You will be surprised to know that when it comes to digital marketing, things are not very different between a small business and a large corporation. The tools, platforms, tactics, analysis and methods have a lot to do even among very different sectors. Despite having more than 15 years in full course and being one of the most developed marketing tools in history, digital marketing as a discipline is still a practice with many pores, and little standardized. If someone claims to know the golden rules to undertake a successful digital marketing strategy, you can be sure they are lying.
Think about it, today there are thousands of companies around the world that suffer from visible clutter within their platforms. With extremely heavy and archaic websites, YouTube channels with video productions worth hundreds of thousands of pesos, but no plays, professional Google profiles practically abandoned and a frank irrelevance in any social network. Surprising more: many of these companies already have a so-called “ digital marketing strategy“, and an agency that bills quite well for this.
How could you explain something like that? A brand that invests hundreds of thousands of pesos per month to maintain and strengthen its digital presence in a marketing strategy without head or feet, without visible results, without a precise and clear strategy, with confusing and improvised reports, making an extensive expenditure in resources and platforms that it doesn’t really need. When I think of people who see digital marketing agencies as “smoke and mirrors”, I think they are often right.
Xochitl Galvez, the best example of an expensive, improvised and irrelevant political marketing campaign.
All of this is not something I hold at random. In the 12+ years of experience I have in digital, and working for different agencies with huge clients, I have witnessed all sorts of, (to be kind) aberrations ” areas of opportunity“, where it is clear to me that there is no standard of best practice for almost any digital activity.
It’s not about me, or my experience much less complaining about the great job opportunities I’ve had in my lifetime, we’re just talking about context. So, are the big brands and agencies a reference of good practices for digital marketing? The answer is: No, definitely not.
How to adapt a digital marketing strategy to my business?
I know that the preamble to this article is extremely long, but I think it is a necessary context to create a reference in this regard. If you need to design the marketing strategy for your business, project or company, the first thing you need to do is to never take as a reference what a big brand has done before, ironically, the reality is that often they don’t even know what they are doing.
That said, one thing that will always be very helpful is to be extremely schematic. Create a document on a Word, Excel, or handwritten sheet where you describe each and every one of your products or services in a first chapter, then move on to your objectives.
Of course, the objectives of every small business project or company are the same: to become a reference in our sector, to gain customers around us, to have new branches, to diversify our customer portfolio, etc. etc. etc. And of course we are talking about different stages of development in our business. But set yourself short and medium term objectives, one of them can be to recover your initial investment with the sale of your product or service. Think small for a moment.
The paths of your strategy will draw themselves as long as you keep your feet on the ground and never stop. From drawing your initial objectives, your Target, “buyer persona”, or ideal client will tell you which platforms to guide your first steps towards. Once you know which platforms to use for your business’ digital marketing strategy, the tactics and resources you will have to employ will be a simple answer to answer. But this is something we will have to talk about in another post.