Getting a Handle on your digital presence

Handle is a new product from Bizfitech that scores and benchmarks a company’s digital presence, suggesting ways it can be improved.

Handle brings together information from a business’ website, social media activity, customer feedback, credit score and other financial information in one easy-to-access website, so that a small to medium sized enterprise (SME) in the UK can understand how the world sees it digitally.

How a firm is viewed by counterparts, potential customers, employees and others in the supply chain directly impacts its chances of winning business, referrals, investment, good quality staff and so on.

The information provided by Handle can be used by treasuries or accountants in negotiations with other firms when discussing pricing, credit terms, invoicing and other cash management activities and by marketing departments that want to improve customer perception, and usage, of their firm. Other potential end uses include enhanced recruitment, expansion abroad where a digital presence is vital, and so forth.

The digital world is now more than ever a fundamental part of running an SME. From search engines, digital advertising, social media, banking, borrowing money, even filing company information, tax, and so on all occurs online.

A firm’s digital presence matters but small business’ often don’t have the time to investigate and improve their profile in the opinion of the Business Finance Technology Group (Bizfitech), which has built Handle to try to rectify this.  Bizfitech is part of the Blenheim Chalcot group of companies, which also owns ‘GTNews’.

Handle can be tried for free for the first 30 days and is available to subscribers from £9.99+VAT per month thereafter, or on an annual £99 fee basis. It combines the varied and complex data available about any business online and seeks to distil it into relevant insights so users can quickly see how they are perceived, how they compare, and the steps available to them to improve their digital presence.

All the data in Handle updates monthly so business owners can track progress over time and see how their digital profile is changing.

Development work & pilot participants

Handle has been created for small business owners, initially in the UK, and been developed and influenced by almost 200 small business owners who had early access to the online data product over a six month pilot period.

One of the pilot participants, Rebecca Aldridge, managing director of Balance: Wealth Planning took part in the user testing programme and said: “As a business that finds the majority of its new clients online, Handle allowed us to see how we are being perceived and then take control of our online reputation. For example, the scores on the dashboard have motivated me to work on my business’ search engine optimisation (SEO).”

FSB support

The UK Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) commercial director, Dave Stallon, offered his support, explaining that 86% of FSB members use the internet for business’ development and 79% for selling goods so it is a vital conduit. “Handle is hugely relevant to our existing members,” he said, “and something that should prove highly attractive to other smaller businesses. With the information in Handle, a smaller business can improve its commercial performance and gain a competitive advantage … if it builds the insights from Handle into its Key Performance Indicator (KPI) planning.”

Bizfitech chief executive, Olly Betts, from the Nottingham-based technology business that developed Handle, says that the reason it, “exists is to empower small business owners with data in a language they understand. I know exactly how hard running a small business and protecting your online reputation is, so I am incredibly excited to launch Handle. We want to help more business owners see, understand and use the information available about their business. For too long information has been used to make decisions about small businesses with no way for the subject of all that data, the business owner, to efficiently understand or affect it.”