The Web: Your Shop Window to the World

Whether it’s an online store or an active social media presence, every touch point is an opportunity. Do you think outside the box?

In 1843 Ada Lovelace, who was widely recognised as the world’s first computer programmer, predicted that computers would become tools of human imagination helping us to surface known information. All this before a computer was even really in existence. Nowadays, with new technologies emerging every day, so too do new ways for audiences to interact and collaborate. Digital stretches our imaginations and allows us to achieve seemingly impossible feats.

Whether it’s an online store, a simple brochure website or an active social media presence, every touch point with your audiences is an opportunity to sell yourself. But, there are some hard and fast rules that will make this easier for you:

• Be consistent – you need to build familiarity with your brand and the essence of what you stand for. In order to achieve this, you need to match the expectations of your audiences and consider your ‘visual brand’. By creating familiarity, you begin to build authenticity and relationships.
• Be proactive – the nineties mantra “if you build it, they will come” does not ring true. You need to put in a little more effort than that. Make sure that you have time set aside to manage your online channels, respond to your audiences and actively engage them.
• Be prepared - put the time in at the beginning to do your research, so that you’re not wasting time on the wrong channels, speaking to the wrong people or sending the wrong messages. Having an understanding of your marketplace and audiences is critical to success.
• Be inquisitive - Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Nobody expects you to be an expert on everything, and digital and marketing are constantly evolving. Talk to the people who know and don’t be scared of asking ‘silly’ questions. The more you ask, the more you’ll learn.
• Be agile - the beauty of digital is that it provides real-time actionable insights and data, from which you can assess how effective your marketing activity is and adapt. This allows you to be far more agile to change and responsive to the channels driving the most ROI.

The web affords you a world stage. It knocks through barriers of time and space. It encourages the formation of online communities. And, it let’s even a sole person have a very far-reaching voice. So, are you putting your best foot forward?

Cat Leaver is the Head of Strategy at strategic digital agency We Are AD. Working with clients worldwide, Cat was recently listed in The Drum’s 50 Under 30 and received the coveted Chief Executive’s Award at the 2015 Women in Business Awards. She was also voted Digital Personality of the Year at this year’s Mancoolian Awards.