As we prepare to get back into things following the summer holiday period and we’re seeing all those back-to-school messages, the astute marketer in you is probably realising that there isn’t long before you start thinking about your 2024 marketing plans – I know, scary, isn’t it? The first step in doing that really is to review the current landscape and where you are right now. We suggest you do this by carrying out a digital health check. How does your current website look from a performance perspective? Are all your digital ducks in a row? Think about it like your car getting an MOT or nipping to the Doctor for a health check. There is a whole list of checks and tests you get done annually – so here’s my question.

Would you like a digital health check for your website?

Yes, this is a service we offer, and although our assessments are prepared, created and delivered by our awesome team, with the right direction, you could spend a couple of days getting this together yourself. This is, of course, where I add in the sales pitch and tell you how much more valuable it would be to have an external resource looking at your online presence through fresh eyes. But that’s kind of obvious. Isn’t it?

What should you include in your digital health check?

Is your website working for you? We don’t care how pretty it is at this point. Just whether or not it’s actually working and achieving results. Believe it or not, there are generally ten things your website should offer from a marketing perspective so that it has the capability of being able to work for you. These ten items are the same irrespective of your industry or sector, whether you are a one-person operation or a PLC with 1000s of employees.

When we carry out a digital health check (or digital assessment, as we sometimes call it), we don’t just look at your website, and you shouldn’t either! We delve into and report on ALL of your social media platforms (even platforms that you may not know you had!). We also carry out a few Google checks for you so we can really get a complete picture of what’s what online where your brand is concerned.

You’ll find this process of examining where you are today extremely educational, you’ll find out where you’re doing well and where you need to shift focus to, or away from. It’s important to understand, however, that this process isn’t about giving yourself a pat on the back. The information you uncover should reveal where your current strategy might be failing and what opportunities you are missing.

When we present a digital health check to you we share the tips and techniques that will benefit your business. We also give you recommendations based on our first-hand knowledge and try to break it down into steps that make it less overwhelming, meaning you can immediately start to put wheels in motion after the assessment to get things moving forward. If you carry out an assessment yourself, the same should be true. You should have a list of actions that you can implement to improve the health of your online presence. If you are serious about growing your business, you’ll find some of these actions might be bigger projects that need to be broken down into manageable pieces – or potentially outsourced. (For example, you might decide to outsource the management of your social media platforms!)

The main objective for us in delivering these health checks is to set you on the right track and help your business grow. So that’s the approach I suggest for you, the best way to do that is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and see what they are seeing – not what you want to see. Do that first, then once you have completed your digital health check you should have a nice list of actions that will bring what those customers see and what you want them to see into alignment.

Finally, this is something that you need to spend time on. If you’ve only got an hour or two to spare – let us do it for you! From the research to putting together the report, presenting it to you and then writing up the actions, we probably spend half a day (if not more) on each digital health check we deliver. And this is the kind of stuff we do every day so we’re naturally going to be quicker at it. If this is something you are doing yourself, especially for the first time, you probably want to put a day aside to do it properly.

Be honest, and answer these two questions

1. Do you have the time to commit to doing this?
2. Will you be able to step out of your business and look with fresh eyes?

If the answer to either of those questions is no – you need our help. Give us a call, an email, jump on live chat or fill in the form on this page to get your digital health check booked – and we’ll do it for you.