JDR Group's 'Digital Prosperity' Blog

Websites are not like fine wines – they don’t age gracefully. If your website is more than a few years old and you haven’t had it updated, the likelihood is it will look tired and out-of-date at best and lacking in functionality at worst. Older websites often need a complete redesign rather than tweaking around the edges, and this can be a considerable investment.

Leads are the life-blood of any successful business. Generating leads will help you to make sales and pull in more revenue. One of the key things that your website should do is to help find leads which you can then follow up on. However, some businesses can struggle with this - while there can be a variety of reasons for this, it could be that your website itself that is the big problem. You might get lots of traffic, but just aren't seeing it convert into genuine leads.

While it can be tempting to answer in the affirmative, the picture from old western movies of the snake oil salesman comes to mind. He would offer a cure-all elixir, but be far away down the trail before those gullible buyers appreciated they had a bottle of flavored water! Claims such as: 'We can double your results' or 'increase ROI by XX%' should see business owners heading for the hills! When necessary changes are being made, it's best to beware of those who guarantee instant success.

Would you like to see the return on your marketing investment? Or evaluate how good your sales team are at upselling existing customers? Or even understand how loyal your customers are?

Creating the right marketing strategy for your business can be difficult, especially if you have had little experience in this area before. While there is a lot of information online, much of it is conflicting and may not be relevant to your business. However, one of the most versatile and easily actionable strategies is the use of Facebook messenger bots. Our experts at JDR know how useful they can be and have created this short guide for you.

Whenever customers are looking to purchase a new product or service, they can often be skeptical about the feature and benefits of this, along with the price too. This is usually exaggerated when customers are looking into entering a long-term contract. In these cases, simply reassuring the customer may not be enough, and our experts at JDR have found that it is often better to show customers rather than tell them. The best way to do this is through the use of case studies, showing the benefits of your product and services to customers, as well as offering quantifiable and empirical results.

IGTV is a brand new standalone app that Instagram has launched. It allows users to make vertical videos, in long-form. It differs from Instagram's current video sharing platform, Instagram Stories, because the length of the video has been increased to up to ten minutes - raising to sixty minutes for verified/popular accounts.

Humans have an incredibly powerful connection to stories. It seems that, evolutionarily, they're a key part of how our brains developed. To this day, stories have the potential to be the best way for people to understand even complex data in an evocative, memorable way. In a digital world, there are more ways to share powerful stories than ever before.

In an increasingly connected, digital world, generating content is one of the most effective ways of reaching and converting potential clients into loyal customers. But coming up with original ideas for content can be extremely time-consuming, particularly if you're just starting out building an audience.

Online reviews are an incredibly powerful tool, for good or ill. Positive reviews online will inevitably mean more people showing an interest in your website and a big boost for your brand, while a negative review can break a business. In this day and age, a business needs to do everything it can to utilise positive online reviews and turn them into opportunities.