finally, don’t forget non-digital communication such as brochures, signage, and other forms of advertising.  

Think Differently About Marketing

We have already had a couple of clients reach out about using this “down time” to redesign their website. You may have wanted to start a blog but didn’t have the time until now. Or maybe you want to try to build a Twitter following for your business. Don’t be afraid to think differently and take the opportunity to try something new with your marketing. 

Options For The Coming Weeks

As your marketing needs are in flux during this challenging time, we will be happy to use existing support hours and/or reallocate hours from other contracted projects (ex: from PPC to design, SEO to content, etc.) as requested. We are also amenable to incremental content & design projects to lay the foundation for growth once the crisis abates. Feel free to reach out to the team directly with any questions or concerns.

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5 Steps To Find The Right Digital Marketing Agency

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A great digital marketing agency can increase traffic to your website, leads to your sales reps, and revenues for your business. For example, an agency with expertise in running paid ad campaigns can refine your Google Ads targeting so that your business earns $2 in revenue for every $1 spent. But how do you know when a digital marketing agency is the right fit to work with you and your team? Here are five steps to find the right one.

Find the Right Digital Marketing Agency in Reading, PA

1. Check Out The Agency’s Digital Marketing Assets

A good agency should practice what they preach. Are you interested in updating your stale website and hiring someone for ongoing SEO management? Search for and review the agency’s own website. If they are using best-practices, the site should rank high on the first page of Google results. Their website should be user-friendly, current, and function smoothly on mobile devices. If you are hiring them for inbound marketing, do they employ a strong inbound marketing strategy, themselves? The site should possess a simple navigation structure, feature an active and relevant blog series, and contain professionally written service pages that prompt clear calls-to-action from users. 

2. Research Their Marketing Team

I am going to let you in on a dirty industry secret: most local marketing agencies now outsource over 40% of their client work. Every business hires specialists or offloads work during busy periods. After all, that is probably why you are researching marketing agencies right now, yourself. But are you really paying an agency $100-an-hour just to have them turn around and have a freelancer who doesn’t know your business, do it for $5? I didn’t think so.

Team work fist pump

The digital marketing agency should have a team page that is easy to find and outlines each individual’s competencies. Investigating a company for Google Ads that doesn’t list a paid search consultant on-staff? That’s a red flag that some of the info you convey to the agency will get lost-in-translation by the time it gets to their third-party partner. That will impact the effectiveness of your ads and how those ads align with the branding and messaging of all of your other marketing collateral. Work with a local agency with real people that intimately know your industry and your business.  

3. Investigate the Agency’s Tools and Credentials

That digital marketing team should display diverse talents and deep areas of expertise. They should use industry-leading tools and make it easy for you to validate that they have experience using them. If their website doesn’t display their credentials, ask to see them! Here are a few leading platforms to familiarize yourself with prior to beginning your agency search:

  • Website Performance: Google Analytics
  • Inbound Marketing: Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot
  • Email Marketing: Hubspot, Mailchimp
  • Social Media: Hootsuite, Sproutsocial
  • SEO: SEMrush, Moz
  • Paid Search: WordStream, Optmyzr

Agencies that are willing to pay for and learn how to use the best industry tools will usually deliver the best marketing results for your business. They will stay up-to-date on platform capabilities via ongoing training — so you don’t have to.

4. Determine If Their Price Delivers a Positive Marketing ROI

You like their work and their team — now what? It’s time to determine if the value they can deliver will be worth the cost. According to a recent HubSpot survey, the average digital marketing contract can set a small business back anywhere from $500 to $10,000 (or more) per month, depending on how many services are required and the project scope. For most small businesses, that is a huge commitment.

Source: Hubspot

That means whatever agency you work with should have a plan to help you make this value determination. The best way to do this is by tracking all of the traffic, leads, and conversions they generate. If they don’t have a plan for this, don’t sign the contract! Without one, you’ll have no way to know if all of the money you’re spending is worth it.

Your agency should be able to look at your current state and determine how much they can increase your brand awareness, prospects, and/or sales. From there, you should agree upon a unique value for each metric so that you can determine the ROI, or return-on-investment. You should calculate this number overall and for each service channel, individually. This will allow your budget dollars to be more effectively allocated toward higher-performing channels down the road. This process is as much an art as a science, but at the end of the day, the exercise will give you a clue into how wisely you will be spending your marketing dollars.

