Here’s a comprehensive guide on how businesses can position themselves effectively in the digital realm, with insights on how Dodwell Solutions can help.

1. Embrace Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is no longer a choice but a necessity. Businesses must integrate digital technologies into every aspect of their operations to remain competitive. This includes updating outdated systems, automating processes, and utilizing data analytics to make informed decisions.

Dodwell Solutions specializes in website design and development, offering modern, responsive designs that ensure a seamless user experience across all devices. By revamping your website and integrating advanced digital tools, Dodwell Solutions will help your business enhance its online presence and operational efficiency.

2. Optimize for Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) remains a critical component of digital marketing. With search algorithms becoming more sophisticated, businesses need to focus on creating high-quality content, optimizing their websites, and building credible backlinks.

Dodwell Solutions provides SEO services that include keyword research, on-page optimization, and content strategy. By improving your website’s search engine rankings, this will help drive organic traffic and increase visibility to potential customers.

3. Leverage Data Analytics

Data-driven decision-making is crucial for understanding consumer behavior and optimizing marketing strategies. Businesses need to collect, analyze, and act on data to improve customer experiences and drive growth.

Dodwell Solutions offers advanced analytics solutions that provide actionable insights into user behavior and website performance. Our data analysis services can help you make informed decisions, optimize your marketing strategies, and ultimately drive better results.

4. Engage with Social Media

Social media platforms are powerful tools for brand building and customer engagement. In 2025, businesses must not only maintain a presence on these platforms but also engage with their audience through personalized and interactive content.

Dodwell Solutions will help develop a comprehensive social media strategy that includes content creation, social media management, and campaign analysis. By creating engaging and relevant content, this will help you build a strong social media presence and connect with your audience more effectively.

5. Invest in Cybersecurity

As digital threats become more sophisticated, investing in cybersecurity is crucial for protecting your business and customer data. Ensuring robust security measures can prevent data breaches and build trust with your customers.

Dodwell Solutions provides cybersecurity consulting and solutions to safeguard your digital assets. Our expertise in security protocols and risk management will help you protect your business from potential threats and maintain customer confidence.

6. Adopt Emerging Technologies

Staying ahead in the digital space requires embracing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and blockchain. These technologies will enhance operational efficiency, personalize customer experiences, and create new business opportunities.

Dodwell Solutions is at the forefront of integrating emerging technologies into business operations. Our expertise in AI and machine learning will help you leverage these technologies to gain insights, automate processes, and enhance your overall digital strategy.

7. Focus on Customer Experience

In 2025, providing an exceptional customer experience will be a key differentiator. Businesses must ensure that every touchpoint with customers is seamless, personalized, and valuable.

Dodwell Solutions excels in creating user-centric designs and developing customized solutions that enhance the customer experience. Our focus on usability and personalization ensures that your digital platforms meet and exceed customer expectations.

8. Implement Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

Effective digital marketing strategies are essential for reaching and engaging with your target audience. This includes content marketing, email campaigns, and online advertising.

Dodwell Solutions offers comprehensive digital marketing services, including campaign management, content creation, and performance analysis. By developing and executing targeted marketing strategies, they can help you increase your online visibility and drive conversions.

Positioning your business for digital success in 2025 requires a strategic approach to digital transformation, SEO, data analytics, social media, cybersecurity, emerging technologies, customer experience, and digital marketing.

Dodwell Solutions offers a range of services to support your business in these areas, helping you stay competitive and achieve your digital goals. By leveraging our expertise, you can navigate the evolving digital landscape and secure a strong position for future growth.

The post 🌐Gaining a Competitive Edge For Your Business in 2025🌐 appeared first on Dodwell Solutions Limited.

In an era defined by digital transformation, traditional marketing methods have given way to a more dynamic and far-reaching approach: digital marketing. With the increasing prevalence of internet usage, businesses across industries have recognized the immense potential of this powerful marketing tool.

Dodwell Solutions Limited

What is digital Marketing? Understanding Digital Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses a wide range of online marketing activities aimed at reaching and engaging target audiences through various digital channels.

These channels include websites, search engines, social media platforms, email marketing, content marketing, mobile applications, and more. The fundamental goal of digital marketing is to drive brand awareness, increase website traffic, generate leads, and ultimately convert them into loyal customers.

Strategic Positioning in Digital Marketing

To succeed in the highly competitive digital landscape, businesses must employ strategic positioning techniques. Here are some key strategies to consider:-

1. Define Your Goals

Start by setting specific and measurable goals, such as increasing website traffic, improving lead generation, or enhancing brand visibility. Clear objectives will guide your digital marketing efforts.

2. Know Your Audience

Understanding your target audience is crucial. Conduct market research to identify their preferences, demographics, and online behavior. This insight allows you to tailor your digital marketing strategies to resonate with your audience.

3. Optimize Your Website:

A well-designed and user-friendly website is the cornerstone of digital marketing. Ensure your website is mobile-responsive, optimized for search engines, and offers a seamless user experience.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Implementing SEO techniques helps improve your website’s visibility on search engine results pages. By optimizing your content, keywords, and meta tags, you can increase organic traffic and attract relevant visitors.

5. Content Marketing

Create high-quality, informative, and engaging content that aligns with your audience’s interests and needs. Utilize blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and social media to establish your brand as an industry thought leader.

6. Social Media Marketing

Leverage the power of social media platforms to connect and engage with your audience. Craft compelling content, run targeted ads, and foster a community to build brand loyalty and drive conversions.

7. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click advertising offers businesses a cost-effective and targeted approach to reach their desired audience, drive qualified traffic to their website, and achieve measurable results, ultimately maximizing their return on investment.

The Future of Digital Marketing

The future of digital marketing holds tremendous opportunities for businesses willing to adapt and embrace new technologies. Some emerging trends include:-

a). Personalization

Tailoring marketing messages and experiences to individual customers using advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence will become increasingly important.

b). Voice Search and AI

With the rise of smart speakers and voice assistants, optimizing content for voice search will be crucial. AI-powered chatbots will enhance customer support and engagement.

c). Video Marketing

The popularity of video content will continue to soar. Live streaming, video ads, and interactive video experiences will play a significant role in capturing consumer attention.

d). Influencer Marketing

Collaborating with influential individuals on social media will remain a powerful strategy to reach niche audiences and build trust.

Dodwell Solutions – Empowering Businesses in the Digital Marketing Landscape

Dodwell Solutions is a leading company at the forefront of digital marketing solutions. With a deep understanding of the evolving digital landscape, Dodwell Solutions helps businesses harness the full potential of digital marketing through:-

1. Tailored Strategies

Dodwell Solutions provides customized digital marketing strategies based on a thorough analysis of each client’s unique goals, target audience, and industry landscape.

2. Expertise and Innovation

With a team of experienced digital marketers, Dodwell Solutions stays up to date with the latest trends and emerging technologies, ensuring their clients stay ahead of the competition.

3. Multichannel Approach

Dodwell Solutions leverages various digital channels, including search engine optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, paid advertising, and email marketing, to create a comprehensive and integrated approach for maximum impact.

4. Data-Driven Insights

Dodwell Solutions utilizes advanced analytics and tracking tools to provide valuable insights into campaign performance, customer behavior, and ROI. This data-driven approach allows businesses to optimize their marketing strategies and drive tangible results.

Conclusion

Digital marketing has revolutionized the way businesses connect with their target audience, providing unprecedented opportunities for growth and success.

By adopting effective strategies and partnering with experienced digital marketing companies like Dodwell Solutions, businesses can position themselves strategically in the digital landscape, stay ahead of the curve, and unlock the full potential of digital marketing.

As the future unfolds, embracing the evolving trends and technologies will be key to thriving in the digital marketing arena.

The post Digital Marketing: Strategies, Opportunities and Positioning appeared first on Dodwell Solutions Limited.

Dodwell Solutions explores the importance of visual design and branding in web design and development, highlighting how they contribute to establishing a strong online presence and leaving a lasting impression on your website visitors.

Capturing Attention and Establishing Identity

Visual Design and Branding in Web Design and Development elements, such as striking imagery, eye-catching color palettes, and unique typography, are essential in capturing the attention of website visitors. A visually appealing website grabs the user’s interest and encourages them to explore further.

Moreover, effective branding through consistent use of logos, visual assets, and brand messaging helps establish a distinct identity, enabling users to recognize and connect with the website and the associated brand.

Enhancing User Experience and Usability

Visual design goes beyond aesthetics; it also plays a crucial role in enhancing user experience (UX) and usability. Intuitive navigation, clear visual hierarchy, and well-designed user interfaces contribute to a seamless and user-friendly browsing experience.

Thoughtful use of visual cues, such as icons and buttons, helps guide users and improves website usability, ensuring that visitors can easily find the information they seek.

Conveying Brand Personality and Values

Visual design and branding are powerful tools for expressing a brand’s personality, values, and messaging. The choice of colors, fonts, imagery, and design elements can evoke specific emotions and associations, enabling brands to communicate their unique identity effectively.
Whether it’s a bold and energetic design for a youthful brand or a clean and minimalist aesthetic for a professional service, visual design sets the tone and creates a consistent brand image.

Building Trust and Credibility

A well-designed website with cohesive visual elements and branding instills trust and credibility in visitors. Consistency in design across various pages and devices establishes a professional and reliable impression. By ensuring that the visual design aligns with the brand’s voice and values, web designers can help build trust among users, fostering a positive perception of the brand and its offerings.

Differentiating from Competitors

In a crowded digital landscape, visual design and branding can serve as powerful differentiators. By creating a unique and memorable visual identity, websites can stand out from competitors and leave a lasting impression on visitors. Consistency in visual elements, color schemes, and typography across different touchpoints strengthens brand recognition and fosters a sense of familiarity among users.

