Hi everyone, I’m Jason Hawkins from KND Digital Performance and welcome to 2023. With a new year brings a new brand. We’ve refreshed and we’re now KND Digital Performance. A new logo, new website, and a new approach. We’re really helping you outperform your competitors in all aspects of your digital. Not just marketing, but technical aspects, your hosting and your website. Just getting your message out there online is our priority for you.
2023 Digital Trends
So today, I thought I’d talk about the five top trends of 2023. Four of them are evolving trends that have been around for a while and are just really maturing. But the first one that’s been on the topic of every business owner that I’ve talked to recently is ChatGPT.
It’s an incredible new technology. If you haven’t tried it, you need to test it out. It generates conversational, human-style conversation in text that is quite realistic and it’s scarily realistic. You just need to test it in your business to see how you can use it. For example, real estate agents are using it to generate the copy to promote their properties. SEO companies such as ours are experimenting with it to write copy for pages and using it to benefit performance for Google Search. There’s a whole range of different options for this awesome technology. It’s going to revolutionize elements of business. So to outperform your competitors, you need to think about how to use it within your business to make it more efficient. A word of warning, do not trust it. It’s not always right, and there will be plenty of that in the media in the coming months as we move through the year.
Mobile First Web Design
So the next trend is more of an evolution around mobile usage. So many of our clients are focused on the design of their mobile presence, creating that user experience that is mobile first. You need to be able to interact with your prospects and customers very smoothly in that mobile environment. What does that mean? Efficient data collection, minimizing user interactions. So only collect the data that you need to collect. A great example of if you wanna see a new version of the ezilend website, you can see examples of how we use large buttons for your thumb to just click through the options rather than drop downs, scroll through, select, all of those sort of things. We try to really smooth out that user profile and get those conversions rolling. Google also rewards businesses with a really good mobile experience, so you cannot ignore it if you want to cut above the rest.
Conversion Optimisation – Setting up Google to know your numbers
The next trend that we’re seeing is not really a trend. It’s like a must-do for small business and large businesses alike. And that’s converting your analytics and goal tracking, or simply conversion tracking within Google. Just to know how you are performing in digital, you need to be moving to GA4. What does that mean? It’s a bit of new code activation on your website. And across different platforms to be able to track conversions, and add performance, and SEO performance, et cetera. And usability on your site. It’s a big change. Not for the fainthearted to do it on your own. We’ve inherited a bunch of accounts from different businesses that they thought they’ve set up their GA4 properly, but it’s nowhere near it. So don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Sarah in our office has now done hundreds of these sites, and she’s a real wizard at it. So just reach out for us to give you a hand to make sure that that is all correct for you.
Embracing video content for promotion and story-telling
The next is an evolution around video usage within your small business. A great example of that for us is our our client, Plenty Training, who have really embraced video within their site with some very highly curated, and produced videos, video testimonials of their students. And some promotional shortcut videos that they use across different platforms. Really well done and executed, and is a great example of what you should be thinking about with video. So not just for social media, but educational material. Just getting your message out there is now in demand from a video perspective. Instagram stories, Facebook, across all platforms you should be considering the video usage and get in front of the camera more often, hence why I’m back.
The best websites are fast websites – Look at your Website Speed
So our last but not least is speed. Websites need to run fast. You need to be able to convert your users and visitors into active customers. To do that, they need to have a nice smooth experience in your online environment. And that means pages loading fast, navigating quickly between content, viewing products quickly, photos loading, image, product images loading fast. All of that is around a high-speed functioning website. It can be very difficult to achieve in some instances, but it’s worth investing the time and the effort to do that.
So you will need technical support to enable and to really work on that. And we have quite a lot of experience in that space. It’s tricky to get this to work on some sites as they are really hard to actually fine-tune, but it’s worth looking at. Look at your numbers and see what improvements can be made there to really boost your performance. So, have a great 2023. We will see you throughout the year. And don’t hesitate to reach out if you need to work on your digital strategy to outperform your competitors.