5. To Find The Right Marketing Agency Ensure Your Work Cultures Align

The final step is often overlooked in the agency search process. Your digital marketing agency will be working closely with your team for a long time (hopefully) so it is critical that their work culture aligns with yours. We have clients that want their hands held through every step of the process. We also have others that just want the bottom line at the end of the month. Neither is right or wrong, but your agency should be able to meet your expectations — not the other way around!

Check out some of their clients. Are any in your industry? As the first digital marketing agency in Reading, PA, we have the experience to recognize that how we work with our financial services clients needs to be very different than how we work with our clients in manufacturing or healthcare. Do your homework, ask around, and make sure the values at the prospective digital marketing agency reflect your own values. And if after all of that you still have questions, we are always here to chat!

Schedule a meeting to talk about how we can be the best digital marketing agency for you.

Developing a 2020 Content Marketing Plan for Your Bank or Credit Union

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You’ve heard it before: content is king. In 2020, the digital marketing landscape will reinforce this adage more than ever. As Google’s algorithms increasingly rank pages with relevant information higher in its organic search results and users gravitate toward brands they trust, quality content can help savvy marketers stand out from the competition.

Educational content, specifically, is the tool through which banks and credit unions can engage with potential customers. In fact, one study by Powered Inc. suggests that consumers who receive educational content are 29 times more likely to enlist the provider’s services compared to traditional advertising. This means that educational content can help you drive new customers, increase the number of loan applications received, and improve the bottom-line.

But where should you begin with your own content makeover? Though the 2008 financial crisis is now more than a decade behind us, banks and credit unions are still struggling to win back trust. The non-profit Association of Retirement Plan Participants found that only 8% of those surveyed had faith in their financial institutions—down 5% from the previous year. Offering value to your current and prospective account-holders—such as financial education—can help re-establish and build trust, as well as engage consumers in a more lasting way than other marketing approaches.

At DaBrian Marketing Group, we leverage a simple approach that guides our clients through a four-step process for their content makeovers:

  1. Via an initial audit we determine what digital and physical marketing resources the institution currently possesses – and what still needs to be developed.
  2. Second, a careful examination of consumer buying stages helps to prioritize the content materials that will move the needle on larger business objectives in the short-, medium-, and long-term.
  3. Next, we consider the content that has to be revised or created based on our audit and an understanding of potential customers.
  4. Finally, we set the groundwork to distribute existing and new assets to the right people, at the right time, using the right channels.

It can seem overwhelming when first getting started, but what follows will guide your bank or credit union through an effective content audit, creation, and distribution process in 2020. Following this plan will help you generate more traffic, loan applications, and ultimately – revenue.

Starting Your Content Audit

Content Audit - Take a close look at your existing content

Your content audit should start with an inventory of the marketing resources you already possess. To do this, create a checklist of haves and be sure to include the created by and modified by dates. We find that our bank and credit union customers often have resources (especially printed collateral) that is so outdated that it’s more efficient to start afresh. Note: your content audit checklist should include BOTH your digital resources and your in-branch assets! Here are some specific content types to consider to get you started:

In-Branch Assets

Flyers
Brochures
Guides
Worksheets
Screens
Articles
Surveys
Info graphics

Digital Assets

Website
White Papers
eBooks
Apps
Videos
Quizzes
Blogs
Podcasts
Calculators

As you move through the information, consider the kind of content each of your marketing personas might best engage with. Infographics and interactive online and mobile content might resonate better with Millennials, for example, while in-branch editorial content might connect better with older consumers.

Appraise Your Customer Buying Stages

The process where your potential customers become aware of your financial institution, learn about it, and (hopefully!) engage with it is called the buyer’s journey. You’ll need to consider if you have content to help advance prospects through each stage of the buyer journey. Here’s what you need to know about each stage and the types of content that often work well at each step…

Buyer’s Journey - Use content to guide web visitors to become customer

Awareness – The initial stage of the journey begins when someone discovers your bank or credit union. Marketing assets might include blog posts, curated news content, and other fairly general materials that provide value to the prospect without mentioning your particular brand’s products or services.

Consideration – After becoming familiar with your institution, your audience may begin to consider it among other buying choices. Content created for this stage should still focus on financial education but you will want to begin interspersing brand elements so that your audience begins to consider you. Longer, deeper forms of content such as eBooks, videos, and webinars are often used during the consideration phase.

Decision – The final stage of the journey occurs when your audience values what you’re provided, trusts you, and considers your offering appropriate. At this point, your content should directly link to a sale: brochures, vendor comparisons, case studies, and trial offers may all be appropriate.

