How Responsive Website Design Can Take Your Business Forward

It is easy to understand this concept even if you don’t have special technical knowledge. The idea behind responsive design is to make the website usable across all connected devices. It responds to the environment created by the hardware to make viewing and interaction comfortable, pleasant and productive.
Simply put, the website is equally easy to view and to use on desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets. What value can it bring to a business? Let me answer this question from the point of view of an experienced web development consultant.

Cost Efficiency
With global mobile web traffic already surpassing desktop traffic, it has become perfectly clear that there is no way back – mobile is here to stay. If businesses want to keep up with the trends and stay competitive, their website has to be optimised for mobile. It is possible to have a mobile website in addition to your existing one. This option typically requires a smaller initial investment. However, it is not cost-efficient as you will have to invest in the search engine optimisation, marketing, maintenance and future development of two different platforms. Furthermore, content duplication issues may occur and you can be severely penalised for this by Google.
With responsive website design, you will be able to focus your effort and investment on a single platform. You can expect higher return since the platform will continue to work effectively for all of your marketing and other business purposes in the long term.

Improved Visibility
Since April 2015, Google has been giving priority to websites which are optimised for mobile devices. This means that responsive website design has now become fundamental for SEO and digital marketing in general. If you want your optimisation efforts from content creation to link building to pay off, you will need to have a website which is equally functional on all mobile devices. With higher search engine rankings, your website will have more qualified leads and this will help for increasing the rate of conversion.

Higher Conversion
Eventually, it all boils down to sales and revenue and responsive design can help to improve both. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, mobile is becoming an ever more important channel for generating information and social sharing. With a website optimised for smartphones and tablets, you and your products and services will get found more easily and quickly not only via the search engines, but via the social networks too.
Around half of all online shoppers use multiple devices to make a transaction. For instance, they may find a cool product on their tablet and then buy it later on via their desktop computer. Additionally, one in four e-commerce sales is now made via a smartphone. These statistics come to prove that responsive design is necessary not only for gaining new customers, but for keeping existing ones.
As mentioned in the beginning, the core purpose of this design is to improve user experience. When the user enjoys satisfactory experience, the chance of sale increases by two thirds. You will not have to worry about missing to capture a prospect customer because your website is difficult to navigate with gestures or slow to load on mobile devices.

Become even more competitive with responsive design for your business website.

You already have a vision for your business’s responsive website? Share it with me.

Key Factors for Developing a Successful Digital Strategy

Just over ten years ago, the web was viewed as just one of the marketing channels available to businesses. Now it is a powerful platform not only for promotions, but for direct sales. How effective are your digital marketing efforts? If they are not organised in a whole digital strategy with clearly set objectives, then you are most probably losing money as well as prospects. But how do you create a strategy that works? As an experienced digital consultant, I’d like to take you through the primary steps which have to be taken.

Analysis and Goal Setting
It is important to approach the development of a digital strategy in the same way as the creation of a business plan. It all begins with analysing your strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and threats in the digital environment. Given how dynamic this environment is, you need to identify your competitive advantage and come up with a strong value proposition.
Millions of people in the UK alone use the web, but it is neither effective nor cost-efficient to target all of them. One of the first steps to take is to define your target audience using precise demographics. This will help for the development of your website and its content and for the choice and utilisation of digital marketing channels later on.
You have to define precise goals that you want to achieve with your digital strategy. The key thing is for them to be measurable. You should focus on traffic, conversion rates, sales and revenues.

Digital Channel Selection
It is a common misconception that you can focus solely on two or three digital marketing channels. This is because they are all connected just like everything on the web today. Due to the numerous changes in the algorithms of Google in recent years, driving organic traffic to a business website has become more challenging and requires a great amount of effort to be put in content creation. PPC campaigns still have high return on investment, especially thanks to Google AdWords.
Content marketing is essential for promotion and should ideally be spread to a variety of social media. Social media marketing can be used not only for driving traffic and conversion, but for creating engagement and building loyalty. This is where its strength lies. Email marketing remains one of the most effective and dependable digital channels allowing you to capture and convert high-quality leads.

Planning and Scheduling
Once you have the big picture, it is time to come up with the actual plans to follow. It is up to you to decide on the period which is to be covered by a single plan. It depends on your individual business operations. For many companies, the three-month plans work well given the dynamics of the online business environment.
The decision on the number and types of digital marketing campaigns which will be carried out during the year should never be underestimated. In addition to those for new product launches, you may want to boost sales during traditional low periods or to increase your revenue during the holiday season. Advance planning combined with flexibility will give you the best chances of success.

It’s time to start creating your digital strategy for the coming periods. Count on me to help you at every step of the way.

Need an experienced digital consultant to help you with developing your digital strategy? Email me or send a message online.