3 Digital Resolutions for the New Year
Heading into a new year often means pausing to take stock of your life, and identifying areas that would benefit from a commitment to improvement. But don’t stop there! As a business owner, you should also be asking yourself what steps you can take to improve your company. Not sure what to focus on? Here are three resolutions you can make to ensure 2020 is your best year yet.
Perform a Content Audit
Akin to tackling the mess in the garage or attic, a content audit is taking the time to evaluate your current content, and deciding what needs to go, what gets to stay and what you’re missing.
When you evaluate your current content, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Which market segment is being targeted?
- What product or solution is the focus?
- What is the content’s call to action?
- How has the content been distributed?
- Is the content still relevant and up-to-date?
Once you have answered these questions, you should be able to determine which content should be discarded or archived, which needs to be updated, and which is working as is. Then you can identify areas that need new content.
If this sounds like a lot to go through, or if you’re not sure how to assess your content, 360 PSG can perform the content audit for you. Based on your company’s unique vision and needs, we can perform a customized content audit and help you identify not only what marketing content you need to develop, but also how to do so.
Enhance User Experience (UX)
The way a customer feels while interacting with your product informs their present and future choices. All the touchpoints along their journey matter. So how do you ensure a customer has an enjoyable, rewarding experience while interacting with your brand?
You have to think beyond mere usability, and consider the user’s entire experience.
Founding father of information architecture, Peter Morville, determined that six core features define the user experience. They are:
- Usability—The delivery system must be simple and easy to navigate, with a short learning curve.
- Usefulness—The product or service must fulfill a need. Any of the system’s touchpoints must also meet a need.
- Desirability—The visual components of the product or system need to be attractive, yet minimal. Visual clutter isn’t attractive.
- Findability—Information must be able to be quickly located, and found in the places users expect it to be. Searching should be simple and intuitive.
- Accessibility—Sites should be designed with various disabilities in mind.
- Credibility—The company must be trustworthy.
Keeping these six components in mind while designing everything from mailers to customer service rep scripts will help ensure that your customers have meaningful, pleasant interactions with your brand, each and every time.
Update your website
Updating your website is crucial if you’ve performed a content audit or examined your site through the lens of user experience. Moreover, the industry standard is a website refresh approximately every three years. How long has it been since your site was redesigned?
If its been more than three years, or if any of these situations apply, you should make website redesign part of your 2020 plans.
- Your website looks unprofessional or unappealing—An ugly website will absolutely increase your bounce rate (the number of viewers who leave your site after looking at only one page). Visitors who leave quickly aren’t going to become invested in your brand. To get visitors to stay, you’ll want a site that has high quality images, relevant links, a sensible color scheme, a quick loading time and mobile compatibility.
- Your website isn’t responsive—Responsive design means designing and implementing your site to accommodate different screen sizes, platforms and orientations. Mobile phones and tablets account for 58 percent of global internet usage. Your website needs to account for how users are accessing your site, or you risk losing potential customers.
- A site that adapts to the user’s device and environment provides a consistent yet tailored experience, which better engages the user.
- Your lead generation has stalled—Your website’s primary goal is to generate new leads. If you’re seeing fewer leads that you’d hoped for, your website isn’t doing its job, and needs to be updated.
- Your website is hard to update—If updating your site is difficult and time consuming, it’s less likely that you’re posting all the content you should be. Utilizing an easy-to-use content management systems (CMS) to post engaging content will result in more customers. 360 PSG provides multiple CMS options for our clients, and is able to customize our systems to address your company’s unique needs.
- Your website is hard to find—If you don’t have a good grasp of search engine optimization (SEO) or know how Google Ads work, you’re business probably isn’t ranking very well in searches, which means customers can’t find your site. Retooling your site can result in better rankings, and thus, more customers.
If you're not sure what tools you need to make 2020 your best year ever, 360 PSG has everything you need to turn your resolution into reality. Let our team conduct a content audit for you, improve your user experience or update your website.