Revise and Create Appropriate Assets

Content Puzzle - Create/Modify content to fill in the missing pieces

Now that you know what you have and what you need to help prospects progress through the buyer’s journey you can begin revising and creating the assets you will need throughout the year. It is helpful to consider each phase in the journey – if you are short on time, produce some assets for each stage rather than completing all of one category at once. For example, if you intend to do a monthly blog series throughout the year, craft an outline for all 12 blogs but only set-out to immediately publish the 3 blogs needed for Q1. This will give your marketing team time to also produce content suited to later stages of the buyer journey. 

Also, remember that content marketing should be helpful, and not come across that you’re just trying to sell to the reader. Each piece of content should be measured against its ability to educate your audience, grow the value of your financial institution, and point your audience—once they’re ready—to the appropriate products and services. Think about ways to marry your business goals to your marketing goals through the lens of financial education. What can you teach your audience about credit scores, for example, that may later impact their adoption of your products and services?

Create a Content Distribution Plan

Targeted Marketing for Financial Services

After determining and creating your content needs, you’ll also need to begin thinking about how you’ll distribute the assets. You should also consider what assets you intend to “gate” – that is, locked behind a registration form. You trade valuable content (financial education, a tool, etc.) for valuable contact information (the prospect’s phone number or email address).

We recommend to most financial institutions with whom we work to gate content in consideration phase. Locking it in the awareness phase jumps the gun – these assets tend to be too general to have sufficient value to gain usable prospect info. By capturing an email address in the consideration phase, however, it gives you an opportunity to follow-up with tailored, personalized content in the decision phase. This will improve your conversion rate and allow you to better focus limited resources. Other distribution elements to consider:

Distribution Platforms – Select the websites, publications, and social platforms where your target audiences congregate. Which ones make the most sense for your brand? Do you have the marketing resources to appropriately manage interactions?

Distribution Process – Outline exactly what you want to have happen whenever an asset is created. The distribution process will be different for each marketing piece but the overarching principle is to repurpose as much as possible. Your team took the time to develop collateral so make sure it is promoted on as many platforms as possible. Turn a podcast into a blog, email the blog before sharing it on Facebook, and then send out Tweets of various stats and highlights from the blog.

Distribution Schedule – Finally, determine when you will disseminate content and how often you will publish and post it. You want to maintain a steady stream of material without overwhelming your followers. You also want to maintain space in your marketing calendar for news, breaking stories, and other unplanned assets.

Wrapping it Up

Being prepared for 2020, requires an assessment of your current content, both print and digital content. Make sure you have content that helps guide your current and future customers through your funnel from awareness through consideration until they make their decision. After that, you will know what content areas that will need to be created or recreated. Finally, determine how your content, print or digital, will reach your audience.  Going through these steps (as difficult or easy as they are) will ensure you are prepared to make 2020 a year of great content marketing. 

Looking for a bit more help keeping your content organized – try this Free Content Planner. Still have questions, contact DaBrian Marketing Group Today, while there is still time to prepare for 2020.

4 Fixes For Your (Painfully) Outdated Website

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Websites have advanced a lot in just a few short  years. In the ’90s, businesses simply aimed to set up online presences, resulting in an Internet full of electronic brochures. Since then, marketers have improved both the functionality and aesthetics of their websites. As a result, they’ve delivered a better experience to customers – and better outcomes for business owners.

The corollary for marketers is that with advances come heightened consumer expectations. Potential buyers increasingly need more from websites than basic transactions and facts about their favorite brands. They want to shop, learn, and play on their own terms, in a fun, user-friendly, and convenient format. Oh, and one more thing: they want all of that from their mobile devices, and they want it right now.

What Does This Mean For You?

It means that if your business hasn’t retooled its website in a while, you’re probably sending the wrong message to potential customers. And by sending the wrong message, we mean you’re losing customers to a competitor. Someone who is more fun, more user-friendly, more convenient, more mobile-responsive, and more “right now”.  Luckily for you, we’re willing to take the time to outline a few ideas to fix your painfully outdated website:

1. Clean Up Your Site

Fast Fact: “94% of negative feedback for websites is design related”

If you’re like most of our new clients, you can probably find everything you need on your own website. And if you’re like most of our new clients, your potential customers probably can’t find a thing. That’s because when you build up a website over time, you begin to lose the intended structure. Your page organization fails to highlight newly released product lines . Links lead to 404 errors. Posts get housed under random categories. For the business owner, it’s just part of a growing business. For maximizing your website traffic, it’s a mess.

