The High Street Is Dying: Is Your Business Next?

Shopping on the high street has become a thing of the past, as more consumers make the move to buying online — and it’s time you got serious about digital too if you want to avoid losing out to your competitors for good.

While you’re treasuring traditions with your costly high-street store, the competition is making the cheaper transition to a fully-optimised, e-commerce website and capturing your customers through effective, profit-driven marketing campaigns.

No business is immune to the curse of the high street — and more leading businesses have found themselves falling into administration because of it, leaving no hope for revival.

As a result of the digital revolution, technological developments have accelerated. The future is online, and if you haven’t started budgeting to align with the changes in shopping habits, it’s something that you must now act on.

From Poundworld to Toys ‘R’ Us, the past few months have been damaging for some of the world’s most familiar brands as they enter administration and put thousands of jobs at risk. Clearly, it’s a critical time to focus on your business’ online strategy — and we’re going to help you do it.

Value your customers’ initial interaction

Consumers like quick contact with staff when they enter a store and are willing to spend a total of 13 minutes before being served — if you’re lucky. Businesses lose 75% of their customers because of this, which may also explain why so many are migrating online. But be warned, that doesn’t mean they’ll stay here if they continue to receive slow service.

Your focus needs to be on offering the best user experience from the second your customer clicks from a search page to your brand website. Did you know that 25% of users abandon a website if it doesn’t load within four seconds? This will be detrimental to your online sales. Not only does load speed play a huge part in how users get onto your website, but it also affects your search engine rankings, as Google favours websites that are dedicated to providing a fast and efficient user experience.

A fully developed design

People love something that is visually pleasing and is easy to use, and this can determine whether a consumer shops with you or with your competitor. Whether you’re making the move online or already have done, it’s important to consider what the user is actually seeing when surfing your products or services.

There are a lot of factors that you must consider when it comes to website design, especially when 38% of people will stop engaging if the content/layout is unattractive. You need to also consider what device your consumer is browsing on and ensure that your site is fully optimised for that gadget (e.g. desktop, mobile, tablet, or other). Word-of-mouth is everything and 57% of consumers won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website — regardless of how they viewed it.

Look at the likes of ASOS and Boohoo.com, they’re solely based online and are two of the biggest players in their industry — showing that the competition is high and that your business can’t sit still in a digital world that is constantly moving forward.

Writing creative and enticing copy

The written copy on your website is extremely important to capture the interest and engagement of your audience. It needs to be creative, as research suggests that users get distracted after only eight seconds. Not only will your persuasive and informative copy encourage users to interact and conduct more actions on your website, but it will also add and improve its SEO value. This means more traffic and a greater chance of conversions.

Including target keywords across your website will help each page appear on relevant user searches too. This will boost rankings on search engines to ensure high-volume traffic, greater onsite duration rates and increased conversions.

Adapting your brand to fit the online world is not an easy task, but it’s a task that is dangerous to ignore. Contact our expert team today to find out how we can help your business by filling out the form below.

Jake Holyoak Digital Marketing Executive Mediaworks