Slack - the mighty comms alternative to email

Online messaging tool Slack has the occasionally disquieting effect of making it seem that staff, contractors and clients (even if they’re the other side of the world) seem as though they’re sitting right next to us – with the added bonuses that there are paper trails of every conversation, immediate asset and link sharing, as well as private channels. If there’s any single tool that we use here at 3B that gives us confidence in our ability to operate going forward it is Slack.

Try Slack for yourself - join us!

Our Thoughts on using Slack and how it’s helped us be a better agency:

Drupal

Working with Drupal 

Drupal is an open source content management system written in PHP, like Joomla and WordPress. Unlike it's little CMS brethren however, It is used around the world for powerful web applications and for secure political, corporate and personal websites.

A couple of popular websites built using Drupal are BBC Good Food, and MTV UK.

Drupal simplifies development and eliminates the need for writing routine code making it a cheaper option than a pure custom built site.

Like Joomla, Drupal is working hard to create a CMS aimed at simple internationalisation and translation of your website. It also includes a wide variety of modules making it possible to implement almost any user interface or web feature you can think of.

We love the flexibility of this CMS when it comes to SEO, in fact, Drupal has an incredible suite of SEO tools, which we're expert in installing and adapting to your specific use case.

The most recent update is (Drupal 8) available in over 100 languages, and including various Drupal 7 modules as 'Drupal 8 Core'.

That being said, some Drupal 7 modules are maintained better than their Drupal 8 counterparts, so some new sites are still more appropriately built on Drupal 7, but this truly depends on the feature set required by your users. An example of this would be the Algolia search integration (we love Algolia), but the Drupal 8 integration is still not truly secure or well maintained. If your site requires Algolia, it may be that the older and more robust Drupal 7 is still the best choice for you.

Here at 3B digital, we are experts in hosting, development, design, theming and more. Should you need assistance in planning and/or building a Drupal build for your business, do let us know.

View our Drupal development case studies.

Our Drupal work

Joomla

Creating a Joomla website

Joomla is a content management system that uses PHP and JavaScript at it's core. In 2018 more than 2 million websites use Joomla worldwide. It has since been re-designed to fill a WordPress niche for SEO-friendly multi-language websites.

Major Joomla features:

• Translations and SEO - rank higher with your translated content as for every dynamic page, and translation, custom metatags can be added.

• Scheduling content within the website's calendar

• Restricting access to some content, making it available only for certain registered users or members

• Joomla allows you to improve the website functionality by adding multiple extensions that can be installed simultaneously and integrated into one installation package. Moreover, it is possible to automatically update installed extensions. There are over 7,000 extensions available for use with Joomla.

• More than 10,000 templates allow easy customisation of your website's design, in-line with the needs and expectations of your target audience.

• The most recent update made internationalisation easy, meaning that the software can now be localised to your worldwide audience with minimal technical support.

To get the most out of these Joomla features we would advise that you hire Joomla-experienced professionals or an agency with Joomla wings, such as ourselves - view our Joomla case studies.

Our Joomla work:

WordPress

Building a WordPress website 

WordPress is the most popular content management system used on the web. By 2017 27.9% of all websites were powered by WordPress. WordPress allows you to customise templates, use different page styles, share social links.

Cons of using wordpress

Despite having a 60% market share of web CMS's, WordPress is the most hacked CMS as 83% of hacked websites are WordPress-powered. Rather than flaws in the platform itself, hacks are likely due to a lack of site maintenance, security updates the use of outdated modules and plugins.

Benefits of using WordPress:

• It is fairly easy in use and does not require much HTML/CSS/PHP editing, meaning that a website can be built over a short period of time without much involvement of our development team (similar to Joomla) making it a cheaper option for businesses limited on a budget.

• Simple design updates can be made without needing to contact a web designer, via developer-free template installation (similar to Squarespace)

• Content created on a WordPress site is easily read and indexed by the search engines. There are additional features available to optimize your content and rank higher in the web search. Such as adding meta tags, titles, descriptions, and keywords to text and media content on the page.

• Our recommended WordPress SEO Modules are Yoast SEO, W3 Total Cache, URL Redirection, Google Sitemap Generator, Broken Link Checker, and Google Analytics for WordPress.

• Most WordPress plugins are free or come at a reasonable price.

WordPress is designed to be user-friendly for Webmasters but every great website requires professional support. If you feel like a WordPress site is what your business now needs, contact us to discuss your business aspirations, and we will construct a WordPress website tailored to your needs.

