Writing about what you know

They say to write about what you know, so having worked for nearly 21 years, across eight different industries, in internal website teams that have been responsible for running more than ten large corporate websites, I figured that I should probably write about that! If you work in a digital team within an organisation, then you'll already know all of this already (do tweet me and let me know about your thoughts & experiences and how they might differ) but if you're in a business where you've taken on running your website yourself, or you rely on an external company to manage it for you, or if you have no experience and you're trying to understand how to make your business 'more digital', then this is aimed at you.

It's obvious to everyone that websites, and the digital world in general, have massively increased in importance over the last 25 years so I'm not going to waste your time telling you about that; however, from the outside, the exact activities that happen to sustain this growth may not be as obvious.

Forgetting apps and websites for now, you'll know that at the most basic level, the core concerns for any product or service that your business might offer are that it needs to work, look right and make sense financially. This will differ from industry to industry; a self-employed gas engineer will be making sure that the work they do is of good quality and safe (it works, and legally), the customer gets the right experience (the engineer is easy to get hold of, arrived on time, works tidily) and the price charged is fair for both the customer and the engineer. If you're building millions of cars at scale it's the same - your vehicles have to do the job of a vehicle, look right and be priced right. Yes, that is extremely simplified!

The online world may seem a bit of a mystery but is in reality no different. There are some famous case studies of digital businesses ignoring these fundamentals of business and getting it very, very wrong. The financial aspect is broadly the same as in any business, but in digital business, we tend to describe the 'does it work' concern as 'back-end', and the 'does it look right' as 'front-end' - terms taken from software engineering.

And that is, at the simplest level, how you can categorise almost every activity that happens behind the scenes on a large corporate website. A non-exhaustive list of the activities are listed below, and it's worth noting that these are almost always on-going activities that never stop. There will be very few, if any, large corporate websites that are built and remain unchanged for much longer than a day or two.

That's great, but what can I learn from this as a small or medium business?

The most important thing to take away from reading this article is that all the activities above are constantly on-going. The financial side may be more obvious, but many large businesses will have teams of people focussing on each of the front-end and back-end items each and every day to ensure the site is operating as effectively as possible.

In order to maximise their efficiency, effectiveness and profitability these giant sites have to be constantly refreshed and kept up to date and relevant to their target markets and audiences.

Don't think though that in order to have a successful website, you'll need to start employing lots of people to make sure all these things are looked after. Many good web design & development agencies will be able manage the technical back-end and some of the technical front-end aspects for you. The thing is, they don't know your customers like you do, and they may not be familiar with the market you operate in.

With all this in mind, and if you're running a website for your business, or re-evaluating the opportunities that online might bring to your business, I've picked these Top 3 activities as the things that you should be doing to ensure your business is as successful online as it can be without you needing a whole new team of people:

Written and visual content
You know your business best, and you know your customers best. As I said at the start, write about what you know - talk to your customers online about what you do, how you do it, why you do it. Take some time to think about what you do for customers, why they like you and what feedback they've given. Use this as the basis to explain to new visitors the reasons why they should engage with you. Remember, unless they already know you, they're not going to be interested in whether you're the best, biggest or No.1 in whatever....they just want to find someone that can help them, so talk directly to that need instead. You can tell them about all of your awards later. Make sure your content, written or otherwise, is always up to date, relevant, fresh and communicates to your users in the way that they want, not how you think they want to hear it.

Testing & optimisation
In order to get your content right, I can't recommend getting into the habit of trying different things with your users enough. You will learn a lot. In most of my roles in the past, I've made assumptions about how I think users will want to use whatever website I was working on at the time. And then I went to visit them and discovered what they actually need it to do. Even if your website doesn't sell anything directly and acts only as a way for you to be found, go and ask customers why they are looking for businesses like you and how they do it. You may find the answers surprising - do you even need a website? I'll tackle that one next week....

Try different versions of your content, change it, get it to the point where most people that see it say that it makes sense. Then try the same with how the site works; if the one thing you want your users to do most is to send you an email, do you know how many of your site visitors are willing to or want to do this? Or how many potential customers you could be losing because they don't want to go to the effort of writing an email? You don't email an online supermarket with your order.

As consumers have become increasingly used to using the internet to get jobs done, they are accustomed to using the big online services like banks, supermarkets and you-know-who, the big rainforest. They will not expect to have to adapt their behaviours when using smaller websites, so the more you can do to make life easier for them, the better for you. And the best way to work this out is to keep testing different approaches. If it's really important for you to have messages via email, fine, but don't insist that potential customers have to open their email software to do this - give them a form to complete on your website that can be emailed to you automatically.

In short, work out what the one thing you want your visitors to do is, make that as easy as possible, and then keep checking that it's what your users want. Then do it all again to keep improving it.

Digital, marketing and product strategy
Perfecting your content and testing & optimising how your site works is great, but you also need to know what your goals are for the website. If you want a positive return on investment in digital, then like the large companies, you need to set your objectives, work out how you can reach them, and find the best solutions. Imagine if you and your closest competitor both launch new websites at the same time, and you take the approach of "great, that's done, now I can get on with running my business and more customers will come to me because I have a new website." whereas your competitor has a strategy to take them from launch to 30% more customer leads in the first 6 months, and keeps working on changes to the site throughout the first 6 months to make sure they get there. I think you know the outcome.

There's no one-size fits all digital strategy, it will be unique to your business. Rather than write about hypothetical digital strategy here, if it's something you need help with or would like to know more about, it is much better to have that conversation in the context of your own business. Do get in touch even if it's just for a chat to learn more. Abingdon Digital can offer digital product management services on a consultancy, part-time or full-time contract basis and would be happy to be a part of helping your business to grow in the digital world.