We went to a Google Digital Workshop

On Tuesday, two of the Liquidshop team, Marketing Executive Dominic Mayo and Business Development Manager Nick Donovan, headed out to Taunton to attend a Google Digital Workshop, run in partnership with Lloyds Bank. 

We enjoyed a talk from Patrick Cutliffe, an expert speaker for Google, who discussed ways of setting up a digital marketing plan for your business. He emphasised the need to ensure that the content was relevant to the audience, and how this requires research and a good knowledge of customer data to know exactly who they are, and what content would most appeal to them, and also which platform to use.

Patrick talked about the need to have your site optimised for different displays such as mobile and tablet, due to the large percentage of shoppers who are using mobile devices. He also discussed utilising free services such as Google My Business and Google Analytics to promote the business on the search engine, and to have access to the customer data to better inform decisions surrounding content creation. Using different methods of marketing such as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Optimisation) were also discussed, but the fundamental point he was keen to impress on us was the need to understand and value the audience. Without a clear understanding of your audience, like what sites they look at, and what platforms they use to read content, then any content created wont reach that audience, putting all the effort to waste. 

In the afternoon, we learnt about how to keep websites safe, in the context of the cyber attacks that have made the headlines recently, with major breaches affecting British Airways, Uber and Facebook. The Lloyds Bank team talked through the different ways hackers attempt to infiltrate sites, and how the try to infect your site through malware from malicious links on emails. The level of sophistication seen from hackers means that everybody has to be on guard against inviting malware onto their systems,  as hackers can now replicate internal calls and emails with increasing accuracy, making it difficult to spot potential fraudulent emails and texts. Continually training your staff to stay vigilant is an important step, as is ensuring that you keep your systems updated with the latest software patches. Those updates may be annoying, but they can often contain crucial information and software updates that protect from malicious attempts to hack the site or distribute malware. 

Overall, going to the Google Digital Workshop was a great experience. We picked up some good advice and tips on improving our digital marketing and content, and we are looking forward to putting those into practise. It was also good to refresh ourselves on the dangers of cyber attacks, as this is a big issue at the moment, especially in the ecommerce market. The more information we have, the better advice we can pass onto our clients about keeping their websites safe and secure!