Why a Digital-First Approach Is Now Fundamental

Why a Digital-First Mindset Is Now Essential For Your Business

Small businesses in the modern marketplace have to establish themselves digitally in order to compete with larger competitors. It’s not enough anymore for your business to be limited to the confines of your storefront and customers need more than just an online presence these days. With the Internet, you can reach out and engage with customers from all over the world at any time of day or night!

Small business owners often overlook digital marketing because they don’t have large budgets or teams behind them like big corporations do. But what they lack in size, they can make up for in creativity- think about how many great ideas come from small business owners who are willing to take risks that bigger companies may shy away from.

Digital Is the Future of Marketing

In today’s world, the digital space is where you need to be if you want your business to survive. Successful small businesses know that marketing is essential to their success. Failing to embrace social media or digital marketing in general just leaves space for your competitors to overtake you and you are literally handing them more customers. Now for those of you thinking this is just snake oil selling and it’s all a load of codswallop, 2 prime examples of why working on your digital business will ensure that your business stands the test of time.

1. 2020 – need we say more? Every business in the world suddenly saw the benefit of an online presence and had to try to pivot into it in a short space of time.
2. Remember when your maths teacher would say you wouldn’t have a calculator in your pocket to do maths? Yet now you carry not only a calculator but the entire Encyclopædia Britannica in your pocket.

 Humour and examples aside the world are taking huge leaps towards fully digital customer experiences and digital-first business models are the only way to keep up with the competition, but how and what does this mean for the traditional way of operating a business? Being a digital-first thinking business does not mean that you abandon the traditional way of doing business, it just means that you add an additional tool to how your customer experience journey looks.

What Are the Benefits of a Digital-First Approach?

There are 3 core benefits to taking a digital-first approach and all 3 are about engaging audiences and establishing your business in its niche to enhance the entire customer journey for all your customer base, not just a selected few. The 3 core benefits are:

Commercial Potential

Digital experiences enable you to grow your business to a much larger customer base allowing your business to grow much bigger at a more affordable cost than the same growth through a physical experience offers. Digital channels such as social media and a website allow you to sell more products to more people in more places more cost-effective than opening several physical locations would.

Customer Appeal

Increasingly a larger portion of people are shying away from the high street, for various reasons from the time-consuming nature of it or the more convenient experience that online shopping offers. Whatever the reason, people are taking their shopping online, and if your business is not there for them to find then you quite literally are handing that customer off to someone who is.

Future-Proofing

The internet and how we use it has changed VERY rapidly in the last decade, from machine learning to digital transformation of how the entire digital experience works, operates and how many companies have failed to embrace this and paid the price. You only have to look at business leaders from the retail sector like Debenhams for example who failed to see the benefits of digital-first thinking, who paid the price and now owned by a business that launched solely as a digital business – Boohoo.

Is Digital Transformation Only For Ecommerce?

No, the biggest misconception is that the internet is only for selling physical goods, this could not be further from the truth. Think about how people use their phones on a daily basis for instance, how often would you say a person uses their phone just for making phone calls? Very rare these days that a phone is solely for the use of making calls, we use them to find products, services, directions, interact on social media and much more.

Google handles about 8 billion searches per day worldwide so it has some pretty big insights into consumer behaviour and in 2016 in one of its papers it released figures that said:

“76% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a physical place within 24 hours and 28% of those searches result in a purchase”.

What can we take from that? Well combine that with a lot more research and a lot more insights and you come to the conclusion that even if you are not selling products online you still need to have a digital presence to reach customers.

How Does a Small Business With No Digital Experience Go Digital?

The shift to online spending and online habits is accelerating and likely to be a permanent move, so the sooner you get started moving towards having an online presence in the digital world the better for your business. Investment in the technology required to do this is the first step so things like a website are a good place to start and social media channels.

Once you have the basics such as social media and a website in place the rest can be done as you go along such as investment in SEO and digital marketing like content and adverts. The key thing to remember is to embrace change and look at the many benefits that moving to a digital-first way of working offers rather than focusing on the initial costs and time that will be needed.

Need further advice? Get in touch with us here at Morgan Branding we have a fully dedicated team ready to help you and your business get ahead online. You can get in touch via our contact page or get social with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn! 

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