The problem is that your site might make sense to you and your team (after all, you made the mess) but your audience is probably lost. So have a fresh set of eyes look over your website. Within 5 seconds of landing, can she tell exactly what your company does? Can she find the blog? Subscribe to the blog? Give her a product description to “purchase” – how long does it take her to find, view, and watch a product video? How many broken links and outdated bits of information did she encounter in her journey? If just imagining this scenario is painful, consider a (free) website audit to discover simple ways to clean up your site.  

2. Speed Up Page Load times

Fast Fact: “A 1 second delay correlates to a 7% reduction in conversions”

Customers no longer tolerate websites with slow load times. You can test the load times of pages and identify the bottlenecks with a number of online tools. You need these tools because your website is a lot slower than you think it is. You’re probably reading this blog on a desktop computer at work (i.e. you’ve got a fast, stable Internet connection). But how would it render on a spotty 3G connection? That’s where you might be losing the people who have better things to do than wait for your site to load.

Resist adding bandwidth-hogging (and annoying) features like videos or music that auto-load. Pick and choose design elements that highlight product features and engage readers – without slowing down your site. That amazing copy you wrote can only sell your product or service if the page renders. And if you have a hero video, 13 images and myriad design elements on the home page, readers never get that far. The best thing you can do is keep your landing page(s) simple. If a reader finds that landing pages take too long to load, that reader is probably going to hit the back button and shop with a competitor, instead.

3. Make It Mobile Friendly

Fast Fact: “57% of all US online traffic comes from smartphones”

How does your site look on a smartphone screen? Here’s one better: how does your site look on an iPhone X compared to an iPhone 6? If you don’t know the answer to those questions, you’re taking a big risk with your website. Customers increasingly rely on mobile devices for browsing. Many of our clients now get over 60% of their traffic from mobile channels. That means that whether browsing, shopping, or scheduling, your customers are probably doing it from their phones.

A mobile-friendly website is crucial to convert these users. Either have your site professionally redesigned for mobile or use one of the many responsive templates out there for WordPress, SquareSpace, or Weebly. Our design and marketing teams can review your bounce rates in Google Analytics (because you DO have Google Analytics code on your site, right?) to tell you what pages to focus on. Next, consider your contact us, make an appointment, and other lead generation forms. We haven’t even seen them yet but I bet they are too long, too free-form, and too hard to complete on a small screen.

Your best bet is to work with a digital agency that adheres to a mobile-first philosophy. The old practice of designing a website for desktop and then tweaking it for the mobile experience, later,  is no longer good enough. Ask your current design team for their thoughts on accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) for your site. (If their answer at any point includes a blank stare, contact webdesign@dabrianmarketing.com).

Accelerated mobile pages are part of an open source initiative that allows developers to create web pages that load quickly on mobile browsers. If your website has a lot of different stories, products, and articles combined with high (or volatile) website traffic, AMP functionality could greatly improve your performance on mobile devices. 

4. Refresh Your CMS

Fast Fact: “82% of customers have a more positive view of a company after reading custom content”

If you’re still relying on your website designer to update content on your site, you’re already behind the competition. Your marketing team should be able to add information to your site through an easy-to-use content management system (CMS), like WordPress. You should have multiple portions of your site updated regularly with current news, upcoming events, and recent blog posts to ensure that new traffic becomes repeat traffic.

Get more value from your CMS by implementing a process to review and update leading plug-ins. Plugs-ins are bits of software that can be uploaded to expand the functionality of your site. If you can imagine a way to extend and enhance your site, someone else probably has, too. And there is probably a plug-in to accomplish it.

Finally, grant multiple people the ability to post custom content. You can assign some to create content and others to review and approve it before it goes live. You can also outsource work to contractors, giving them limited rights to partitioned areas of your site. It takes a little bit of time and effort to get the most from your CMS, but in the end, the timeliness of content and ease of updates ensure a better experience for prospects, customers, and marketers alike. 

Wrapping It Up

The user experience needs to be the forefront of your thought process when updating your website. It needs to be a friendly, smooth-sailing, information-packed adventure that leads prospects toward a conversion. Having an updated site can make all the difference between “I don’t have time for this” and “I’m ready to checkout”.

Once you’ve refreshed your site, set a few dates to review it each year. Keep an eye on other websites and note the things they’re doing that you’d like to see on your own site. Pay attention to the way other companies interact with their customers through their websites, and emulate the best practices that might work for your business. Sooner or later, the competition may even start to emulate you.

Using the information provided here will give you insight and a starting point to fix your outdated website. But if you need a more comprehensive plan to update your business’s website, reach out to our team to discuss our free site audit process.

In the meantime, we love a good laugh, so feel free to share your frustrations with outdated websites. Tell us about it in the comments below!