Digital Marketing: Is Doing Nothing an Option?
Getting started with digital marketing is often the hardest step to take. We speak with many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches that know they need to do something but there’s always one more thing to square away before launching their digital marketing plan. There will always be one extra element that could make digital marketing better but if it will cause an indeterminate delay in launching your digital marketing activity, it’s best to take a few initial steps and build on that rather than trying to craft a perfect scenario before getting started.
A marathon runner doesn’t wake up the day of the race and pound out 26.2 miles. They work up to it via a training regimen. The training regimen is often a result of just experimenting with running in general before discovering they had a passion or talent for it. In other words, they had to try out the activity before they started becoming proficient at it.
Digital marketing beginners should have a similar path. If you’re starting from scratch, get a basic lead generation mechanism (like a website, social media page, or affiliate form) established. Then start experimenting with channels to drive traffic to that lead mechanism. Will the implementation be perfect? Absolutely not, but it will provide some baseline discoveries to guide you into what digital marketing activities have the most value for your business. Furthermore, some early progress and results will motivate you to get other digital marketing elements together and launched.
The same guideline applies when contracting out digital marketing services. If you can meet a pre-requisite list for a particular digital marketing activity but not others, start there and then build up to others. For instance, we have a client that wanted SEO, website lead generation landing pages, email marketing, and social media to be in their digital marketing plan. However, they didn’t have a sufficient database of contacts to launch an email marketing campaign and content for SEO was in a state of disarray. Instead of hitting the brakes on everything we started out by updating the website and setting up landing pages, starting social media posting, and set up a temporary pay per click campaign while the SEO elements were being developed. In this way the foundations were started and the elements with missing pieces could be develped using data and insights from the iniatial digital marketing.
Procrastination in launching digital marketing efforts is often a smokescreen for being overwhelmed or unorganized. The volume of information about digital marketing can make a launch seem like a more daunting task then it needs to be. Doing nothing ensures that you will fall further behind and gives the competition even more time to fortify their position as market leader. Take a simple first step with your digital marketing and build from there. Otherwise doing nothing might be a permanent decision.