Impacting Conversions and Business Success

Visual design and branding have a direct impact on website conversions and overall business success.

A well-designed and visually appealing website enhances user engagement, encourages longer browsing sessions, and increases the likelihood of conversion.

By creating a seamless and visually appealing user journey, web designers contribute to the overall success of the business, helping drive customer acquisition and retention.

Conclusion

Visual design and branding are integral components of effective web design and development. They go beyond aesthetics, influencing user experience, brand perception, and business outcomes.

A well-executed visual design strategy captures attention, communicates brand identity, builds trust, and differentiates websites from competitors. By understanding the power of visual design and branding, web designers can create compelling online experiences that leave a lasting impact on users and contribute to the success of businesses in the digital realm.

The post The Power of Visual Design and Branding in Web Design and Development appeared first on Dodwell Solutions Limited.

Your website is one of the most important aspects of your brand’s online presence and it’s important that you design it right. Your website is also the place where you nurture your bottom-of-the-funnel leads to get conversions. So, you can’t afford any website fails that might cause your prospects to bounce off your website.

Your website should be designed keeping in mind your audience and should ensure that it provides good user experience. There are a lot of other benefits of a good website design for both your business and your audience.

In this post, we will discuss must have features for a good corporate website keeping in mind your audience’s perspective.

A Quick Look At The Home Page Features for Your Website

The home page is where most first impressions are made. It’s a user’s first look at who you are and what you’re about. Don’t mince words here. Be concise and effective with your communications, and make it a quick place for users to understand your business.

1. Domain Name

The URL for your website that appears in the navigation bar. This is the address where visitors are able to find you, or the address they are taken to after search leads them to your site. Domain name creation is one of the first steps to website creation, and you cannot have a functioning site without one.

Make the domain simple and easy to spell so visitors may find you without trouble. If your ideal domain name is taken, think outside the box and get creative. Domain names are registered for brands, so you will either need to find an unregistered domain or acquire a domain that is owned by someone else.

2. Company Name

Your company’s name should appear pretty high up somewhere on the homepage, reassuring visitors they’ve come to the website they were looking for. Users should not have to scroll to find your company name.

3. Search Bar

Some users know exactly what they want from your site, and just need help navigating to that page. Including a search bar on your homepage, and every other site page, allows visitors to take control of their site experience.

4. Logo

Logos should also appear high up on the homepage. Logos are small, easy-to-remember graphics that create a link in a customer’s brain between your company and that image. While they may not always remember your company name, they may recognize you by logo.

5. Description

A short description or company tagline should appear somewhere near the company name or logo. This is especially true of smaller businesses whose work is not so easily understood. A short phrase that outlines who you are and what you do will set the scene quickly for first-time visitors.

6. Navigation Bar

Whether to the side or across the top of the page, a navigation bar should be positioned to empower users to explore your site and find their desired products or information.

7. CTAs

A CTA, or call to action, can be anything from “create a login,” to “book a demo,” to “get on our mailing list.” It’s a convincing plea to users, begging they take some kind of action on your site that would involve later contact, and it is often coupled with some sort of incentive.

8. Images

Your website should be accompanied by some sort of header image or body image to provide visitors with a visual. These visuals can be ads for your new spring line, or a graphic designed specifically for your site. Images help retain attention as they are easier to process than an overwhelming amount of text. Images can be a slideshow or video; any visual media is better than a page of plain text.

9. Internal Links

The purpose of a website isn’t just to get people to your homepage. Rather, use your homepage to spur visitors to other parts of the site. Advertise relevant spring styles, or provide links to recent blog posts. Internal links get users to stay on your page longer, which increases the odds they’ll become a customer.

10. Testimonials

Consider including some of the wonderful things users and/or previous clients have said about you on your homepage. Review sites such as Yelp or G2 Crowd have a plethora of data from which to pull. If you don’t have enough data, seek out administrative rights to your company profile and ask users to write . In the meantime, consider reaching out personally to people and asking if they don’t mind saying some kind words to be included in your testimonial section.

11. Live Chat

More and more, websites are utilizing as an opportunity to get in touch with site visitors and provide top-tier customer service. If you are using a live chat tool, make sure users are prompted to converse after they’ve been on the homepage or other internal link for a certain period of time.

12. Subscriber Opt-in

Although newsletter forms can really be located anywhere on your site, they should start on the homepage. A lot of orgs will opt for a pop-up that encourages visitors to sign up for the email newsletter in exchange for an incentive, such as a discount. Newsletters can be set to appear as visitors are hovering over the X button, prompting them to action before they close out the page.

A Look At Website Footer Features

The footer sits at the bottom of each page, providing links that help visitors navigate to popular site pages.

13. Tabs and Options

At the very bottom of your homepage, and every page, should be a hyperlinked list of places where visitors commonly wish to navigate. Examples of these site locations are the blog, press stories, the company’s “about” page, careers, customer support, the FAQ, and whatever other site-specific links are pertinent to your users’ experience.

14. Social Media Icons

The power of social media marketing cannot be overstated. In order to get visitors over to your Twitter and Facebook pages, include social media icons on the homepage, or on the footer at the bottom of each page.

Website About Page Features

An about us page leads visitors to learn more about your organization. Although many of these elements can go on the homepage, you may prefer a page dedicated to users who wish to learn more about the organization. This can be a great place for a company to utilize brand storytelling.

Tip: “Is there an interesting anecdote about how the business started? Share it. A good story puts a human face on what might otherwise be a sales pitch or impersonal About page,” advises Susan Greene, a copywriter who helps companies create better web pages. “Facts are important but stories get remembered and help you connect with your customers.”

15. Map to Your Business

A map and address leads users to your office or store location. This helps them understand where to find you. A larger company with multiple storefronts may also include a search for users to find a location nearest them. A smaller business just needs to include the one or two addresses it has.

16. Business Hours

If you have a physical storefront, or if you’re only reachable at certain times, include this on your about page. Having hours clearly listed helps people know when you’re more likely to answer their calls or process returns.

17. Contact Info

Contact information gives users a way to get in touch with you. Include a phone number and potentially a support or informational email address on your about page. This way, anyone who has further questions or who is experiencing issues with your product or service can make contact quickly.

18. Contact Form

A contact form is another way of making your company available to users. Contact forms gather an individual’s information while giving them a message box where they can voice their concerns.

19. Biography

A biography for your organization and its founders helps visitors better understand who they are doing business with. People love familiarity and feeling good about where they invest their time and money. A company bio can brighten up your about page with some storytelling and personal anecdotes.

Other Inner Page Features for Your Business Website

The other internal links on your site will vary largely depending on what you’re selling and what tactics you enact to drive traffic. Below are some examples of internal pages and the types of features you’d need to include in a website update to make them successful and navigable.

20. Team/Careers

A team and/or careers page is a marketing tool to show visitors who works at your company, what they’re interested in, and who you could work with if you were also to apply.

21. Teams and Employees

Employee pages are often sorted according to who does what, meaning they’re listed in terms of who works in marketing, sales, research, etc. These pages include headshots or other team photos, with the employees’ names and titles. Teams will vary depending on how your organization is broken up and what teams you have.

22. Employee Bios

Team biographies show the diversity of your organization in regards to their interests, backgrounds, and modes of thought. Including short bios for employees gives everyone a chance to make their own personal impression on the people coming to your site.

23. Media

A lot of companies will include a video component to their team or careers page that includes interviews with real employees. This serves as great marketing collateral for when your company goes on a hiring spree. Video components also improve SERP rankings.

24. Feature Page

If you’re a SaaS company, you’ll likely want to include a features page to show visitors how you stand out against your competitors.

25. Functionality

This is, quite literally, just a list of features your product has. What can it accomplish for other professionals? Be sure to organize features according to the specific categories they fall under. If your software product can update and organize customer contact information, list that under a contact management category.

26. Integrations

Users are always wondering if a certain software tool is compatible with something they already use. Including integrations on the features page is a good way to address these questions early, as well as increase traffic to your website by including the names of popular tools.

27. Case Studies

Case studies allow visitors to explore how your product or service has benefited the customers before them. Case studies are unbiased and have the data to back up the claims. Learn how to write a case study to help convert your business website’s visitors into qualified leads.

28. Blog

Blogs are great for any organization wishing to bring traffic to its site through unique content, or wishing to provide regular updates through published posts. Even if you’re not particularly a blogger, having a blog on your site can still gather attention.

29. Organization

Blogs can be organized in a number of ways, but it matters that they are organized. Readers and visitors should have a clear understanding of how your blog is broken out and how they can find the content most relevant to their interests.

30. Blog Search Function

We spoke earlier about having a search bar located on every page, but having one on your blog page is perhaps the most pertinent, as matching keywords can lead your visitors to locate content.

31. Author Pages

Readers occasionally want to know more about the professionals writing blog posts. By adding a hyperlink to blog bylines, you can navigate readers toward that employees’ bio. This creates familiarity with certain writers, potentially encouraging readers to return specifically for their content. These also can establish credibility for authors with relevant experience.

32. Comments

Blogs are meant to be conversation starters, are they not? Including a comments section after blogs allows readers to participate in a forum-like discussion that shows how engaging your content is.

33. Blog Internal Links

If a visitor is interested in your blog, it’s possible they would be interested in a different blog of similar devices. Take this opportunity to include a bar or list of recommended content that could potentially keep them on your site for longer.