We can also offer candid advice on where the limitations of WordPress could weigh in favour of a more powerful platform such as Drupal.

Optimizely

Test and optimise your website with Optimizely 

Optimizely is software designed for customer experience optimisation.

Optimizely gives you access to complex A/B testing tools. You can implement and study multiple performance indicators on two different versions of your website.

Not just limited to a page, you can send users down entirely different conversion paths to find out what sells, and what doesn't.

Using Optimizely helps to identify the sections of your website that need optimisation, which solutions might achieve the desired effect, and which KPIs to track in line with your business objectives. 

Optimizely reports

Optimizely then makes it incredibly simple to compile reports for presentation to your stakeholders, in order to explain the incremental benefits of your optimisation efforts.

The cumulative effect of optimisation work is much like the idea of compound interest in investing. A few % every year on a large scale can quickly become a data-driven 50% e-commerce revenue gain.

Overall, Optimizely helps you to design your website precisely for your desired market segment.

Hiring a web optimisation agency

If you feel like you need to optimise your website to meet your business goals, contact 3B Digital. One of our professionals will build ‘the goal tree’ (a map of metrics critical to your business success), and update it constantly to fit your business model as we learn more.

We can devise an A/B testing strategy and provide concise analytical reports for your site's optimisation efforts, making sure that what we do benefits your business.

We can carry out the design, development and statistical analysis prominent in such data-driven developer-heavy work, all in house!

Google Apps

Migrating to Google Apps

Google Workspace has multiple business benefits. The business or team package gives you unlimited storage, access to a live help centre and support at any time. You also get advanced administration controls (i.e. user permissions).

It is easy to manage from any of your devices, whether a smartphone, tablet or a PC.

Replacing your enterprise cloud storage suite with Google Workspace can be easily done with the use of migration tools and services provided, and you'll get the whole host of other Google products bundled in for free.

We advise businesses to migrate from using Office 365 to Google Workspace for a number of reasons:

• Gmail is a much more functional email service allowing you easier search within emails. We use multiple inboxes and find Google's spam filtering to be far more accurate. Gmail apps are pretty powerful too and worth looking into!

• The Google Workspace interface is generally more user-friendly, with a variety of apps available. No matter how many you install it does not ever feel cluttered.

To make sure that your important business data is moved securely, or if you require data to be migrated over from more than a single file or email server, contact 3B digital and we can handle the bulk of your switch.

Zendesk

Using Zendesk

Zendesk is a customer service platform suitable for  businesses of any size.

Zendesk's Support structure brings all client interactions into one interface making it an efficient and easy option as a customer relationship management tool (i.e. CRM).

Zendesk provides you tools to deal with customer requests coming in from any channel using triggers, predefined query responses, web widgets, and automated client search history.

The most important Zendesk features allow you to:

• Solve, prioritize and track customer queries

• Collect customer data

• Set up an online chat for the highly engaged customers

• Connect to messaging apps (i.e. Twitter, Facebook)

• Track your performance by providing customer satisfaction ratings and analytics in dashboards.

Would like to know more? 

ConvertKit

Email marketing with ConvertKit

ConvertKit is software to help grow your business revenues online. Email marketing is one of the most popular strategies used to convert subscribers into potential customers.

ConvertKit tools help you create automated, customised campaigns for your subscribers. The effectiveness of these marketing campaigns are then comprehensively tracked and analysed on the dashboard page.

ConvertKit's insights can help you to understand your subscribers and to tailor your marketing campaigns to their needs. ConvertKit allows you to organise your subscribers with segments and tags, so you can tweak your emails automatically to give them a personal touch.

A carefully designed email marketing campaign has the potential to drive traffic to your site, grow your online engagement, build subscriber relationships with your brand and facilitate word-of-mouth.

Here at 3B Digital, we are experts in the management of online marketing, and can consult on whether ConvertKit is right for you.

Mailgun

Using Mailgun

We specialise in the design, distribution of, and optimisation of large email marketing campaigns. Mailgun can be used for either marketing campaigns or system-notification emails.

The use of Mailgun API provides you with a number of advantages:

• It deals with mail servers that automatically mark your emails as ‘spam’; allowing you to focus on your products and services rather than having concerns about whether your emails have been delivered or not.

• It delivers emails faster than SMTP. BLOB data is encoded automatically when it reaches the server.

Contact us to discuss an online marketing strategy which includes Mailgun integration designed to suit your business needs.

If you are not satisfied with the output of your current online marketing campaigns, we could help you to evaluate your strategy, campaign objectives and design a customised plan to improve your online engagement.

