The online world has moved on greatly over the last 10 years, much more than you may remember.

Look back to 10 years ago, about the year 2005.

Personally I didn't have my first mobile phone (not until 2006!!), mobile contracts were centred around call minutes and SMS, the ability to access the Internet on mobile devices was very much in infancy and data allowances were not even in the mix.  In fact, new mobile phones were still some way off being known as a ‘smart phone’.  On the Internet, businesses were scrabbling to get themselves some web space as PCs became common place in households and consumers were really getting to grips with online searches for their information needs.  Blogs probably didn’t even exist and social media was a thing of the future as the youth of the time were spending most of their time typing out frantic text messages using predictive text on a numeric phone keypad.

The yellow pages was still king!

How things have changed!  Social media has taken over, smart phones rule the roost, and virtually every consumer has one!

So what does this mean now?

Well, websites became ever more interactive and busy, before being pared back to a more basic, less busy offering to enable quicker page loading.  But more importantly, consumers have moved away from PC use to their smart phones to access the Internet.  This makes it even more imperative that your website can be viewed from a mobile device – so it either needs to include a mobile website facility or not include great amounts of data for people to be able to download it.

In addition to the mobile offering, social media has really taken over people's time and energy in terms of their online activity – there are some 24 million facebook users for example.  

Information is available everywhere, a website is no longer enough on its own. Even if you have a really well setup website for Search Engine Optimisation (giving you good Google ranking) you will still feature after all the paid for adverts that businesses use to get their search results to the top ranks and give themselves a chance of being found.  Behind such paid for performance, you may not even feature on the first page of results, and very few consumers look as far as page 2!

This means that you need a helping hand in the digital marketing space.  You need something to help you up the Google rankings, to get you amongst the paid for adverts, to get your business seen by those that only look at the first half a page of google results to their search.  Equally, you need a social media presence that is going to put you in front of the consumers, on a daily basis, and present a united and consistent brand message for your business across the various forms of online media.

Being a business member of thebestof Stroud gets you all of these things.  You already have your own website, at least pretty much everyone does have some form of web presence (If however you don't, we can help and guide you to achieve this).  Similarly, you have almost certainly sorted out your business branding (again, if you haven't then we can help).  Becoming a business member also gets you an additional web feature on our website, which through regularly updated content, fresh material and the power of numbers we achieve great organic Google SEO performances which is also backed up by Pay Per Click support, ensuring that we get your business up there in the all important search rankings.  We keep your brand consistency while doing this by spreading your branding in a consitent manner with your website and social media presence.

Next up we also integrate with your social media, posting about what you are doing, shouting about your business, telling people about your offering and re-posting all of your own posts to our engaged local followers.  We are able to generate a large, interested and engaged following as we shout about all manner of local businesses, offers, events and community matters, resulting in a great local community media feed.

We also enable you to collect and display your authenticated and up to date customer reviews, which all the statistics show (see my other blog posts!) are a really, really vital part of the consumer decision making process.  With so many consumers using authenticated online reviews as part of their decision making process, you simply must collect and display them for your potetnial customers to find.  We make this very easy and cost effective for you.

So, if you have read this far and need a little boost with your digital marketing in Stroud, drop me a line on stroud@thebestof.co.uk and lets talk.