Intentionally Digital – 5 Parts of a Digital Assessment

William R. Benz - Chief Digital Officer – Carnegie Agency

 

Inertia continues to increase the number of companies that now recognize the importance of digital media delivery.

 

 

It is time to assess how you are participating, or not, in the process.

 

 

Within larger organizations, it can be an arduous task to effect change with competing interests. For smaller businesses the decision can be made quickly and requires a commitment of resources more scarce in the form of people and budget.

 

 

So, first things first.

1. Is your business on the right digital path?

 

 

Before you can assess your digital preparedness, it is critical to determine why to be online. What is the anticipated growth in sales expected from an improved digital presence? Web, social media, email are all ways to be found but once located, what behavior do you want your prospects and customers to perform? It seems there are more questions than answers. Start with a summary of the business including web address, domain expiration, hosting provider and location.

 

Think of a digital assessment of your company from the top-down. Start with a summary of the firm’s existing digital properties and if available, goals, objectives and a screen grab of the homepage.

 

2. Context and Comparison are helpful when providing an overview of the digital ecosystem of business. Add a screen capture and list best practices and industry averages as available to make the assessment useful.

 

3. An inventory of the technologies that make up the reference architecture of the apps, systems and other materials accessible for the use of sales and marketing. This list represents opportunities to re-evaluate new capabilities and plan for the upgrade of outdated technologies.

 

4. This section "Site Observations" is presented in both the good, always listed first followed by opportunities.  Within the entire document, this next paragraph is the most critical. Part of the value proposition is to call out egregious errors that the prospect can correct immediately. This olive branch of good faith provides a win that the prospect would be unable to fix had it not been brought to their attention.

 

Moving on to non-web properties, social media, and email footprints can be listed with the amount of usage. Hesitate to describe recommendations until you have a better understanding of the goals and objectives of the business as I have heard from some companies that goals are more than sales, some focus on the quality of life of their employees in the firm.

 

5. As a last proof point, I recommend listing all of the sources that were used to collect the information presented in the assessment. Depending on the situation and the prospects, limited recommendations should follow best practices. And finally, be sure your site displays all of the best practices that you suggest in the assessment or at least have an explanation and of course, include a contact email address and phone number for future communications.

 

 

About us, Carnegie Agency is a digital-first agency offering our clients practical, measurable marketing to increase the inbound traffic to the top of the sales funnel. We bill our time per hour of effort, so the value never exceeds the benefit.

 

Please visit our website at or call (646) 504-1204 or email sales@carnegieagency.com for a complimentary digital assessment of your business.