Editorial: The digital battle is one you must win

Sadly, I’m too old for that.

I often look on in awe as my kids confidently navigate their way around the internet or their tablet devices and think back to my own childhood experience of computers. They were almost prehistoric in comparison.

I’m pretty competent with a PC and active on social media with a Twitter handle (@mrmikeberry if you’d like to follow), Facebook profile and occasional post on Instagram. I have a professional LinkedIn profile and a (barely used) Google+ account.

But that’s just five social channels. I struggle to keep on top of those and I’m not running my own pub business. There are hundreds of other apps or services out there that claim to help you communicate with your customers and boost your digital presence.

And that’s before you even start considering how technology can improve your day-to-day operations with, for example, contactless payment, cloud services and sophisticated EPoS systems. Our feature pages on technology (p30-39) will help explain that.

Navigating the digital landscape is tough. When you a run a pub there are myriad issues to deal with and problems to solve every day. Digital marketing is probably not all that high on your agenda. But it should be.

The results of our digital survey (see p1), in association with Heineken, are not especially surprising. They paint a picture of time-poor licensees struggling to get to grips with what works and where best to focus their efforts.

If you’re going to concentrate on getting one thing right, make that your pub’s website. It’s your shop window and often customers’ first experience of your business and what they can expect from you. If the information you supply is out of date or poorly presented — or, for one reason or another, you don’t even have a digital presence — what does that say about your pub?

While writing this piece, I looked at a random selection of pub websites that I found via a couple of regional brewers’ corporate sites, as well as some from independent pubs. My research wasn’t very encouraging.

Websites ranged from, in my opinion, the average to the downright dreadful. One site actually admitted the information on it was “not guaranteed to be correct” and was littered with spelling errors. Astonishing! Another claimed that sport was a big part of the pub’s offer, while highlighting a rugby match that took place nine months ago!

Obviously this is just a snapshot and many pubs have excellent websites. But my point is that it’s not expensive or particularly arduous to get a decent user-friendly site built that will give potential customers the information they are after.

To those that say ‘my customers aren’t online’ — who are you kidding? The pubgoers of the future will be far more discerning than those
of today. For your business to survive and thrive, a proper website is as important as your beer range, food offer, interior design or events calendar.