REAL TALK TIME
Business owners, we need to talk.
As the months go by and I talk to business owner after business owner, a strange pattern has emerged in how many of you approach digital marketing.
It is a strange combination of high & low performance expectations, small investments and short timeframes.
Firstly, many of you are not sold on whether digital marketing can be of value for your business.
Now this very well may be true, and there are many, many business types and business situations where digital marketing may not fit the business goals or your target market needs.
Let’s look at an example to better demonstrate this category. A friend of mine owns and runs a business where they manufacture and distribute a commercial product for large commercial use. As they are the only provider of this type of product in the entire state, competition is near non-existent.
They have been around for decades and are well known with commercial installers and mechanics in the area, as well as retailers. If you need the product they produce, then you have to go to them. Now, I still think I could make a case for a digital presence for them, but for expediency’s sake, let’s agree that digital marketing isn’t a high priority for them.
If you fall into this category, with no competition, fantastic brand awareness and enough work to employ a staff of 15, feel free to put your self in the ‘digital may not be a great option for me’ camp.
I think you would agree that most businesses do not fall into this unicorn type situation, and so let’s continue.
Back to my point though, many of you doubt digital.
You are doubtful of it’s efficacy.
You think it’s a bunch of fake clicks from India.
You think social media is a bunch of twenty somethings sending each other silly videos of otters shaking hands and cats squeezing themselves into vases.
And you know what? That’s totally ok. You do you. I’m not here to convince you of of the power of digital, that’s a discussion for another day, and frankly, maybe just go have a look at many of the biggest and most successful companies in the world and tell me how the internet worked out for them i.e. Google, Amazon, Microsoft to name a few.
What drives me nuts is when this disbelief and mistrust of digital is paired with unreasonably high expectations of digital marketing performance. I see this all the time and it is ridiculous.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
Think about it.
You don’t believe digital works, but at the same time think it should work crazy better than every other marketing channel ever in the history of everything. This is completely illogical. Spock would be appalled.
It goes something like this.
You spend as little as humanly possible on all aspects of your digital presence i.e. you never got a real logo designed by a graphic designer; you got your friends mum’s brother’s cousin to build you a website; you used photos you took on your phone; and you spent five seconds throwing together some text to describe your products and services on said website. You may have even run a few Facebook ads and Google Adwords too.
You have probably up until this point spent as much as it costs for one full page ad in a newspaper. If that.
You then sit back and expect this colossal investment to turn into a flood of paying customers that are immediately worth 10-20 times your initial investment amount, in a week.
You cannot expect a small investment of time & money, to pay off big time, in a short amount of time.
NOPE
That’s not how marketing works, in fact, it’s actually not how anything works but that’s a story for another day.
So much goes into the buyers journey and to think that one flash of your ad on social or one click on your google Adwords ad is going to compel a person to hand over their hard earned cash after looking at your half baked website is ludicrous.
If you don’t believe in digital, that’s okay, just don’t expect it to build your business in an instant with no real investment of time and money!
BIG DIGITAL LOVE
Clay
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