34. Knowledge Base or FAQ

These pages help visitors find answers to questions that have been asked before. This reduces your team’s need to respond to the same questions repeatedly, and also makes visitors feel more self-sufficient.

35. Questions and Answers

Questions are the building blocks of a forum. Once questions are asked, other people can start to offer up their answers and truly begin a community of shared knowledge. Organize the questions and answers of your forum or FAQ by topic, much like you organized your blog. As with the blog, make these questions searchable.

36. Documents and Guides

Every company has set guides and processes, and customers benefit from that documentation as well. Consider making customer-facing documentation and making that available in your knowledge base.

37. Infographics

Infographics explain a big concept in a small picture. If your company has infographics that explain processes or data, make that available through the knowledge base.

A Business Website’s Back-End Functionalities

Everything we’ve discussed so far has been customer-facing, which is helpful in creating a wonderful user experience. But what are some of the elements you should consider on your end, in the control room?

We’ve certainly gone more in-depth on this topic in the business website ultimate guide. But for those of you just looking for a quick checklist of things to consider, the following will get you off to a good start.

38. CMS Tool

A content management system (CMS) helps organize and retain all of the content that is on your website. Even if you take a post down after its related event or holiday, you can store it within the CMS should it be needed again later. 

Many CMS platforms have hundreds of customizable add-ons for any use case. For example there are countless popular WordPress plugins for e-commerce stores.

39. SEO/Optimization Tool

SEO software tools help you word content in such a way that it attracts the most visitors possible. Keyword optimization helps you utilize the words other people are searching so as to lead them directly to your website.

40. Site Analytics

Analytics tools help you understand who is coming to your site and how much time they’re spending on it. This kind of insight is great for analyzing the effectiveness of certain pages or content for the purpose of changing failing strategies.

41. Website Hosting

Similar to a domain name, websites cannot function without a host. If you’re using a website builder, you won’t need to worry about a web hosting provider as your site is probably hosted through them, and you don’t have to worry about finding a host externally.

42. Content Descriptions

On the back-end, your website should offer you the option of adding meta descriptions to content and updating its title. This is useful for improving SEO, as adding in certain words in the meta description will make your site appear in certain searches.

Avoid These Features on Your Company Website

Among multiple sources, a few things are clear:

• Do not upload video content directly to your site, as it increases the likelihood of error. Instead, use video hosting websites, such as YouTube, and embed the video to your site. Auto-playing videos is also bothersome to some.
• Avoid using elements that require Adobe Flash Player, as not every visitor is able or willing to download the corresponding software.
• Stay away from background music. Many consider it bothersome to forcibly listen to music they did not choose.

Next Steps for Your Business Website, Let us Walk With You

There are certainly more elements to consider, but there’s no need to overwhelm you down as you’re just getting set up. The aforementioned thoughts and advice should get you started on what we hope will turn into a beautiful, functional and successful website. You can then begin to consider web design trends and overall user experience to breathe life into your business website’s essential features.

It’s all about making a website that will get you in front of as many potential customers as possible, and then making it as easy as possible for your prospects to find what they’re looking for in you.

The post Must have features for a modern corporate website appeared first on Dodwell Solutions Limited.

Plus, its benefits extend far beyond increasing sales.

However, not all businesses are aware of the benefits of social media marketing. In fact, 50% of small businesses aren’t using social media to promote their business. That’s an alarming number. Even more concerning is that an additional 25% don’t plan to use social media in the future either.

Clearly, there is a disconnect between those who are seeing the benefits of social media and those struggling to get started.

If the latter sounds like you, keep reading. You’re about to learn how social media marketing can help build your business. Some of the benefits are to mention but a few:

Increase Online Traffic With Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is an essential method to increase your online traffic to your website, landing pages, blogs, and more. A well built and executed social strategy will help you establish a constant flow of traffic to your target sites.

Gaining constant online traffic from social media marketing efforts is also a cost-effective strategy for companies to utilize. Diversifying your sources of online traffic creates a sustainable online business that is less subject for changes in the future.

Using social methods to grow your business online with other traffic generation methods, you will create a strategy that gives you more opportunities for growth.

The benefit of social media marketing for other traffic generation methods are abundant. Increasing your online presence that is a lively and interactive will, improve your results from search engine marketing or search engine optimization. As more touch-points you have online, the more opportunities there are for customers to engage with your business.

For instance, if you make your brand seen in the social networks, your customers will start to research more about the brand through other channels, such as Google search, and if they can find the brand there too, it increases trust in your business and will more likely lead to a conversion.

Combining different online marketing techniques to create a complete experience and a funnel where a customer sees and engages with the brand on multiple fronts, the more sales and leads you will have.

You want to maximize your brands reach everywhere your target audience is.

Utilizing well-planned paid social ads, organic posts, and influencers, you’re maximizing your traffic potential from your target audiences. The great thing is that social channels provide traffic for you in many different forms, which allows the testing of a variety of traffic generation methods from social media.

While organic traffic from social sources can initially be hard, by investing time to learn your audience’s needs and creating engaging content for them is a sure way to discover growth for your website and business.

Global Reach & Visibility

Social media marketing is global, and from the billions of users, you can extract your specific audience from anywhere in the world.

The many social media platforms allow you to reach a more extensive and larger audience online. Every platform functions a bit differently from each other, others being more general and others offering a more niche approach, but choosing the right platform that fits your brand and your audience is a benefit of social media marketing.

As of April 2020, the most important social media platforms and their estimated number of active users:

• Facebook, 2 489 million
• Youtube, 2 000 million
• Instagram, 1 000 million
• TikTok, 800 million
• Reddit, 430 million
• Snapchat, 398 million
• Twitter, 386 million
• Pinterest, 366 million
• LinkedIn, 310 million

While many platforms do have overlapping users, the opportunity on a global scale to grow your business is enormous.

By understanding your core demographic better, you will discover what the best social media platforms to target them are.

Social networks are gaining in importance regarding increased search terms, which makes them alternative search engines as well. The use of hashtags in your posts strengthens your global reach. Also, using locally relevant hashtags can increase your local visibility as well.

As ever-growing audiences acquire new tastes and ways of interacting with different social platforms, new growth avenues become available for companies to try fresh ideas online.

Even the smallest businesses have the chance to gain significant reach with social media marketing without massive budgets. It will be harder to gain free visibility than for larger companies with more resources, but as social media platforms are free to engage with, there’s always a chance for free promotion, hence worth a shot.

For example, smaller businesses can use their local knowledge to cater to their local areas with content that is highly localized to gain more customers nearby. Social media marketing reach in the world is vast, and it’s growing every day, and new opportunities from new social channels become available as they grow in importance.

Increase Brand Awareness

Social media marketing is all about presenting your brand the best way online as it should be. Increasing positive brand awareness through social channels is one of the best strategies to achieve long-term success for any company or brand.

By controlling your brand image through social networks, instilling an image of your company that you want, and engaging with your target audience, you will receive the desired results and benefits of social media marketing.

With social media marketing, you are increasing and controlling the conversation around your brand and connecting directly with your target audiences’ needs in real-time. By listening to your audience and being available and seen, you’re building a more approachable brand that customers want to engage with.

What social media enables is the creation of a story, a story that brings results from your marketing efforts. A good story that resonates with your customers to build a brand online should be one of your goals when designing your social media marketing strategy.

Building authority, increasing social proof, and managing brand reputation has many benefits for any company wishing to grow organically through social channels.

When you establish authority in your industry through the creation of a strong brand on social media, you’re eventually going to achieve more sales, leads, conversions.

Increased brand awareness is a way to make sure customers remember you when they are ready to purchase your products. A memorable brand can benefit from past customers that are engaging with your business online, and through social proof, new customers will be more likely to purchase from you as well.

Engaging Content Marketing

Social media marketing strategies should be included in your content distribution plan as it’s an effective way to publish a diverse set of content.

Using many content types allows building a more wholesome content strategy around your brand. In many cases, you can reuse a lot of content you’ve already created for other channels, as long as the content fits the platform.

Original and creative content that matches your audience’s wants will work the best in social channels. It’s essential to keep every piece of content relevant to the audience at all times. As content that is unoriginal and doesn’t resonate with your customers won’t work, and the results will be rough.

Utilizing strong storytelling around your brand enables customers to keep engaged with the content you’ve created. A right content mix that includes images, videos, infographics will be more beneficial. Only through testing your content mix, you would learn what types of content work for your audience in particular.

Take every chance there’s in social media marketing to improve your content to fit your customer’s needs.

The common challenge in content marketing is to find the right content types and forms that will bring the most results for the time invested.

Learn and get inspired by watching competitors and the industry as a whole to see what others are posting to which platforms if you’re unsure what would work. By looking at stats like views, comments, shares, you will have an idea of what might work in your industry. Start from there and keep developing further your social strategy.

Social media presents an opportunity to easily showcase customer-generated content across social channels to grow social proof around your products and services.

Engaging Customer Service

A great benefit of social media marketing is that you can combine your customer service and support into your marketing strategy. Providing the best support while combining it into your marketing enables you to help your customers while promoting your products and services.

People tend to use social media channels to get help regarding your business, and not offering support through social media can hurt your business. Offering quick help and answering questions as soon as possible through channels your customers use, will create a better experience of your brand.

Excellent customer support and services increase customer loyalty, which in turn increases repeat business you will have. Customers who have had great experiences tend to leave good reviews and feedback that could be turned into a positive marketing channel by itself.

If your company will enable customer support through social channels, make sure to have the profiles attended appropriately as social channels enable bad experiences to spread quickly too.

Running social accounts allows managing the conversation around your business, and by listening to visitors, followers, and customers, you can quickly react to positive and negative notions about your business. Through listening, you can improve your business for the better.

