Many thousands of businesses have launched advertising campaigns, including digital advertising initiatives without deeply considering the user experience within their digital infrastructure. The result is most often wasted advertising dollars or worse frustrated potential customers. Most small/ medium size businesses have at least considered the user experience on their website, mobile site or social pages. But too often these critical building blocks ,are put on the back burner.
Let’s take mobile friendly websites as an example. Less than 50% of businesses today have mobile friendly websites. And yet, leading advertising researchers at Borrell Associates estimates that by 2016 88% of local advertising will be delivered on a mobile device. Even with Google now penalizing non-mobile friendly websites in search engine results pages (SERP), way too many businesses are too slow to respond.
Personally I’ve consulted with scores of businesses in San Diego that are running Google Adwords campaigns (PPC) without mobile friendly sites. The Google Analytics tell the sad story of wasted traffic with high bounce rates, no time on site and no conversions. The same can be said for email marketing campaigns or video’s not built for mobile engagement.
Getting the infrastructure right is not simply a matter of functionality but impacts the public perception of a company. Social Pages that are not updated regularly, blog postings from two years ago, buried positive reviews, antiquated websites, slow loading websites, lack of mobile friendly site can all negatively impact how the public views the value of a business. At the same time and on the positive side, companies that spend time building the digital infrastructure the first time benefit in big ways:
- Positive user experience
- Positive public perception of company
- Reduction of lost leads and customer fall off
- Increase in new leads
- Improvement in communication with new and existing customers
- Reduction of wasted advertising dollars
In today’s digital age businesses need to be building for the future. The scaffolding needs to be in place to move with more agility as technology changes. There are amazing new platforms that make managing all of this a thousand times more simple. That said, digital infrastructure still remains a critical, too often neglected, piece of today’s business puzzle.
