CronxTech roundup: Croydon’s tech bloggers on lockdown easing, digital marketing and more
A roundup of what Croydon's tech community has been blogging about in the past few weeks.
Welcome to another of our regular round-ups of the top blogging and news from Croydon’s tech sector, connecting our community and giving others an insight into the innovations and thinking coming out of the Silicon Flyover.
With lockdown easing, our contributors this week share some pro tips for rebooting your business and engaging your customers with effective marketing, and increasing your reach with SEO. Plus more learnings for ongoing remote work.
Surviving Covid – Ash’s story
As many of you will know, much-loved member of the Croydon tech community Ash Balakrishnan was struck down badly by the virus and only narrowly escaped death. He shares his incredible story in this video interview including, with his typically positive, entrepreneurial outlook, “some of the business lessons I learned from the worst experience of my life”. We are so glad Ash is still with us and wish him all the best on his road to full recovery.
Coming out of lockdown
We’re also pleased to see some of our more building-centric tech businesses have either re-opened or are imminently re-opening their doors, notably South London’s leading tech startup space the TMRW hub, incubators of innovative awesomeness Sussex Innovation Croydon, our funky audiobook studios Ladbroke Audio, and the endlessly entertaining Limitless VR.
As we come out of lockdown, let’s use tech to rebuild stronger communities after Coronavirus, says Cronx resident and CEO of Loqiva, Marcus Chidgey.
StreetPin Tim says your Kodak moment is now. If you’re still rooted in a bricks and mortar business model, it’s now essential to get your business online, and StreetPin can help.
Bare PR offer their wisdom on how to speed up your business recovery and Smart Cow have this piece on how you can bounce back to business.
Hospitality, leisure and retail sectors can benefit from these 5 tips on easing the stress of reopening post-lockdown, courtesy of Rotaready – the workforce scheduling software startup housed in TMRW.
Working remotely and life under lockdown
Here are some excellent tips from Croydon’s Dhruvin Patel, founder of Ocushield on balancing work and life in the new, remote working normal.
Local recruiters Calco have some great advice on how to approach job interviews over video chat.
The design team at Home Office Digital have shared these learnings on how they ran a design crit session remotely for the first time. Like many of the new wave of public sector digital teams, where usability has to be universal, Home Office regularly uses “crits” to get constructive feedback on design work.
PropTech
Katherine Bew from PCSG has this on the importance of data and digital disruption in civil engineering.
InsurTech
Giroux shares how the right data analytics platform can help MGAs raise the bar.
Email marketing
As usual, Dotdigital have been blogging with top tips for email marketers, including a round up of their top marketing learning resources, a piece on how to increase ROI from post-sales emails and advice that will be useful to almost anyone on avoiding your email subject line being caught by spam filters.
Also for email marketers, Wizemail suggest trying to solve a problem your subscribers have, and never exploiting their trust.
Digital media, events and PR
Add making a video during a pandemic to your to do list, courtesy of Scaramanga, who say video, in particular animation, should be at the heart of your content strategy.
Speaking of video, we were impressed to see in Rise Media’s June highlights that they led on creating promotional video for the launch of the Times Radio.
ASP, the events website and tooling people, encourage you to “Be more Bandersnatch” and let your customers and event-goers choose their own adventure.
Bare PR posted this on how to spot if your marketing needs a rethink. (Great to see they’re on the path to becoming a BCorp, too).
Smart Cow gave this advice on marketing for virtual business events and reasons why they love social media in Croydon
And here’s a great read from Digital Virtue on their 10-step process to writing effective B2B blog posts
Web development and SEO
Web designers Design Brothers point out the top 3 SEO mistakes
Read it alongside Smart Cow’s 4 tips for successful website design and development and 4 simple steps for SEO improvement
Chilliapple wrote about how to master the science of online marketing and why you should consider outsourcing your web development
Digital Virtue dig a little deeper into the role page speed performance has in Google results, and how to optimise it
Digital skills
Could you be a Tech Buddy and help local seniors learn the basics and get online? Clear Community Web are recruiting for volunteers
Looks like congrats are due to Daniel Mullings of Techembrace, who was named Apps for Good’s Expert of the Year for his work with them.
Calling all CronxTech bloggers!
If you’re one of the Croydon-based digerati and we’ve missed your content in our round-up, let us know so we can add you to our checklist for next time.
Don’t have a blog? Yeah you do – use Croydon Digital as your blog, just hit us up via the contribute page.
Stay safe.