Social media is an engaging and fast method of communication between a business and its customers, and every company should be aware of how to use it to its benefit.

For example, you are communicating business updates and informational posts to keep every customer updated about your business.

Increase Sales, Leads, And Conversions

Without social media marketing, you will lose sales and leads to your competitors, and without it, it’s hard to achieve any significant growth online.

Compared to other marketing channels, social media marketing is a powerful way to increase sales, leads, and other conversions online. Whether you use social media to grow organically or via paid advertisement, it should be an integral part of your overall growth strategy.

While building your organic traffic from social media in most cases will be slow, utilizing paid social media marketing strategies allows you to grow and scale your business quickly with effective ad campaigns.

With social media marketing, companies and brands can build cost-effective advertising campaigns for their benefits. Advertising on Facebook and its network, on LinkedIn or Youtube, can expedite the scaling of your business.

The use of paid ads helps you create profitable sales funnels from the get-go, and using campaign data can improve your overall conversion rates in your business.

Social media marketing can provide local businesses with much-needed publicity to increase their sales. For example, a real estate business can scale their sales through the use of local social media presence and by being active on different platforms.

Companies looking to generate qualified leads profitably can use LinkedIn and Facebook ads to support their sales teams.

Keep Ahead Of The Competition

Understanding what your competitors are doing online and in social media enables you to compete with them directly and more efficiently.

Seeing what types of ads, and posts your competitors are publishing, and especially what ads and posts are doing exceptionally well, will help you create better campaigns yourself.

Are you looking for ideas and different angles to use in your marketing? For example, using the Facebook Ad library enables you to check all the ads your competitors are running now. Using the data to create better campaigns or to benchmark your ads against your competitors will keep you better informed of what’s working right now in your industry.

Social data from competitors unlock opportunities that you might’ve missed before, such as finding new influencers to expand your reach. Always include available social data into your competitive analysis.

Directly copying won’t get you far in social media marketing, but it can lead to you creating better content for your strategy. Always create unique approaches to attract your audience.

Researching through LinkedIn posts, and through Twitter’s tweets, you can learn more about what’s trending in your industry to keep your strategy fresh at all times.

Social Media Marketing Cost

Social media marketing costs include the cost of managing social media accounts, the creation of content, and paid social ads.

Depending on your goals of social media marketing, the cost will vary a lot.

For example, a smaller company just using Facebook to facilitate customer support, and the occasional promotion, you could get away with not spending much time, therefore, money into social media.

If you’re trying to achieve an active presence and grow an audience for your brand online, the necessity of investing more time into social media marketing becomes essential. The larger the goals and budgets will require more people involved in the process, which increases the costs.

For those looking into maximizing their social media marketing efforts investing in a dedicated team, an agency, and tools might be a good idea.

Overall, time and money invested into social media marketing can have benefits to a company’s bottom line, as it is a cost-effective way of marketing and offers higher return-on-investment(ROI) when done optimally.

While calculating ROI is easier for paid campaigns, it can be harder calculating it for other social media activities. Important is to have clear goals and sub-goals to measure social media activities profitability. For example, what’s the benefit and worth of long-term increased brand awareness for your business?

As a benefit of social channels is that they are free to operate, which means any company can start their social media marketing efforts for free and gradually start scaling when results are positive.

A good thing to remember is, organic social traffic and visibility can take time and has not any guarantees of success, which can make the initial investment into it hard. But over time, with better data, you can improve the results of it.

Social Media Marketing Strategies

What is an excellent social media marketing strategy? In short, a good plan uses the right social platforms for the right audiences, and it has data-driven goals for measuring the success of any social campaigns.

Creating a social media marketing plan that works for your business the best requires researching the best strategies that would work the best for you. Every unique business will need a custom strategy to achieve the most results out of a social media marketing strategy.

Gladly, a benefit of social media marketing is that there are multiple approaches to grow a business with social media: For large multinational campaigns, for increasing sales for an online store and even a small business without a marketing budget.

By setting achievable goals and benchmarking the results of your strategy to those goals will advise you on how to modify your strategy to gain the most results.

It might seem more obvious and just say that you want to achieve everything from brand awareness to sales with social media, but that will lead to bad habits and optimizing the wrong things.

It’s crucial to have a clear goal in mind that benefits your business when creating your plan.

A good strategy utilizes both free and paid social media marketing methods to its benefit. It’s possible just to run paid ads to your website, but by nurturing your whole funnel, you’re going to maximize the potential of any given ad.

Understanding how to reach your audience is key; for example, developing a multi-channel presence to build personalized experiences or creating online communities online, services your business’s growth on social media.

Virality

Only with social media marketing is content able to go viral. A single viral post can achieve more than years worth of content marketing and even paid advertising.

The more people are liking, sharing, and commenting on your posts, the more likely it is that your post will achieve virality. When a user likes or shares, it’s potential to be shared to the user’s network grows, and if the network themselves engage with the post, sharing it even further, is when it has reached virality.

Carefully designed posts that match audiences’ interests will have a better chance of going viral and bringing extra visibility from a single or a series of posts.

Engaging content that is easy to share, like or comment should be in your mind when planning your next content. Sometimes a subtle call-to-action can have a positive impact on how the content will spread around social media.

Achieving cross-platform virality requires more thought in how to implement cross-platform features that every platform can deliver. For example, utilizing a common hashtag in every platform to achieve your goals or publish similar content to the original post in other platforms as well.

While it’s hard to plan and achieve a viral post, if your post goes viral, you have to manage the increased visibility properly. Poorly managed viral posts will go to waste, and to gain that opportunity again is hard.

For example, let’s look at a give way post that went viral for a small online store. The post itself gathered more reach than the online stores’ ads received in the last month. While the added visibility for the online store was great, it wasn’t optimized to facilitate the growth. In the ending, the post itself gained a boost in traffic for one day only.

It’s crucial to take the gains from virality and turn into a more long-term generator of word of mouth to your business.

Connect With Your Target Audience With Advanced Targeting Options

Targeting the right people at the right time is your primary goal when using social media marketing to promote your business.

For example, using Facebook Page Insights to understand better who are your followers and likers, you can create more suitable content for them—analyzing what content has garnered the most engagement to keep creating similar types of content.

Try to understand why certain content worked better than the rest: was the difference in style, form, or targeting in general?

Many platforms do have overlapping users, as users have different uses for many platforms. Understanding how your target audience uses each network allows you to cater to your audience on every platform the right way.

If you’re unsure what your target audience is or you don’t have enough data to paint a full picture. Using advanced targeting options through paid social ads, you can test different audiences and see what content works best going forward.

Within social ads, you can create efficient lookalike audiences that help you scale your advertising profitably. A lookalike audience helps you discover a broader audience that might be interested in your offerings.

For example, utilizing lookalike audiences from parts of your sales funnel will improve your results from advertising. Having data from lookalike audiences enables us to create highly specific goal-based campaigns. When we want awareness, we can create a lookalike audience that increases the most awareness, and when we want sales, the same will apply.

Finding your core audience and engaging with them will keep you ahead of your competitors.

Advertising and Retargeting in Social Media Marketing

Advertising plays the most prominent part in social media marketing, as it’s the most controlled aspect of it. Controlling the flow of traffic to landing pages, websites, and social profiles, you can engage with more potential customers than ever before, and it’s fast.

Advertising in social media is a necessity when it comes to gaining traffic and sales from online, and it’s grown to be a significant part of any successful venture.

Organic growth through social channels will be harder to attain. Still, through effective ad campaigns, any company can reach its goals for brand awareness, online traffic, and eventually, sales and leads.

Most social media platforms allow advertising on their platform, as it’s the common monetization model for them.

Social advertising campaigns are a powerful marketing strategy from which every company can benefit.

The flexibility of the advertising grants businesses to expedite their social media strategies to achieve their goals faster.

For example, if you are looking to grow a sizable audience on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, with the use of ads, you’re going to reach audience-based goals quicker, if you have optimized ad campaigns for such use.

But ads in social media are much more than just growing followers on any given platform. It will create effective sales funnels and lead generation opportunities that companies who are lagging in their use, will find it harder to compete with those who use them.

If we look at online marketing as an ecosystem, the social ads go hand-in-hand with search engine ads creating a dynamic competitive-edge to grow your business.

Most essential social media platforms which you can advertise on:

• Facebook Ads
• Instagram (Through Facebook)
• Youtube Ads (Through Google Ads)
• LinkedIn Ads
• Twitter
• Snapchat
• Pinterest Ads
• TikTok
• Reddit

Retargeting

Using Social paid ads enables you to create remarketing campaigns to target audiences who have acted upon different signals on your websites or social profiles. Retargeting is a key social media marketing strategy that can have a considerable impact on your results from it.

Warming cold traffic into customers is a process where we create engaging retargeting campaigns to target those who acted in a predetermined way.

For instance, let’s look at how an online store would benefit from a retargeting ad: Your initial social campaigns would generate a lot of interest around your products, to increase sales you would want to retarget those who had grown interests in certain products.

A cold visitor that is initially interested in a product will be more likely to convert if the visitor has seen the product a couple of times more.

The way an online store would benefit from the use of retargeting is targeting visitors and customers who have dropped from its sales funnel. Let’s say a customer adds to cart a few products but later abandons it never to return. With a retargeting ad, you would show these products again to the customer, in the hopes of converting them. To make converting easier, you can have special incentives to convert the customer, like with special discounts.

In a nutshell, using retargeting in paid campaigns can increase your conversions, therefore, improving your return on ad spend (ROAS).

