How do you care for your digital things?
As much as there is a lot of magic in the world of digital, a non-sexy part of working in digital is maintenance. In this post, we will share our advice on how to be successful in maintaining digital success.
Clean up & maintain your content.
This is the easiest and most-cost effective thing to do, and is easily overlooked. Your content – imagery, messages, offers, videos, and other things we use as information – is the main way your customers decide to do business with you. If you have outdated content or offers, you will be leaving potential customers or sales on the table. If you don’t pencil time in your schedule for this, your presence will become old quickly.
Maintain & improve your digital brand.
Your digital brand is your brand in the digital world. Don’t let it get old or accumulate dust. If you don’t have an easy way to do this, start small with small things: how you write, the images you choose, the colors you choose, and the links to pages you point to. Then work on making it easy for your tools to quickly adjust your branding elements globally by centralizing how you do this and make templates. People notice these small things, and putting time in to fix these will get you noticed in a good way.
Monitor search terms & results.
Whether search is from Google or on your own site, you’ll want to make sure that you’re delivering the right results to your customers. Teams usually forget to regularly get a pulse on what is being searched for, what pages show up, and what data is fed to the search logic. As most new & returning customers find you through search, not having powerful search results is like hiding in the sea of digital. And all of the work you are putting into digital won’t be seen by your audience.
Improve technical robustness.
The world of technology is constantly evolving. You need to budget time and money for: system updates, performance checks, monitoring security, and paying for your hosting. While these are basic items in digital, I’ve been part of organizations that have had their services stopped completely because they forgot to check for these. Don’t be embarrassed digitally by forgetting these simple things, as they will catch you always off guard.
Invest in & maintain your team’s digital knowledge.
Something I don’t see digital teams do is budget for time and money for learning & documenting knowledge. Learning is essential to keep your knowledge fresh, find new opportunities, or do a better job at what you’re already doing. Keeping your knowledge and information up to date is the best way to not be left behind, fail to train new employees properly, or spend time & money to keep up with the competition.
Keep an updated vision and roadmap.
Many companies don’t take the time to update their roadmaps every six to twelve months. That’s usually because they are working on getting something out into the market, or are focusing on making something else. If you don’t take the time to have – and keep updating – a roadmap, you’ll struggle to keep your arms wrapped around the entire digital property. And this will make it harder, more expensive, longer to build, and less cohesive for your audience and customers to see your value. Instead, focus on keeping this up to date to budget properly and know what the next thing to build is.