Digital Management
We take care of managing your digital resources so that you can get on with running your business.
Over the last decade we’ve witnessed an explosion of complexity in the digital world. A mountain of new buzz words has entered our lexicon, and the scarily exciting thing is that they’ve all become important!
Confused? So were we when we started. It’s taken many years of hard work and late nights to figure this stuff out, and it has taken us even longer to learn how to leverage this knowledge effectively. What’s more, we’re still running at full pace just to keep up with new developments.
All of this learning, and yet the work’s still to come…
The dynamic nature of the digital environment presents three main challenges for the modern business or marketing manager. If you’re planning on developing your digital management expertise then you will need:
- Time to Learn – If you’re not a full bottle already then get ready for a time-intensive learning experience. How long will it take? Start thinking in the realm of years of full-time study.
- Money to Burn – It’s an unfortunate reality, but as a newbie you will make big mistakes. The fact is that even small mistakes can be expensive when your business is on the line, and big mistakes can cost even more.
- Time to Work – How much spare time do you have at the moment? It could be a good experience if you have time to squeeze it in, but if you’re already burning the midnight oil then chances are you’re already at capacity.
And then there’s the delay. If you needed it to happen yesterday then all this upfront time and money investment will get in the way of generating results. This is where we come in. Living Online are specialist digital managers. You could even say we’re specialist digital generalists. We understand how to manage the digital process.
Targeting the sweet spots, not the sales spots
So we’ve demonstrated that working in the digital environment demands specialist capabilities. We’ve also demonstrated that it takes a lot of time to develop these capabilities, and yet more time to do the work. So how does the business manager who understands the extent of these constraints address the situation? The answer, usually, is to engage with an external provider. But herein lies some another challenge: everyone wants to sell you what they’re offering, not find the solution that’s right for your business.
To illustrate the situation, let’s imagine that you’ve realised that your business website isn’t working very well, and you decide to do something about it. So you do a Google search and find what looks like a reputable web design company, you give them a call and ask them for their opinion. Of course, the answer comes back “you need a new website!” Better yet, you’re told that you need a website that is built upon their custom CMS because it provides “unparalleled flexibility and reliability”. This may of course happen to be true, but chances are that the web design company is focussed on making the sale, rather than taking a detailed look at what is actually wrong with your existing website. In fact, it is against their commercial interest to find a solution that doesn’t involve selling you a new website.
Let’s now imagine that you continue to dig a bit deeper. You decide to call a search engine optimisation company, and are told that “you’re website is fine, you just need to do SEO”. Then you call some paid search marketing guys and are told that “Adwords can get you to the top of Google on Day 1 – you need to run an Adwords campaign”. Perhaps next you call some conversion rate consultants, and what do you know, “you need conversion rate optimisation!”, video producers?, “video production!”, and social media?, you get the picture… The point is that external providers have a vested interest in their products and services and that this can make it hard for you to distinguish substance from spin.
Living Online’s Digital Management services offer a solution to this problem. Our goal is to help our clients identify the solutions that are right for their business, facilitate solution implementation by sourcing the most suitable providers, and then manage the process of fulfilment by ensuring adherence to business requirements and quality standards. In short, we provide unbiased provider relationship management. We do this because we want to find the best solutions for our clients, rather than trying to keep it all in-house. We understand that we can’t be the best at everything, but we can be the best at digital management.
Breaking the rules
Although we like to look outside our circle, sometimes we’re also the best choice for downstream implementation. For example, we’re very good at search engine optimisation. In fact, we’d go as far as to say that we have a highly advanced level of SEO capability, as demonstrated by our achievements in this space.
Furthermore, we’ve found that the world of search engine optimisation is littered with poor-quality solution providers. Chances are that you’ve witnessed a little of this yourself, as you’ve probably been subjected to an endless stream of spam SEO emails and telemarketing calls. That’s not to say that all other SEO providers are untrustworthy, far from it, just that it’s a little harder to find quality solution providers when dealing with search engine optimisation. Additionally, and importantly, when SEO is done poorly it can have very negative repercussions for your business.
So when we know that we’re among the best in the business, rather than trying to find another SEO provider, we find that it sometimes makes sense to just get our hands dirty and do the work ourselves. We provide this type of downstream implementation for a number of different service streams.
However, we also take our unbiased approach to digital management very seriously. As such, we still provide our clients with external procurement options for all types of digital service offerings, including all of our downstream in-house capabilities. Therefore, Living Online can provide either independent digital management or integrated digital services, in accordance with client needs. In other words, we adapt to your requirements.
The essence of our digital management service
- Employing our in-depth understanding of the digital environment.
- Management of the digital fulfilment process, from sourcing to delivery and beyond.
- We don’t sell what we’re offering; we find solutions to your business challenges, whatever they may be.
- Finding quality solution providers by delving past the sales hype and conducting a detailed assessment of provider capabilities.
- Continuous review and assessment to ensure that your digital campaigns are targeting the right areas at the right times.
- Delivering cost-effective resourcing by utilising fit-for-purpose service providers; incorporating freelancers, contractors, and consultants into the value chain when appropriate.
- Independent provider relationship management – no commission, no preferred suppliers, no partnerships.
- Optional integrated downstream service delivery for a selection of core competences.