Social Media Marketing Analytics & Insights

The process of analyzing and measuring data from social media channels such as traffic, conversions, engagement, and audience-based data, is what makes social media marketing an effective method for growth.

As everything is measurable, succeeding will not be down to luck. The key is to understand why something worked or why it didn’t.

Web analytics in social media marketing makes success into an actionable plan. Choose a goal and measure everything that matters to that effect.

Analytics makes reporting the results of social media methods easier. Insight’s on how well the implemented strategy worked will make replicating a successful strategy possible.

At first, as personalized data isn’t available, try seeking out what worked for competitors in the past and develop the plan according to your personalized data as you go further.

Analytics helps you discover new opportunities all the time, whether its new ads and post ideas, content concepts, or a new type of customer to target you never thought would’ve been interested in your products in the past.

Social media platforms offer in-depth analytics tools to improve your organic reach and results and tools to optimize your advertising campaigns. Use third-party tools to gain more insight from audiences, competitors, or to obtain more ideas.

Website-based analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics will help you see how social traffic behaves and convert on your landing pages and website.

Introducing analytics into your social media marketing workflow will create a more cohesive experience for your audience in the end.

For improving your content’s engagement metrics, the profitability of your ads through improving conversion rates, or finding a better audience to target, through sufficient A/B testing of variables, you will discover what actions work best and in what situations.

Are these some of the benefits you would consider for your business, write to marketing@dodwellsolutions.com for a result proven social media marketing strategy and implementation. We take pride in your growth as so does our pride as an esteemed social media marketing company in Kenya.

Dodwell Solutions

The post Importance Of Social Media Marketing In Meeting Your Business Marketing Goals appeared first on Dodwell Solutions Limited.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing, internet marketing, online marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for both practitioners, marketing executives and researchers. Dodwell Solution’s social media platforms have built-in data analytics tools, enabling companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns.

Importance Of Social Media Marketing In Meeting Your Business Marketing Goals

1. Increase Online Traffic With Social Media Marketing
2. Global Reach And Visibility
3. Increase Brand Awareness
4. Engaging Content Marketing
5. Engaging Customer Service
6. Increase Sales, Leads, And Conversions
7. Keep Ahead Of The Competition
8. Social Media Marketing Cost
9. Social Media Marketing Strategies
10. Virality
11. Connect With Your Target Audience With Effective Targeting Options
12. Advertising And Retargeting In Social Media Marketing
13. Social Media Marketing Analytics & Insights

Social Media Marketing Analytics Tools

Most social networks provide their built-in analytics dashboards that are free to use. The free analytics tools are excellent for optimizing content and its engagement, measuring social activity in your channels, and for learning more about your followers.

• Facebook Insights
• Instagram Insights
• Pinterest Analytics, and Pinterest Trends
• Youtube Analytics
• LinkedIn Analytics
• Twitter Analytics

How to create a social media strategy

Step 1. Choose social media marketing goals that align to business objectives

The first step to creating a winning strategy is to establish your objectives and goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure success and return on investment (ROI).

Each of your goals should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Here is a S.M.A.R.T. goal framework. It will guide your actions and ensure they lead to real business results.

Here’s an example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal:

“We will use Facebook for customer support and lower our average response rate to under forty five minutes by the end of the quarter.”

Track meaningful metrics

Vanity metrics like number of followers and likes are easy to track, but it’s hard to prove their real value. Instead, focus on things like engagement, click-through, and conversion rates.

You may want to track different goals for different networks, or even different uses for each network.

For example, if you use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website, you would measure click-throughs. If Instagram is for brand awareness, you might track the number of Instagram Story views. And if you advertise on Facebook, cost-per-click (CPC) is a common success metric.

Social media goals should align with your overall marketing objectives. This makes it easier to show the value of your work and secure buy-in from your boss.

Start developing your social media marketing plan by writing down at least three goals for social media.

Step 2. Learn everything you can about your audience

Create audience personas

Knowing who your audience is and what they want to see on social media is key. That way you can create content that they will like, comment on, and share. It’s also critical if you want to turn social media followers into customers for your business.

When it comes to your target customer, you should know things like:

• Age
• Location
• average income
• Typical job title or industry
• Interests
• etc.

Get to know your fans, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs, and you will know how to target and engage them on social media.

Gather data

Don’t make assumptions. Think Facebook is a better network for reaching Baby Boomers than Millennials? Well, the numbers show that Millennials still outnumber Boomers on the platform.

Social media analytics can also provide a ton of valuable information about who your followers are, where they live, and how they interact with your brand on social media. These insights allow you to refine your strategy and better target your audience.

Step 3. Know your competition

Odds are your competitors are already using social media, and that means you can learn from what they’re doing.

Conduct a competitive analysis

A competitive analysis allows you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own.

It will also help you spot opportunities.

Maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook, for example, but has put little effort into Twitter or Instagram. You might want to focus on the networks where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant player.

Use social media listening

Social listening is another way to keep an eye on your competitors.

Do searches of the competition’s company name, account handles, and other relevant keywords on social media. Find out what they’re sharing and what other people are saying about them.

As you track, you may notice shifts in the way channels are used. Or, you might spot a specific post or campaign that really hits the mark—or totally bombs.

Use this kind of intel to inform your own social media marketing strategy.

Step 4. Do a social media audit

If you’re already using social media, take stock of your efforts so far. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What’s working, and what’s not?
• Who is engaging with your?
• Which networks does your target audience use?
• How does your social media presence compare to the competition?

Once you collect that information, you’ll be ready to start thinking about ways to improve.

Your audit should give you a clear picture of what purpose each of your social accounts serves. If the purpose of an account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping.

To help you decide, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is my audience here?
2. If so, how are they using this platform?
3. Can I use this account to help achieve my goals?

Asking these tough questions will keep your strategy focused.

Look for impostor accounts

During the audit you may discover fake accounts using your business name or the names of your products.

These imposters can be harmful to your brand—never mind capturing followers that should be yours.

Report them.

You may want to get your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts verified to ensure your fans know they are dealing with the real you.

Step 5. Set up accounts and improve profiles

Decide which networks to use

As you decide which social networks to use, you will also need to define your strategy for each.

If you can’t create a solid mission statement for a particular channel, you may want to ask yourself if it’s worth it.

Set up your profiles

Once you’ve decided which networks to focus on, it’s time to create your profiles. Or improve existing ones so they align with your strategy.

• Make sure you fill out all profile fields
• Include keywords people would use to search for your business
• Use consistent branding (logos, images, etc.) across networks so your profiles are easily recognizable

We’ve also got step-by-step guides for each network to walk you through the process:

• Create a Facebook business page
• Create an Instagram business account
• Create a Twitter business account
• Create a LinkedIn Company Page
• Create a YouTube channel

Don’t let this list overwhelm you. Remember, it’s better to use fewer channels well than to stretch yourself thin trying to maintain a presence on every network.

Step 6. Find inspiration

While it’s important that your brand be unique, you can still draw inspiration from other businesses that are great on social.

Social media success stories

You can usually find these on the business section of the social network’s website. (Here’s Facebook’s, for example.)

Case studies can offer valuable insights that you can apply to your own social media plan.

Award-winning accounts and campaigns

You could also check out the winners of The Facebook Awards or The Shorty Awards for examples of brands that are at the top of their social media game.

Your favorite brands on social media

Who do you enjoy following on social media? What do they do that compels people to engage and share their content?

National Geographic, for example, is one of the best on Instagram, combining stunning visuals with compelling captions.

Then there’s Shopify. The ecommerce brand uses Facebook to sell themselves by showcasing customer stories and case studies.

And Glossier is a great example of superior customer service on Twitter. They use their 280 characters to answer questions and solve problems—fast.

Notice that each of these accounts has a consistent voice, tone, and style. That’s key to letting people know what to expect from your feed. That is, why should they follow you? What’s in it for them?

Consistency also helps keep your content on-brand even if you have multiple people on your social media team.

Ask your followers

Consumers can also offer social media inspiration.

What are your target customers talking about online? What can you learn about their wants and needs?

If you have existing social channels, you could also ask your followers what they want from you. Just make sure that you follow through and deliver what they ask for.

Step 7. Create a social media content calendar

Sharing great content is essential, of course, but it’s equally important to have a plan in place for when you’ll share content to get the maximum impact.

Your social media content calendar also needs to account for the time you spend interacting with the audience (although you need to allow for some spontaneous engagement as well).

Set your posting schedule

Your social media content calendar lists the dates and times at which you will publish types of content on each channel. It’s the perfect place to plan all of your social media activities—from images and link sharing to blog posts and videos. It includes both your day-to-day posting and content for social media campaigns.

Your calendar also ensures your posts are spaced out appropriately and published at the optimal times.

Determine the right content mix

Make sure your calendar reflects the mission statement you’ve assigned to each social profile, so that everything you post is working to support your business goals.

You might decide that:

• 50% of content will drive traffic back to your website
• 25% of content will be curated from other sources
• 20% of content will support lead-generation goals (newsletter sign ups, ebook downloads, etc.)
• 5% of content will be about your company culture

Placing these different post types in your content calendar will ensure you maintain the right mix.

If you’re starting from scratch and you’re not sure what types of content to post, try the 80-20 rule:

• 80% of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain your audience
• 20% can directly promote your brand.

You could also try the social media rule of thirds:

• One-third of your content promotes your business, converts readers, and generates profit.
• One-third of your content shares ideas and stories from thought leaders in your industry or like-minded businesses.
• One-third of your content is personal interactions with your audience

Pro tip: Once you have your calendar set, use a scheduling tool to prepare messages in advance rather than updating constantly throughout the day.

