Is your business ready for 2020?

Running a business takes so much effort, time and energy. So much of your focus is on the day-to-day operations of your business it can be easy to let other aspects of your business slip behind. As we move into 2020 and into a new decade, take a few minutes to find out if your business is ready for 2020 and what the next decade will bring. You can read this blog post and use our interactive bot-based quiz.

Modern, responsive website

The first area, and most obvious as a web design agency, we’ll look at is your website. Is it fully mobile-responsive and up-to-date with industry standards?

Firstly, is it mobile-friendly and responsive? This means that the website will look and work perfectly on every type of device, be it a desktop PC, tablet or smartphone. If you’re not 100% sure you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test resource to find out.

Your website needs to be fully responsive. Research shows that 88% of online visitors will not want to engage with your business if they have a bad experience online. If your website doesn’t work well on their device they will be put off by your business.

One of the easiest things to happen if you’ve not spent loads of time lovingly caring for your website is the loading time will be affected. Your website needs to take at the absolute most 5 seconds to load. Ideally, less than 3 seconds and less than 1 second would be great. Anything over 5 seconds to load will cause your business problems.

People will stay for 70% longer on your website if it takes less than 5 seconds to load. More than 5 seconds and they may not even wait for it to load. Want to know how long it takes for your website to load? Test it now.

Finally, we must mention aesthetics. Your website needs to look modern and relevant. Research also shows that the credibility of a business is based 75% on their website. If you look at a website for a business and it seems out-dated and old-fashioned, consciously or subconsciously you’ll believe the rest of the business will be like that.

The best advice I can give for a business owner is to check the responsiveness and the speed of their website. After that take a few minutes to check the look of your website against your competitors or local businesses. Does your website look as good or better than there site? If not, get in touch and we can help.

Social media accounts

Love social media or hate it, nothing will define your business more in 2020 than your social media presence. The 2010s were all about businesses jumping onto social media and getting to grips with it. Some businesses embraced it so well they could quickly and easily grow their business just with social media.

The 2020s will see social media as a basic expectation for every business, whatever the size. Every business should have social media accounts across many platforms. From Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to YouTube, Linkedin and even TikTok, every business needs to use social media.

Yes, you do need to use as many different social media platforms as possible. If it seems hard to manage so many accounts, then you can invest in a single tool, like Hootsuite or SocialChamp, to manage all your accounts in one place.

There are so many reasons to use social media (here’s 23 of them!) but the main reasons are SEO, traffic and reputation.

Increasingly one of the main ways to boost your website’s ranking on Google is to use social media. Google loves social media, so when it looks to see where there are links to your website it will be really happy if you’ve got loads of links on social media. Rather than spending ￡1000s on SEO tools, you can ensure on a daily or weekly basis you’re sharing links to your website on social media.

What’s the main way you find out about a new business? Probably through social media. Either by following an account, seeing an advert or by your friends on social media sharing a post, that’s how you learn about a new business. If that’s how you find out about a new business, that’s how other people will find out about your business. Social media can be a free way of driving traffic to your website and/or business.

Finally, reputation matters with your business. You can promote the great things about your business and control the narrative all through social media. You can easily chat with potential customers and build people’s trust in you and your business all for free with social media.

Live chat, chatbots & AI

Ever since films like Terminator, there has been a slight hostility towards artificial intelligence. Sounds odd, I know, but people are wary of using AI and not a human.

One of the biggest growths in business in 2019 has been the use of AI and chatbots. Most banks, large businesses and call centres now use some form of AI or a chatbot to help answer customers’ questions. However, chatbots and AI isn’t for the billion-pound companies.

By the end of 2020 around 80% of all businesses will be using some form of AI. Plus, up to 90% of customer support queries for businesses will be dealt with by chatbots.

Every business could benefit from a chatbot. You can easily get a chatbot built within Facebook Messenger that can answer customers’ queries. The bot runs 24/7 and can provide live customer support for any business, no matter how small it may be.

A chatbot can also be used for marketing. You can run adverts and promotions where people chat with a bot and enter a competition or are sent information about your business. Essentially, a chatbot allows any business to act like a massive global brand.

Having spent time talking to businesses about AI and chatbots and writing blog posts like this about them I know it’s such a hard concept to explain with words. Try our chatbot and have a play with other companies’ bots. My one word of advice — expect a chatbot to not be able to answer every question! Every time I promote our bot and ask people to try it out they ask it questions about the weather, food, animals, whatever. Obviously, the bot is only trained to deal with questions about Tiny Blue Rocket and web design.

Digital marketing & online advertising

We have already looked at why every business must have social media accounts across many platforms. I have mentioned you can grow your business for free with social media, however, you can grow it faster with some investment.

One of the growing advantages of social media is that you can advertise to prospective customers really easily. Before social media how would you advertise your business to people all over the country or even the world? You’d have to pay ￡1000s for TV or newspaper advertising.

In the modern world, you can spend ￡100 on an advert and easily target specific people. If, for instance, you run a women’s shoe business for women between the ages of 16 and 35, social media advertising is great. You can build an advert on Facebook that will only go to women aged between 16 and 35 who have an interest in shoes, fashion and other similar interests.

With social media marketing, you can run adverts that only appear for specific people. This ensures your advert will only be seen by people who would be interested in what you’re offering. The old TV or newspaper adverts never had such an option!

You can easily spend ￡1000s on social media advertising, however not every business can afford that. The more you spend on advertising the more effective it is, but even simple ￡5 adverts, when targetted at the right people, can have a big impact.

While we’re not experts in social media marketing, we can help you get started to point you in the direction of people we know who can help. So please do get in touch if you want to get started with digital marketing.

CRM

What’s a CRM? It stands for Customer Relationship Management. A CRM suite is a single platform for controlling and storing all of the data about your customers.

Quite a lot of large businesses live and die by their CRM. The ability to store loads of information about all of its customers that every department of the business can access. It’s very important for big business, why is it important for a small business?

One of the biggest challenges small businesses face is getting customers. The other big challenge is retaining the customers. You want to make sales regularly and have people coming back. Whether you’re a hair salon, plumber, shoe shop or cafe, getting people to come back is what will make or break your business.

By using a CRM you can store the name, email address, postal address, phone number and much more about a customer. When they buy something online, fill out your contact forms or enter a competition you can store their information in a CRM.

Then when you launch a new service, product or deal you can get in touch with all of these past customers can keep them coming back.

Does a CRM cost loads of money? They can do, or you can get Hubspot’s CRM for FREE!

Having a chatbot will be an expectation in the 2020s, so will using a CRM to store and retarget your customers.

If you want to get started with a CRM, we can help. We work with a CRM consultant who can help advise you freely and help implement the perfect CRM for you and your business. So please do get in touch if you want to get started with digital marketing.

In summary

It’s so easy to let the online aspect of your business fall behind your physical business. Take some time today to check your website and think about social media, chatbots, marketing and CRM.

If you need help getting started or would like some free advice, please get in touch today.