Easy ways to improve your digital skills
Our guide to the top tools to help you grow your online community
It’s March 2020 and many businesses have been thrown into a new and difficult challenge - how to take their community online to survive. With that in mind, we wanted to share some resources that can help you improve your digital skills and knowledge, and keep your business active online.
Google Digital Garage
We would recommend starting with Google Garage. Google offers lots of great online training tools and their Digital Garage covers online marketing.
If you have lots of spare time, you could do their Fundamentals of Digital Marketing course. It’s completely free, takes around 40 hours and covers:
Website set up management
Online strategy
How search engines work and how to get the most out of them
Digital advertising
Social media
Content marketing
Email marketing
Creating videos
Data and analytics (exciting!)
E-commerce
This is a huge amount of information for one free course and you are presented with an official Google certification at the end.
If that feels a bit overwhelming for you or there’s a particular area you’d like to improve, they also offer individual courses. These span from Getting Your Business Online (3 hours) to Digital Wellbeing (1 hour). There are 126 courses to choose from, so there is something for everyone.
Spend time online
If digital is new and scary to you, start by spending some more time online. If you want to start using social media more, you can set up accounts on the platforms you’re interested in and then spend some time on there. Follow similar accounts to you, see what they’re doing and consider why that is working or isn’t working for them. This will help you when you start to post your own content. The more time you spend online, the more experience you will gain and the more confident you will feel!
Get advice from business connections
Do you have connections with other businesses who are great at social media, email marketing or their website? Get in touch with them and ask for advice. You could have a coffee via video call and pick their brain for how they got started. Maybe you’re not sure which social media channels will have the most impact for you and they may be able to offer some insight. You can always get in touch with us and we will see if we can offer you some advice too.
Keep in touch with your customers
If you can get in contact with your customers via digital means, let them know what you’re doing. Most people will be happy to support brands and organisations they love on social media.
Do you have valuable knowledge or handy tips you could share with them over this time? Why not start a newsletter to share that information with them? Customers will remember when you’ve added value to their lives and be more likely to stay loyal to you in the long run.
Get organised
There are some amazing tools online to help you with your digital activities. Here are a few of our favourites:
Trello is completely free and perfect for to-do lists, keeping track of projects, and creating content calendars for your digital channels.
If you have a team that is still working for you or you want to host video meetups or live courses, Zoom is a great tool. You can video call up to 100 people using Zoom and we have already seen businesses using it to take their activities online (for example gym classes).
Our personal favourite for email marketing. They have an easy to use email marketing system that has a wide variety of capabilities for you. If you want to keep in touch with your customers via email, this is our recommendation.
If you want to become a pro at social media and grow your community, we would also recommend planning and scheduling content. Hootsuite is a great tool to schedule content in advance and they do have a free plan. You can schedule across multiple channels and even track what your community is talking about.
Want to create graphics or posters? Canva is an amazing free tool that makes it easy to create those things. With lots of beautiful fonts and templates, anyone can create beautiful graphics.
If you have any questions or there are areas you would like more guidance on, please get in touch with us!