Digital – The Why and How? – Part 2
In Part 1 of “Digital – The Why and How?” we outlined why it is worth your while investing time, expertise and energy into digital marketing strategy. The opportunities and benefits your business can achieve are not only aspirational and exceptional, but can be measured in direct revenue growth and profit improvement. You would be hard pressed to find a business that doesn’t want to:
- Improve their customers experiences
- Get more customers
- And get more business from their existing customers
The big question is how to achieve this?
When it comes to digital, most businesses face tough questions, in working out how to best resource and capitalise on the opportunities that exist. Let’s face it, digital marketing strategies like conversion rate optimisation, search engine optimisation, social and search marketing, along with marketing automation and analytics analysis are complex enough. When you add in subjective skills of design, content marketing and user experience improvements it can become downright confusing.
Then on top of this, even if you want to invest; finding talented executives or specialists with the right digital marketing skills can be difficult and costly.
According to a 2014 State of Digital Marketing Talent study there is a massive “talent gap”, between what businesses want and value, and who they can find.
Again from the Online Marketing Institute
While this presents problems for large corporate enterprises, that are able to make significant investments across the spectrum, the challenges facing small NZ companies are a little different and if anything more complex.
According to a MBIE report, 97% of enterprises in NZ are considered to be small businesses, with less than 20 staff. While small teams can produce naturally good all rounders; to compete in a global economy necessitates that your digital delivery is world class, and your investment and activity must be both balanced and focused. To be competitive you need expertise and experience.
Without these skills, it is easy to err on the side of caution, and do nothing at all! The only thing worse maybe, is to throw so much investment at it, that some outcomes are achieved; but in reality you achieve a poor return on that investment!
While finding experienced expert digital skills is difficult! For small businesses, adding additional direct staff, particularly specialists; is likely too costly and can pose significant risks. The overhead of direct employees can be difficult from an ongoing cost perspective, let alone considering the impact if they leave, don’t deliver the results you expect or simply don’t work out. Recruitment, replacement and re- training is time consuming and unproductive.
The alternative is engaging digital marketing strategists that have the necessary skills you require, from outside of the business. This approach can offer many benefits, and deliver lasting business performance improvements.
- It can provide a new and fresh perspective to your marketing approach.
- Finding a partner with the right experience and expertise can add instant value and provide a low cost to entry.
- There is no recruitment, training, Kiwi Saver, ACC, office overheads or holiday costs.
- It will allow you to plan, execute and measure digital initiatives with minimal long term risk.
- For the most part you can scale programmes up or down to suit changing circumstances.
- With the right digital partner you may be able to link your online performance to their remuneration.
Most importantly – it allows you to concentrate on the core value you create and deliver to the customers of your business!
Stuart Clark
www.strategus.co.nz