We might be biased, but we think Dodwell Solutions is the best social media marketin company in Kenya.

Step 8. Evaluate and adjust your strategy

Your social media strategy is a hugely important document for your business, and you can’t assume you’ll get it exactly right on the first try. As you start to implement your plan and track your results, you may find that some strategies don’t work as well as you’d anticipated, while others are working even better than expected.

Look at performance metrics

In addition to the analytics within each social network (see Step 2), you can use UTM parameters to track social visitors as they move through your website, so you can see exactly which social posts drive the most traffic to your website.

Re-evaluate, test, and do it all again

Once this data starts coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy regularly. You can also use this information to test different posts, campaigns, and strategies against one another. Constant testing allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can refine your strategy in real time.

Surveys can also be a great way to find out how well your strategy is working. Ask your followers, email list, and website visitors whether you’re meeting their needs and expectations, and what they’d like to see more of. Then make sure to deliver on what they tell you.

Social media moves fast. New networks emerge, others go through demographic shifts.

Your business will go through periods of change as well.

All of this means that your social media strategy should be a living document that you review and adjust as needed. Refer to it often to stay on track, but don’t be afraid to make changes so that it better reflects new goals, tools, or plans.

When you update your social strategy, make sure to let everyone on your team know. That way they can all work together to help your business make the most of your accounts.

Conclusion

Social media marketing poses an opportunity to grow online for companies if they are willing to invest in their social presence. The many benefits of social media marketing have for companies small and large, can have a positive impact and differentiate them more against their competitors.

Not using social channels will negatively impact businesses in the long term, even if it might seem that your business doesn’t need it now. Eventually, it will hurt your bottom line.

Investing and researching early on proper strategies will help you discover new opportunities in the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing. The power of gaining a new way to reach new customers and showing your brand to new audiences is vital for success.

Most industries can benefit from social visibility, and the key is to find the right social media approaches as every business is unique, and every strategy won’t fit everyone.

To grow on social media, you need to have a solid strategy to base your actions on, and by measuring every step, you can replicate the most successful actions to keep growing.

The post Social Media Marketing In Kenya | For Corporates, SMEs and Other Business Companies appeared first on Dodwell Solutions Limited.

Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system written in PHP and distributed under the General Public License. Developed on pedagogical principles, Moodle is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other e-learning projects in schools, universities, workplaces and other sectors.

Moodle in itself stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment.

This makes Moodle e-learning solutions, to be on a more robust hosting environment.

How to Choose a Moodle Hosting Provider

While Moodle hosting isn’t technically a type of hosting, there are some things to take into consideration and some specific features to look for when choosing a host for a Moodle site.

And while many hosts in Kenya who do offer those features, there are also some who are dedicated to Moodle LMS hosting.

Either way, knowing what you need from a host in order for your educational eLearning portal to function properly is paramount in that decision.

Capacity

The first thing to consider is capacity. How many students will be accessing and using your site simultaneously?

Too many, and without a good host, and Moodle can run quite slowly, resulting in a poor user experience for your students.

Make sure your host can accommodate multiple users on your site at once, and at peak usage times.

Compatibility with Moodle

Next, check which version of Moodle you’ll be using. All versions of Moodle work best in a standard Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, or LAMP stack infrastructure.

Check that your host not only offers LAMP, but updates it on a regular basis to keep up with new versions of those components, but of the CMS you’ll be using.

In addition, select a host that will allow you to customize the PHP and MySQL configurations to accommodate Moodle. Not all hosts will let you do that.

Control Panel and Compression

Choose a host that offers a control panel through which you can compress files of 20 megabytes or more. This will make it easier for you to switch hosts in the future, should you ever decide to do so.

Also, make sure your Moodledata folder is not stored in the public folder, also for future ease of migration.

If all this seems a little confusing or just a lot to keep track of, look for a host that offers dedicated Moodle hosting.

That way, you’ll know they’ve thought of everything, and all you’ll have to worry about is creating high-quality educational content for your students.

Types of Hosting for Moodle

Shared hosting plans may not provide the power needed to host large websites for online learning, such as university courses that experience large enrollments.

Though, they will be adequate for smaller online learning services. For more power, you’ll want to check out Dedicated server plans or Virtual private servers depending on your need.

Dedicated Moodle Hosting

Dodwell Solutions is specialized in Moodle hosting in Kenya and the entire East Africa. We also provide Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud hosting to run your Moodle website on.

Our hosting services are scalable, making it able to handle everything from 500 to 10 thousand students.

Moodle Customization Options

Customization options for Moodle come in the following forms:

• Themes are template packages that change the way the course looks
• Plugins enhance the functionality of Moodle by adding additional features written in PHP
• Language packs help tutors to provide courses in their learners’ local languages
• Dreamweaver is a proprietary web development suite that can be used to create and manage Moodle pages
• Moodle is open source so you can alter its underlying code.

The open source nature of Moodle makes it very flexible and extensible. Most changes can be made in the administration panel; those that cannot can usually be hacked together using PHP.

Themes are one of the most powerful options for customizing Moodle. Themes can also change the look of an entire elearning website, letting companies add their own colors and branding.

Some organizations develop their own themes based on bootstrap content, so it’s easy to customize the theme for your own use.

The fact that plugins are written in PHP helps a lot. It not only helps in creating your own, but it means there are a lot that have been contributed by the user community.

Moodle Requirements

Dodwell Solutions’ Dedicated Servers

If you’re looking for a web hosting account for Moodle, you’ll need Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP for a smooth installation.

Moodle’s own documentation states that this is the “safest” way to install it, and there’s a huge amount of support for the LAMP stack.

Moodle can also be installed on Windows or Mac as a standalone piece of software – ideal if you want to give it a test drive before handing it over to your system admin team.

One-Click vs. DIY Installation

If you want to install Moodle to a hosting account but your provider doesn’t give you one-click installs, the process will be slightly more complicated.

Many hosting companies provide helpful customer support to walk you through this.

If you aren’t so good with the technical stuff, then you might want to switch to a hosting provider that integrates simple application installs.

Databases and PHP

But, if you still want to take this on, there are a couple of things that must be done before starting.

First, you’ll want to make sure that your host provides a database such as MySQL or MariaDB.

The host will also have to support PHP. You may have to configure PHP in your control panel.

In order for your Moodle website to work, you will also need a variety of PHP extensions installed.

If you are unsure if you have these with your host service, don’t worry. Moodle will check for these extensions while installing so you can install necessary scripts before continuing.

You can also talk to your hosting provider about their included script installations.

Final Installation Tasks

The rest of the process can be completed by following instructions on Moodle’s website.

Though, inexperienced web users will find it much easier to pick a hosting company that provides a one-click install of the application.

Moodle Needs:

1. A bare minimum of 160MB storage space for core files – but remember that you need space for your multimedia and content uploaded by students
2. Linux or Windows
3. A backup location with sufficient space (preferably in a remote location)
4. 256MB server RAM (again, a bare minimum – Moodle recommends 1GB for every 10-20 concurrent users)
5. MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL or Oracle support (MySQL or PostgreSQL recommended)
6. PHP
7. Remote backup provision to store copies of your students’ work
8. A web server
9. A modern web browser.

In summary, here’s what Moodle needs at a minimum vs what it needs to run optimally:

You may be tempted to get the most inexpensive hosting for your Moodle setup, but keep in mind that as your student body scales, you’ll need to scale your website as well.

Best to keep that in mind when selecting your web hosting package.

While many web hosting companies offer Moodle as a 1-click installer, not all of them will meet these requirements on their cheapest plans.

The remote backup provision is rarely offered on any web hosting plan, and will require a more complicated setup than a regular website.

We recommend opting for a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server, but have a chat with your host before committing.

For robust and more scalable hosting services write to elearning@dodwellsolutions.com

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SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, SEO is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility for relevant website searches. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.

Hiring a SEO specialist agency to help you optimize your website can be expensive but is money well spent. You can also chose to do the work yourself but it is important to know that SEO work is time consuming. It can often be better to hire someone to do the SEO work so that you can focus on other aspects of your business.

How does Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) work?

Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yandex use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query.

Search ranking factors can be considered proxies for aspects of the user experience. Our seo services organizes the factors into six main categories and weights each based on its overall importance to SEO. For example, content quality and seo keyword optimization research are key factors of content optimization, and crawlability and mobile-friendliness are important site architecture factors.

The search algorithms are designed to surface relevant, authoritative pages and provide users with an efficient search engine optimization strategy. Optimizing your website and content with these factors in mind can help your pages rank higher in the search results.

Unlike paid search ads, you can’t pay search engines to get higher organic search rankings.

7 reasons why you need to invest in SEO:

1.    Your customers rely on search engines

While it’s true that a significant amount of website traffic comes from sources like social media, the overwhelming majority comes from search engines. As a consumer yourself, it’s easy to understand this – when you have a question, you type it into a search engine. So do your customers.

2.    SEO Increases Website Traffic

Dodwell Solutions’ website optimization strategy will substantially improve the number of high-quality visits to your website. This not only gives you a better chance of making a sale, it’s also an opportunity to collect an email address for your mailing list, or simply create familiarity with your brand.

3.    SEO Generates More Sales

The more quality visitors your website receives the more leads and essentially sales you will generate. When you’re attracting traffic that’s actively looking for what you’re selling, this makes sense! If your website provides a more informative, engaging, and user-friendly experience than your competitors, there’s a good likelihood you’ll get the sale.

4.    Sustainable Results

With SEO in Kenya, you are able to expect sustainable results that your company can rely on for the long term digital marketing and search engine optimization. Our SEO company focuses on continuous, ongoing growth and development – we’re interested in results that last, not quick fixes and shortcuts, hence we are the best seo agency in Kenya.   

