findgeelong.com.au
MARCH 2021 | FIND GEELONG
21
Weathering the storm of social media disruption
WEB DEVELOPER By Adam Sims
Late February 2021 was a wakeup call for many Small Businesses across Australia as their Facebook pages were deleted without notice. For many of these small businesses, their Facebook Business page became a primary go-to for both business managers and customers for lead generation, communications and sharing carefully crafted content that showcases the businesses brand story, products and services. Here are some tips and tricks for taking back control and building a Webpage platform that can become an asset and a central part of your business premise. Define a few clear business goals your webpage is intended to support. Keep in mind, these suggestions are by no means a comprehensive list, but intended to introduce you to some ways you can utalise your website above and beyond digital signage. This can include things like; 1. Communicating brand story
your
businesses
2. Generating leads 3. Keeping customers up to date with news and events 4. Provisioning brochures, documents and forms
Crafting quality written or audio/visual content through Video Confidence Coach owned and operated by Zoe Wood, is a sure fire way to keep people coming back to your webpage. Yet did you know that it matters where you publish first? Posting new content to your webpage first before social media, positions your webpage as the primary source and authority in the eyes of search engines. This can significantly improve your webpages search engine ranking as well as make sure other services know who is the likely owner of that content. In addition to your publicly displayed content on your webpage, its important to define one more communication method for sending invoices and alerts. Some commonly choices include; 1. Email 2. SMS 3. Snail mail
however that is not much use unless your webpage knows who your customers are. Introducing the Customer Database and its cousin the Customer Relationship Management tool. Being dependent on social media or other 3rd party cloud platforms to store a list of your customers is risky. However it is often very time consuming to manually transfer customer details from communication, sales order, or invoice into a database. That’s why having a business webpage platform that is developed to assist you with these rudimentary chores can be so powerful. In closing, the keys to weathering the storm of social media disruption is to claw back ownership of your digital communication platforms from 3rd parties by investing in your own digital storefront, develop that storefront with the goal of driving specific business outcomes, and use it to collect critical business intelligence that you can use to understand your customers and communicate with them better.
There is no right or wrong option here. Each method has their own strengths and weaknesses. What is important is that you invest the time to weigh them up and choose the right option for your strategy. Collaborating with a communications specialist can go a long way in making these sorts of choices. So you have defined a communication method in addition to your webpage, but how are you going to send communications in bulk? Your webpage can be developed to send blog updates and other communications automatically,
Adam Sims WEB DEVELOPER
aWebpage 1300 667 141
www.awebpage.com.au/#services
MARCH 2021 | FIND GEELONG
21