Why your business needs to have a digital ecosystem

Everything your business does online needs to connect like one ecosystem. It all needs to work together rather than separate entities.

Field of Dreams was one of my favourite movies growing up. Not least because it contains one of my favourite movie lines of all time: ‘if you build it they will come’.

It’s a line we often think of in digital marketing. Especially when talking about websites. What worked for Kevin Costner isn’t going to work for your business website. If you build it, they will not come.

You need to have a strategy that looks at all the elements of your digital marketing as an ecosystem. You need to identify which ones you will be using and how they will be collectively working together to ultimately win new business and customers.

• How are you going to bring traffic to your website?

• Have you considered all of the digital options and identified which ones will work for your audience?

• What will happen when you do get traffic to your website?

• How will you retain the conversation? Stay front of mind?

So many questions. This whole topic is actually way more than one short blog post. So I won’t go too deep. I really just want to get you thinking about your digital ecosystem for your business.

What is a digital ecosystem?

It’s how all the online marketing options available to you connect with each other. The list is basically endless. But let’s focus on the key players:

• Website

• Social Media

• Email Marketing

• SEO

• SEM

While you don’t need to necessarily be active on all of these (you should for optimal results but we understand this isn’t always feasible). What you are using needs to be done well and they all need to work together. You can’t run them all as separate silos.

What we see more often than not is all the different digital assets running independently of each other (often by different staff members, consultants or agencies). They are not all connected and talking to one another. This approach is going to be costing your business money.

For example, to get the most from any ad spend on Google or social media, there needs to be retargeting. There is little point generating cold leads from Google and then not retargeting them on social media.

If you intend to move your audience from social media to convert them on your website, your website needs to be as impressive as your social media posts. A fancy Instagram profile that directs people to a complicated and clunky website will lose customers.

Customers ultimately need to be taken on a journey with your brand or business. From cold to warm to a conversion or lead. They do this through the multiple digital touch points of your business keeping them engaged, refreshing their memory, building trust. The different touch points will be activated at different times of the customer journey. Each touch point will have different triggers to move the customer through to the next. The customer sits within the ecosystem. Your ecosystem.

Even if you build the fanciest website money can buy, without looking at how your digital ecosystem works, you will struggle to get a return on your investment. You need to consider all the other digital aspects relevant to your business.

BEFORE YOU BUILD YOUR WEBSITE, we recommend you create a digital strategy that identifies:

• How you will bring the traffic to your website (what channels will you use)

• What your website’s purpose is

• What the customer journey on your website looks like

• How you will keep that audience engaged

• How you will turn them into customers/clients over time

• What the key digital platforms you will be using

• How will your digital ecosystem all work together

If you need help pulling together a digital strategy for your business, we’d love to help. We’re passionate about showing you all of the options available and then fine tuning this into a practical strategy that can be executed.