Whether you run an established business, or you’re keen to make 2020 the year that you finally start earning some money from blogging, Rebekah Litherland, the founder of Revival Digital Marketing, has some tips for enhancing your digital presence in 2020. Revival Digital Marketing offers a range of services, from social media set-up and content creation, to email marketing (ahem, the thing that His & Hers Magazine never quite gets round to!) and website design, copywriting and PR. Here are Rebekah’s answers to our questions…
If you’ve set up a simple website for your company, how do you know when it’s time to enlist some expert help to get your site looking slicker or functioning more effectively?
Well, that completely depends on whether the business tracks the website’s performance using Google Analytics or not. For those that use Google Analytics, you’d probably know when it is time to seek help if you’ve noticed a decrease in users visiting your website, or if you’ve noticed a higher bounce rate and a lower amount of time spent on your site.
If a business does not track the performance of the website using Google Analytics, it may be hard to gauge whether your website is actually doing anything for you at all. But I’d say that for those not tracking performance, if you’ve not been receiving any requests through your website it may be time to find out why and see how a professional can improve this.
With regards to making your sight look slicker, many will enlist help if they don’t think that their website suits their target audience or if they’ve noticed an increase in competition in the field that have great sites. We also find that help is often requested when the website has been up and running for a few years, but has not been updated since it was launched.
If you find social media really effective for your business, but fancy taking a digital detox, how can companies like yours help?
Well, quite simply, we can manage all of your social media channels for you. We create content, produce graphics, schedule content and also provide social media community management for our clients.
We also offer these services to ensure that business owners can focus on other business matters, and do not have to worry about whether they’ve created and posted content on social media. We know that quite often, as a business owner, you have a lot of other things to deal with and trying to juggle that on top of managing your social networks can be quite stressful, which is why we are on hand to help!
What do your clients tend to say are the main benefits of getting a fresh pair of eyes focusing on their business when you look at their digital strategy?
Considering that we work with small and medium businesses, our clients are often trying to manage everything themselves, often all at once. For us, some of our clients say the benefits are often that we pitch something they might not have considered, purely because they’ve been distracted elsewhere. One of our clients actually said to us a few weeks ago that our advice and feedback had often made them realise that they hadn’t always fully thought things through.
But again, this is why I launched Revival Digital Marketing Solutions. I fully understand that when you are busy running a business and trying to manage everything else on top of it, marketing is not always at the front of your mind.
What’s one thing most businesses could be doing better in terms of digital?
Digital Marketing Audits. Without a doubt. Audits aren’t something that consumers and followers will see, but they are something that they’ll benefit from. Businesses need to make sure that they are reviewing their digital performance at the end of every month through a digital marketing audit. These audits allow you to see what has worked, what hasn’t worked, when your consumer is online and how you can improve going forward. Without performing audits, a business will not be able to evaluate the effectiveness of their strategy. As a result, they won’t actually know if their digital presence is benefiting them or not, nor will they successfully target their end consumer.
What would you say sets Revival Digital Marketing Solutions apart from the competition?
I’d say this is the main thing that sets us apart from large scale marketing companies is the fact that at Revival Digital Marketing Solutions, we focus our efforts on working with SMEs. Over the last six or seven years, I’ve personally worked with a number of small businesses in various industries, both in-house and freelance, and I’ve seen just how beneficial digital marketing has been for them. Especially those that haven’t had a large budget for their marketing.
I’m extremely passionate about working with SMEs to help them to generate a greater brand awareness and return-on-investment. As a result of working with SMEs our costs are often considerably lower too as we know from experience that small businesses may not often have the budget, but need the help from a professional.
As your company grows, and you begin delegating more of the workload, what are the benefits of outsourcing work such as updating your website or posting social media content, rather than employing somebody in-house?
There are pros and cons of both, I’ll be completely honest. But the main benefit of outsourcing work rather than employing somebody in-house is that it can save businesses money. Letting an agency take on your digital marketing jobs can reduce your outgoings, whereas hiring an in-house marketing professional will cost a fair amount.
Many business owners seem to have a perception that when you outsource your marketing, you don’t get the full experience or as many benefits as you would if you had someone in house, but I have to disagree with that.
At Revival Digital Marketing Solutions, we work to offer our clients a full package. We offer PR, Social Media Marketing, Copywriting, Web Design and even a bit of photography too. If a business was to hire someone to work in-house, they would need to employ at least five members of staff to complete all of that. With our education, background and experience working in various fields, we can do all of that in one place for you.
Can you give us an example of a time you’ve helped a client take their business to the next level by enhancing their online presence?
Without naming any names, I personally worked with one client in London. When I began working with them, they were seeing one or two sales a month. Due to a lack of presence on social media, they didn’t have a large amount of brand awareness either, which was obviously impacting their ability to make sales. During my time working with this business, my first goal was to increase their brand awareness so that everyone could see what an incredible business it was. I started posting on social media everyday, engaged in conversation with followers and created a line of influencers that wanted to work with us too. Three months in, the company was being featured in magazines in the UK and they’d started seeing at least two or three sales a day. Due to popularity, we also began to host in house events and created tutorials on YouTube, too. I think this really shows that by maximising your social media efforts and retaining customers, businesses will see a difference. It takes time, but it is worth it.
If you had one piece of advice for companies wanting to improve their website, or make their digital marketing more effective in general terms in 2020, what would it be?
To perform monthly social media marketing and website audits. The audits will give you all of the information you truly need to make sure that you are improving and making your digital presence more effective this year.
How can a business take advantage of Revival Digital Marketing Solutions services?
Really easily! Because we work remotely with a lot of our clients, you don’t even need to be in Merseyside either! Now, I know what you might be thinking.. .An agency that works remotely? But, don’t be so quick to judge. We use phone calls and regular email communication to talk to our clients everyday. We also travel to our clients’ locations to ensure we maintain a really good relationship with them. In fact, it is another benefit of working with an agency, rather than hiring in-house. Our ability to work remotely reduces costs and also gives us the chance to be a lot more flexible with our clients.
To get started, we advise sending us an email just to say hello and let us know what you are needing help with. We can then either give you a call, pop in and see you or arrange a meeting in a local coffee shop to go over the needs of the business. We’ll also take a look at your social media and website in advance so that we can really offer some sound advice when we meet.
Having listened to your needs and desires for the business, we can offer a solution. Whether it is a one-off job (website design perhaps) or an ongoing thing (social media marketing, for example) we can work with you!
And finally, could you give us an overview of what your business does?
Here at Revival Digital Marketing Solutions, we offer a wealth of services to our clients. From set and tailored packages to individual services, we are able to cater to your needs, to ensure that your digital marketing strategy increases your brand awareness and effectively targets your audience. Working with SMEs, we like to focus on organically increasing our clients’ awareness – however, we are also able to cater to businesses that have a marketing budget and want to take advantage of paid ads on social media or paid press.
Our individual services include social media set-up, social media content creation, social media management, email marketing, website design, copywriting and PR. All of our individual services can be mixed and matched to create a tailored package. We also have three set packages: Revive, Revival and Revived. The three packages all contain a number of our individual services and have been put together based on reviewing individual services that previous clients have mixed and matched to create their own packages.