How can the small business learn to trust digital providers?

Ebusiness club

I went to an excellent breakfast briefing workshop yesterday in Nottingham which was part the Ebusiness Club events.  Converting Website Visitors was expertly presented by Ian Lockwood who gave us an action-packed romp in 90 minutes through techniques to measure your web traffic (including some nifty tricks on A-B and other types of testing in Google Analytics) and using strong techniques of copywriting, sales offers and content strategies  to upsell your casual browsers to paying e-customers.

Ian recommends to test and test again – you need to know your benchmark to know how you’re succeeding, make big bold changes and be prepared to go with the results – what works for you may not work for your customers.  The quality of ideas and information definitely made it worth the early start, when I’m not usually much of an early riser

The event was packed out with 150 local professionals, some digital specialists like myself and Susan Hallam looking to qualify or augment our knowledge, mainly other small business owners keen to get ahead in all things digital.

I had an intriguing conversation with a lady who ran a social health sector consultancy.  She said she spent twelve days last year in Ebusiness Club and other web training events.  I asked if she was trading online, “No, I do all this blogging and other stuff but it has no benefit – I get all my work from professional bodies and word of mouth.”

She said she wanted to know about web so she could manage her own website development and understand how to contract services like designers, developers and copywriters to do it the right way because she couldn’t trust those she had worked with to do things correctly, and without knowing the knowledge on best practice she couldn’t be sure she was getting the standard of work she needed.  “In my industry I have to be accredited and achieve specific qualifications and standards.  In the web industry, there are no standards.”

Web specialists – the 21st century used car salesmen?

Initially this conversation perplexed me.  Why spend so much time at your expense on something so peripheral to your business when there are affordable professionals out there like myself who can do it for you?  Or indeed, why have a website if it causes such a headache?

It strikes me as a control thing – small business owners often want to be in charge of and understand every aspect of their business – and in theory so they should, but as she noted, she would trust an accountant with her finances as that’s what they are trained and accredited to do.

Yet her viewpoint also alluded to some shockingly low standards from the “web shops” (i.e. sole and small business web designers) in Nottingham out there which harken back to the ‘bad ol days’ of pretty, non-functional, non-editable designs which were commonplace when I started in the industry in 2000.  Yet small businesses cannot afford the many specialist or bigger digital or full-service agencies that do provide quality work in the city.

What’s the solution? A serious professional body for digital professional with high, univeral membership standards?  Unlikely to have much impact or change hearts and minds unless it was nationally established.  How do we as digital professionals build trust whilst empowering our clients with knowledge they can take away and learn from?

Are we in danger of becoming the user car salesmen of the 21st century?

How can we develop an effective and trusted digital consultancy service?

I’ve no instant solutions.  But this does pose a major challenge for me; I’m currently developing a product-based service for small business to empower business owners with the solutions they need to grow their business online.  As a non-designer, non-programmer, non-SEO specialist, I’ve no vested interest in commissioning an expensive website that little meets the business’s needs, as an agency or web shop may.  (Why pay when WordPress or Yahoo! Stores will solve over 50% of business’s needs affordably?)

Yet the challenge to date, and it’s changed only incrementally since I first dipped my toe in this type of consulting in 2003, is that small business’s are still only inclined to pay for ’stuff’ (like a shiny new website or brochure) rather than time and money saving advice, and those most in need of help probably don’t yet realise they have a problem.  They’re probably not even online yet, or don’t realise how under-performing their website – let alone their total digital presence – is.

One man at the event said “it’s all very good advice, but I don’t have time to do all of this.”

And that’s where a digital consultancy can come in – to give you the skills and roadmap as to where you need to go, so like our social health specialist you know how to ask the right questions and get the right results when you are ready to commission external services, or work with your digital consultant to get the results you deserve.  And give yourself a 12-day shortcut

I’m looking for guinea pigs to test my new business digital consultancy package which I will launch in the spring, if you’re interested in trying it out please drop me a line, email susi@digitalconsultant.co.uk, tel: 07981 222799.  I’ll be doing one consultancy for free and three others at a nominal cost with business who can give me some feedback to get the formula of services right.

And if you’re an independent web designer or developer, particularly if you’re based in or near Nottingham, I’d love to hear from you to see if we can work together to create better quality services.