MailChimp

Reasons to consider using MailChimp as a part of your marketing strategy

MailChimp is a leading email marketing tool which specialises in data security, custom HTML templates, and optimised email marketing campaigns. The end result should be that you can easily find, create and publish content which resonates with your audience so you can engage with them on a personal and professional level.

We often advise our clients to learn how to use MailChimp as a digital touch point with their customers.

Creating a good quality online marketing campaign could convert your website visitors to potential shoppers by sending timely valuable information to people already interested in hearing from you.

Mailchimp's automated features allow you to focus more on your strategy, while they do the heavy lifting and spam-block-prevention work for you.

One of the most important parts of taking and managing your business online is to identify your audience and choose when you should talk to them. MailChimp reports help you analyse the efficacy of your marketing campaign by providing you with accurate open and click rates, loyalty rates and advice on the optimal timing for sending out a new campaign.

Out the box Mailchimp also gives you the ability to A/B test subject titles and email content, by testing the performance of your campaign on 10-30% of your list, then sending the winning version to the remaining 70-90%. It's a great feature and we love it here at 3B. Simple data driven insights!

Despite MailChimp being easy to use, with many of our clients handling their own campaigns these days, we would advise hiring a professional to assist you throughout set up, so you can ensure GDPR Compliance.

Facebook Ads

Why use Facebook Ads

According to the latest Facebook user statistics, Facebook is used by 2.2 billion people every month.

To maximise the effectiveness of an online advertising campaign a combination of digital touch points would be the best option.

There are many benefits of using Facebook Ads as part of your marketing campaign. Here are the most common ones:

• Facebook advertising fits any budget. Simply set up the amount you are willing to spend and choose the objectives of your campaign. To ensure your money is spent effectively and to maximise the performance of your marketing messages, Facebook's algorithms will try to show your advert only to the people most likely to be interested in your product.

• While constructing an advert you can choose between segmentation characteristics such as demographics, geography, interests and user behaviour.

• Facebook allows you to create ads with the use of the photo, video, product carousels, and photo slideshows. The aim of giving you these options is to allow you to design your Facebook ads in a way which inspires more attention, clicks and ultimately conversions.

• Facebook advertising is compatible with any device that can use Facebook or Facebook Messenger, maximising conversion rates and helping to generate leads that matter. Messenger Ads are a powerful new way to get in front of new potential customers.

Despite all the benefits we list however, Facebook adverts could be expensive if you don't keep your budget tight; so it’s important to find a working ad, and then scale up, but not before. Following those simple steps will help you to get it right first time.

Facebook Messenger & Whatsapp Ads

An example of what can go wrong when choosing between different options offered by Facebook is Messenger ads. Although it's hard to find statistics on the conversion rate of Messenger or WhatsApp ads, Facebook is certainly pushing it hard. A study we found suggested that potential consumers tend to click those ads and close them instantly. Those adverts turned out to be more expensive and less effective than newsfeed ads on a per-click basis. 

Get in touch with us and we'll help you to design adverts to serve your business goals, using high-quality visuals. We can also manage and measure your ad performance, and make adjustments to make sure that your business is getting the most out of a Facebook Ads campaign.

Google Analytics

Working with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most popular service used to track your website traffic. It is often integrated with Google AdWords in order to generate attribution from paid ads.

As a webmaster, using Google Analytics helps you to optimise your paid advertising, understand user behaviour on various areas of your web content and act on the information fed to you by the free Google Analytics Insights bot.

Basic information on Analytics includes where your visitors come from, how long they stay on your site, whether they return, what their lifetime value is, what their interests are, how they move through your content (and when they leave), browser type, device type, network, page load speeds, scroll depth and purchase/conversion funnels.

You can also analyse your ad groups and aggregate the cumulative return you can attribute to advertising on certain keywords in the reports.

You can also divide your visitors into groups, such as logged in / non logged in users, in order to see how they use the site differently.

What can you do with this information?

Knowing 'who' your traffic is, and understanding 'why' they behave as they do on your site, is an important part of tailoring your website (and ultimately your product) to the needs of your desired market segment.

Do consider 'when' your users tend to search for your products and happen across your site too, as this can offer helpful information into when the best time to trigger your social ads and community posts might be.

Here at 3B we have professionals to help get you set up with your Google Analytics account. We can configure advanced settings including goal attribution, conversion tracking and event logs. 

We can also help to understand your audience and optimise your website with an ultimate aim of ranking higher in organic web searches, and serving your customers with quality content.