5.    Your brand credibility will improve with SEO

Customers will love you, if Google loves you first! By ranking well in Google, customers are able to identify that you are leader in your industry. Also known as the ‘Halo Effect’, unpaid visibility in SERPs is a vote of confidence from search engines that your brand can be trusted – and that you know what you’re talking about! 

6.    SEO outperforms paid advertising

Your competitors might have a bigger budget to throw at paid ads, but buying customers is never sustainable in the long run. Search engine optimization completes your marketing in this fast growing digital space based on a research done by best seo agencies.

Attracting unpaid, organic traffic by virtue of having a well-optimized website is a genuine investment – because it continues to pay off in the long run.

7.    SEO brings with it new opportunities

As new devices, smartphones and gadgets enter the market, people are starting to search for information and products in new ways. Voice, mobile and hyperlocal search are just some of these trends. If you’re the first among your competitors to adapt to these trends with our cutting-edge best search engine optimization services, you can leave them in the dust.

Why is SEO important for marketing?

SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct millions of searches every year, often with commercial intent to find information about products and services. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Greater visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can have a material impact on your bottom line competitive advantage.

However, the search results have been evolving over the past few years to give users more direct answers and information that is more likely to keep users on the results page instead of driving them to other websites.

Also note, features like rich snippets and Knowledge Panels in the search results can increase visibility and provide users more information about your company directly in the results.

Factors that Affect On-page and Off-page SEO Optimization

 1. Content Marketing

Before we dive into some of the factors of on and off-page SEO, let’s talk about content. Content is effective in both attracting the search engines and helping your organization make connections with site visitors. SEO meaning can be emphasized even further through your visual and written content.

The more quality, relevant content pieces that you have on your website, the more likely search engines will be to rank your pages higher on the search engine results page.

Similarly, the more engaging and effective content you have on your website, the more likely your visitors will be to spend some quality time on your website and maybe even make a purchase.

The secret to creating content that is optimized for both the search engines and your human site visitors is to create a variety of different types of content pieces that are well-written and on topics that are most relevant to your audience.

Here are just a few types of content that you can focus on to help improve your content offering and, thus, your search engine rankings:

• Blog posts and articles
• Social media content
• E-books and whitepapers
• How-To Guides and Tutorials
• Videos and audio recordings
• Infographics or other visual content

Another important thing to consider when creating content for your website optimization is SEO keywords and phrases. These are relevant words and phrases that a search engine user might type in when looking for answers to their questions or relevant products and services.

When you create content around these keywords and phrases, you improve your chances of ranking higher for these keywords on the search engine results page.

Yet another factor that can impact your content, and thus your search engine ranking, is how fresh your content is. Freshness basically refers to how often your organization posts new content to your site.

However, creating brand new content is not the only way to keep your content fresh. You can also freshen up your content by updating posts, rewriting them to make them more effective, or adding new information and statistics over time.

Though creating content takes time and resources, it will more than pay off in the end. Search engines love great content and consumers need quality content to better understand the value your organization can provide.

Start off by creating a few blog posts and work to build a following on social media. Once you have a group of loyal fans and followers, your organization can work to create different types of media to attract and engage new leads.

2. On-Page SEO Optimization/on site SEO optimization

The on-page SEO factors are those elements that happen on your website. These are the things that you have complete control over, meaning that you can work to improve these factors over time by following best practices for SEO. This goes beyond just your content marketing to the deeper levels of your site’s HTML.

Here are just a few of the on-page SEO factors that can help you improve your search ranking:

• Title Tag – The title tag on each page tells the search engines what your page is about. This should be 70 characters or less, including both the keyword your content focuses on and your business name.
• Meta Description – The meta description on your website tells search engines a little bit more about what each page is about. This is also used by your human visitors to better understand what the page is about and if it’s relevant. This should include your keyword and also provide enough details to tell the reader what the content is about. 
• Sub-headings – Not only do sub-headings make your content easier for visitors to read, but it can also help improve your SEO. You can use H1, H2, and H3 tags to help search engines better understand what your content is about.
• Internal Links – Building internal links, or hyperlinks to other content on your site, can help search engines learn more about your site. For example, if you are writing a post about the value of a specific product or service, you can link to the product or service page in your blog post.
• Image Name and ALT Tags – If you are using images on your website or within your blog content, you will also want to include your keyword or phrase in the image name and alt tag. By including this information, you also help give your SEO definition. This will help search engines better index your images, which may appear when users perform an image search for a certain keyword or phrase.

When strategically placing your SEO keywords and phrases on your pages, it’s important to avoid over-optimization. Google and other search engines will penalize your page if it attempts to use keywords too many times throughout the content.

In addition, you want to make sure that each piece of content focuses on just one or two keywords. This helps ensure that your content is specific and relevant. Trying to tackle too many keywords at once may negatively impact your search engine optimization as it often makes for un-focused and thin content.

While website content plays a vital role in your search engine rankings, it’s also important to consider your site architecture. Part of the optimization process is to ensure SEO definition on all parts of your web pages. You want to use a website design that makes it easy for search engines to scan or crawl your pages and content.

Building internal links between your pages, creating a sitemap and submitting your sitemap to search engines can both help improve your site’s crawlability and give your search engines a better understanding of your content.

Yet another concern when it comes to your site’s architecture is whether or not your website is mobile-friendly. Many consumers are searching for information and brands on their mobile devices.

You need to make sure that these users are able to view, read, and navigate your website from their mobile device. Not only does this impact the user experience, but it can also affect your SEO optimization.

3. Off-Page SEO Optimization

In addition to the on-page SEO elements that your organization has control over, there are also off-page SEO factors that can impact your ranking. Though you do not have direct control over these off-page factors, there are ways that you can improve your chances of having these factors work out in your favor. Here are a few of the different off-page SEO factors that can impact your search engine rankings:

• Trust – Trust is becoming an increasingly important factor in a site’s Google ranking. This is how Google determines whether you have a legitimate site that visitors can trust. One of the best ways to improve trust is by building quality backlinks from sites that have authority.
• Links – One of the most popular ways to build off-page SEO is through backlinks. You want to be careful here as spamming sites with your links is a quick and easy way to get your site banned from the search engines. Instead, take the time to build relationships with influencers and fans who create quality content and will link back to your site in their own content.
• Social – Another important off-page SEO factor are social signals, such as likes and shares. When it comes to boosting SEO, you want to look for quality shares from influencers. The more quality content you publish, the more likely you will be to get people to share your content with others.

Though you do not have direct control over what happens outside of your organization, you can increase your chances of improving off-page SEO simply by creating quality content that others will find valuable.

By giving your SEO meaning, you can catch the attention of more search engine users. The more relevant and interesting your content is, the more likely others will be to link to your content and share it on social media. The more people trust your content, the more the search engines will as well. 

Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO Definition

We’ve discussed SEO and how it works, so let’s break it down even further. When it comes to SEO, there are two different approaches that organizations take to optimizing their sites for the search engines – black hat vs. white hat SEO.

Some organizations are only interested in SEO so that they can rank their content quickly and make some money in the short-term. Black hat SEO involves tactics that focus on optimizing content only for the search engines.

This means that organizations are not considering the human visitors that will read and navigate their site content. These organizations will bend or break the rules in order to improve their site rankings to make a quick buck.

In the end, this approach to SEO produces pages that are often difficult for people to read and look a whole lot like spam. Though the sites may rank more quickly than those that are optimized properly, these sites are often penalized or banned by search engines rather quickly.

Overall, this get-rich-quick approach to SEO ruins the organization’s chance of building a website that is sustainable and able to bring in new leads for years to come.

On the other hand, white hat SEO is an effective approach to optimizing your website for search engines and building a sustainable business online. This approach to search engine optimization involves focusing on the human audience that will be clicking on and reading the site’s content. By giving your website SEO definition, you ensure that your digital content is easy to find and view. 

The goal of this type of search engine optimization is to produce the best content possible on a site that’s easy to read and navigate while also following the search engine’s rules for optimization.

It’s important to note that though black hat SEO tactics might help you rank quickly, it is inevitable that the search engines will eventually figure out what you are doing and penalize your site.

Depending on the severity of the offense, your site may not be able to come back from the penalties. The only way to build a sustainable online business that will bring in more organic traffic over time is to follow SEO marketing best practices and create effective content that your visitors will find valuable.

Why Dodwell Solutions?

Dodwell Solutions Limited is the best seo marketing company in Kenya with a proven track record, having achieved success in Kenya and other highly competitive markets across East Africa, more than 4 different countries worldwide including Germany. Dodwell Solutions has been able to take that search engine optimization knowledge and apply it to the local niches and businesses with outstanding results.

Do you want us to help you reach the world contact us on marketing@dodwellsolutions.com

The post Search Engine Optimization | All You Need To Know appeared first on Dodwell Solutions Limited.

Manage your Brand’s online reputation, get mention insights and grow sales.

What is social media brand monitoring?

Social media brand monitoring entails keeping an eye on your brand’s mentions online and responding to any engagement around it. It is an immediately reactive strategy and pertains to all kinds of talk about your brand: reviews, product questions and even service repair complaints.

Social media brand monitoring is not only about direct mentions or comments on your posts. It extends out to posts that write about your brand without tagging you. These kinds of posts don’t come up in your regular network notifications, which is why it’s important to set up your monitoring tools.

A successful social media marketing brand monitoring strategy will help you streamline all of your brand’s mentions and search parameters into one place so you focus your time on responding to important messages and developing a strategy from your insights. Your monitoring approach should start with listing everything you want to keep track of and how you’ll be responding to those messages.

