It's been a few weeks all of us have been commonly locked down in our respective home countries, for us in Sri Lanka more precisely we are under curfew. There have been a lot of new ideas floating around that the businesses need more and more digital presence to survive this crisis. This is absolutely correct, and digital technology enables virtual means to reach out to the clients. We thought of giving out a few tips you'd need to think while you are going digital.

Number one is to keep your digital solution simple. There are so many reasons for you to do this. Your business needs to get online right now, there is no time to waste. The best way to make it happen without losing quality, trust, security, and stability is to keep it simple.

Keep in mind that you are introducing something new to your customers, let the learning curve for them to use your solution be minimal. Using the standard UX is the best way to make it happen. 

In software development a new layer of features is a new layer of technical debt, introducing costs, development time, vulnerabilities, complexity in testing and so on. So in this emergency we reckon it is best to keep it simple. 

Keeping it simple now, is not going to be forever. Digital systems can always be upgraded, and you can add new features anytime.

It is really important to find the right digital partners to build your systems. As we are a technology based company creating web based solutions, we have seen and experienced how vital the capabilities of the development partners are. They must be able to see through your business requirements, business process and quickly design and architect a technological solution which is flexible, robust, scalable, and secure. If there are any technical blockers there must be devices to detect, identify, and report them in no time.

For any business at this time costs are important. If digital is completely new to you, it is also going to impose on you an additional bill. Think of the recurring costs you will have to take care of by enabling digital, these include things like, hosting charges, maintenance costs, SEO, Pay Per Clicks, postal charges, etc, etc. 

You will have to do a good research on all these aspects before starting, and make plans to fund it. Then decide on the very optimal business cases, and execute.

This is one of the biggest challenges you are about to face. It's good to go digital at this moment, however you are not the only one thinking about digital. This means there is going to be a massive competition in the digital space. You should plan on how to get your message across to the people, find the actual needs of the potential customers, understand the markets and where your customers are, (Are they on social media platforms? Are you going to directly reach out to them via emails or phone calls? How and what people have been searching for? What are the advertising strategies and platforms you are going to use? etc.) 

It's not super hard to do this, there are plenty of tools which allow you to measure certain variables like search volumes, keyword difficulties, ROIs of social media ads, etc. Doing this research is very important while investing in digital.

You must set up goals, digital is a medium for your business and you must think of these questions, "what my business is going to achieve by being digital?" and "what problem my business is going to solve?". In fact it's the only way for you to understand your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). 

To measure these you will have to make use of various analytics tools, the best to start up with are Google Analytics, and Facebook Tracking Pixels. These give you statistical data on how your digital systems are performing, and how your users have been using your websites.

There are obviously many more areas to consider on being digital, but these are the most vital factors you must think of. In fact during this time we are prepared to help businesses to go online, as we are working from home we have managed to reduce a lot of overheads on managing our offices, we are happy to give that advantage to you. Flick us an email at [email protected] to discuss your digital solution.