Over the following weeks companies in Italy will be busy adapting their systems to the imminent, and obligatory, switch to the electronic invoice. From the first of January 2019 this aspect of company activity will also abandon paper to take its digital form. It is yet another sign of the digital transformation underway in the face of which companies are called to make numerous choices; not only administratively.

Small businesses in Italy often read these choices – which are actually opportunities – as useful tools to enhance operational efficiency, forgetting that digital transformation is also changing commercial and marketing activity. First among them – again – is the activity to improve our corporate website which is our showcase to the world! A huge opportunity but, like all showcases, it should be updated often if you want to attract interest.

Much has already been done, but much remains to be done, too. The website is often seen as a necessary evil (a bit like the electronic invoice) and once completed it is often forgotten. Corporate sites are often made unprofessionally and have a self-congratulatory tone:

• They are made cheaply: with do-it-yourself photos and texts and with the foreign languages translated by a friend on the weekends.
• They give us plenty of details on how many square meters our warehouses cover but not enough reasons on why a potential customer should be interested in our products.

The company website must be created by marketing specialists. We don’t necessarily have to spend a lot, but not choose the cheapest one either. The choice today is vast.

If you want to explore these themes further then check out my new book Export in 7 Steps I presented it in my September 2018 post