Social media monitoring is an essential part of any social customer care strategy and public relation . It can lead to faster response times, PR crisis prevention and identification of brand advocates and online damage control. Responding to customers has been shown to lead to stronger brand loyalty among customers.

How to Monitor Social Media Mentions?

While you can do it a labour intensive way by performing several searches on different social media as well as Google, this is not the optimal method. The most comprehensive way is to use a Brand Monitoring tool and set it up with the right keyword.

You can start with your Company’s name and products. Then add your social media profiles to track comments and interactions there too.

For more advanced monitoring, you can proceed to add keywords and social profiles of your Competitors. This will help you to compare your brand’s presence and benchmark against others in your niche for a competitive advantage insight .

You can also setup e-mail Alerts (similar to Google Alerts) to let you know what is going on regularly.

You think brand is just for big businesses? Think again. Branding is essential for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Your brand is what the outside world perceive you to be. Thus it. Although you can influence your brand through well-designed logos, hilarious ad campaigns, carefully crafted press releases, or super-friendly service, ultimately, your brand is what the outside world says it is.

Branding can be a daunting task for small businesses and it’s easy to think brands are reserved for the Safaricom and Coca-Colas of the world. But branding is even more important if you’re a small business.

Four reasons to brand your small business:

A brand makes you look bigger

If you scream “mkulima mdogo,” or “industry big fish,” that is how your customers will want to compensate you. Branding will help elevate your business. Research other businesses—who do you look up to? Find an example of what you want to look like.

A brand builds credibility

If you want people to trust that you can deliver, you need to look the part. A well-designed brand is as important as brushing your teeth before the first date. Think about what you stand for and communicate that to your customers in everything you do, from the colors you choose to the words you use.

A brand makes you memorable

Stand out from the crowd, in the right way. Your customers have to remember you to find you. If your potential customer Googled your service, what would they find? Identify elements of your business that are different from your competitors, and showcase them in unique ways.

A brand attracts customers

When customers understand who you are and what you offer, they think about doing business with you. When they trust you and begin to love you, they tell their friends. Once your brand is solid, word of mouth is the best way to grow your base. Ask your customers for reviews and referrals. Make sure they know you appreciate the business. Build on great reviews by showcasing your happy customers. Grow your business further with well-planned and brand-consistent marketing campaigns, using the same colors, fonts, and personality.

In today’s market, a successful brand has to be consistent in communication and experience, across many applications:

• Environment (storefront or office)
• Print collateral, signage, packaging
• Website & online advertising
• Content publishing
• Sales & customer service

All these, part process of brand building!!!

What is brand building?

The definition of brand building is to generate awareness about your business using strategies and campaigns with the goal of creating a unique and lasting image in the marketplace.

Positive image + standing out = brand success.

Branding can be broken down into three phases:

1. Brand Strategy
2. Brand Identity
3. Brand Marketing

Brand Strategy will map out how you are different, trustworthy, memorable and likable by your ideal customer. It will convey your purpose, promises, and how you solve problems for people.

You can think of brand strategy as the blueprint for how you want the world to see your business.

Brand strategy is a critical and foundational piece for building a successful brand. It’s one of the areas that most businesses overlook because they jump right into the design and marketing.

Don’t make this mistake too! Reach out to us

Brand Identity is the way that you convey this to the public with visuals, messaging, and experience. Your brand strategy will influence how you present your identity and align it with your purpose for the most impact.

Your elements of brand identity should be applied across all channels consistently. It’s the way that your business becomes recognizable. This includes your logo, colors and fonts, website design, content, advertising, print or packaging, and more.

Brand Marketing is the way that businesses or organizations highlight and bring awareness to products or services by connecting values and voice to the right audience through strategic communication.

In recent marketing research report, the amplification of your brand image can be done effectively through various digital marketing activities:

• User Experience (i.e. your website)
• SEO & Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Paid Advertising (PPC)

Together, these channels are fundamental to gaining brand awareness and growth.

Have you found this essential for your business, let us know

The post Social Media Marketing | Brand Monitoring appeared first on Dodwell Solutions Limited.

Some commentators are predicting that this will change the way we live. Perhaps, but in what way? We will certainly remember this time for the rest of our lives. At least briefly, we will appreciate the smaller things in life a bit more. But will it really change anything fundamentally, for the long-term? If so, how?

But when people suggest “things will never be the same,” they’re talking about something deeper, about how we live—about our habits, norms, and ways of living. For parents, teachers, and students, it’s possible that some aspects of schooling might not go back to the way they were before.

Schools, Learner Management Changes

With COVID-19, schools are rapidly changing the basic way they do their work. Some have become old-fashioned correspondence schools, with the vast majority of interaction happening by written mail. Others have tried to recreate the school setting online using digital tools like Zoom, moodle elearning, congrea virtual class, BigblueButton Teleconferencing to name but a few. Others are in-between, directing students to online tutoring and practice programs, and posting videos. Most people think that they just want to get things back to normal. That makes sense. After all, the schools didn’t do anything to cause the crisis. So, why change them?

What lessons can we learn from this?

In the current crisis, COVID is forcing parents to be teachers and forcing everyone—students, parents, and teachers—to adapt to online learning tools.

This is not to say that all the online tools are very good. Many are not. But consider the following: Suppose a teacher tries three online tools during the crisis. She likes tool A, dislikes tool B, and is indifferent on tool C. This doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for mass transformation, does it? Well, actually, if the crisis had never happened, the teacher would never have known about any of these tools and wouldn’t have used B or C anyway. The key is that the teachers (and perhaps students and parents) now want more of A, and that could be transformative.

Third, our adaptations have indirect effects that lead to other changes. The necessary shift due to covid 19 has changed our neighborhoods in ways that were not intended. In the current crisis, the shift to online tools may also have indirect effects.

The potential long-term shifts from COVID-19

Below, I apply the above logic to several policy areas that I’ve seen discussed recently in the context of coronavirus. The first two topics—online tools and fully online learning—are the ones that come to mind first. The rest are potential long-term shifts that might fall more into the “indirect” bucket.

Use of online tools? It should be clear from my arguments above that schools will make much greater use of online tools. Most students in the country will soon have laptops and some type of internet access (though the digital divide will remain a significant concern). Teachers are going to like many of the tools out there, and they will have an easier time using them now that students have some experience with them. Online tools can be helpful complements to in-person instruction—instead of a replacement for it—allowing teachers to focus more on engaging students and mentoring them.

A shift to homeschooling and fully virtual instruction? There may be some shift in this direction. Families will get more accustomed to online learning. However, this approach has the significant disadvantage that families have to play the role of class monitor and teacher. Few families want or can afford that, given their work schedules and other responsibilities. Moreover, research consistently suggests that students learn less in fully virtual environments. In-person, teacher-led instruction simply has too many advantages.

A shift to private schools? A key question is: Which schools will respond better to the current crisis? It could be that traditional public schools respond better, meaning they provide better educational services to children and their families. This is possible because they are designed to have greater capacity. They have IT departments and directors facilitating special education, procurement, and more. They benefit from economies of scale and expertise. On the other hand, private schools have fewer rules to follow. With fewer government rules and more limited union contracts, private schools can be more nimble in responding to a crisis.

It’s too early to tell which sector will win out. One recent report suggests that private schools have switched to online instruction more aggressively than traditional public schools.

But if one sector responds better, this will be a meaningful victory, and one that parents will no doubt notice. The schools that respond best can expect more parents to select them, and expect more political support.

Private schools sustainability? Everything above about private schools also applies to private schools with one exception: Private schools are likely to get pummeled financially. With the exception of the small fraction of students attendance, families have to pay tuition. While the middle-class families that attend private schools will not be as hard hit by the COVID-19 economic crisis, everyone will be meaningfully affected. Over the next year, it is likely we will see a large spike in private school closures.

A shift to competency-based learning? Some education experts have argued that this may be the big winner of the current crisis. However, I think that’s unlikely. As with homeschooling, competency-based approaches have severe limits. While they let students learn at their own pace, competency-based approaches atomize learning and rely heavily on standardized tests. Students provide their competency, and can go on to the next topic, only by passing a test. Competency-based learning is “personalized,” in the sense that instruction is adapted based on existing skills, but, again, within the confines of the tests. Some of these are better than others, but I still don’t believe the more competency-based approaches will be the ones teachers and students gravitate toward in the current crisis. Competency-based learning suffers too much from the same problems as high-stakes testing more generally, which has fallen out of favor.

Yes, we will need more competency-based approaches in the short run to determine which students will be promoted to the next grade, given the lost learning time. But a significant long-term shift to online learning seems less likely.

Shifting roles of students, parents, and teachers? A shift to some online tools could shift the role of teachers, making them more like coaches and mentors. They can point students to very good online lectures and then be there to provide guidance and feedback, and to make connections across topics. The roles of students and parents could also shift. Now that they have more places to look, they may be more likely to try and address learning needs on their own. When roles change, everything else can change with it—though in less predictable ways.

One additional indirect effect: The politics of education

Politics is about how we make collective decisions. It involves values and power struggles. In a later post, I will consider how the COVID-19 crisis might (or might not) reshape the politics of education. Could this lead to big changes in public policy that aren’t yet evident? Might we see reductions in national and county regulation? More flexibility for students who choose courses and tools?

The academic calendar for ECD,Primary and High school students has been scrapped for the year 2020, this one change alone has disrupted at minimum 6 to 8 college and university intakes.

What more regulations do you anticipate as we move into the future? share your views.

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