iON delivers digital marketing strategy courses on behalf of many Councils and government bodies in Ireland. When getting attendees to join the course the government agencies have to sell the workshops as Digital Marketing training. The businesses, typically SMEs are left with the disbelief that the course is going to show them tips on how to become a Twitter Pro or how to integrate their “face-blog-tweet-feed to their web-analytics-ppc campaign”. In essence the business only attend the courses if they believe that that they are going to find the ingredients of the secret sauce that they can then rub into their keyboards. The attendees come because they want to DO more stuff.
Government agencies are acutely aware that the business that they have fostered from being SMEs to becoming larger employers were all founded on strategic business plans. The strategic thinkers in the business create a vision, a mission and objectives. Those objectives then translate into tactics and tasks. The digital marketing tactics are only undertaken if they assist the plan. Success comes not from the the tactical deployment of digital marketing but the strategic thinking that precedes it.
Most SMEs feel that if they are not knee deep in tactics then they are not working hard. They want to be “using Facebook” or making their website “more interactive”. They prioritise tactics above strategy and prefer to work harder than smarter. The hard working SME feels that there is a secret to gaining new customers and they if they try often enough with enough tools, they will in fact find the secret formula. They often fail due to lack of clarity as to who their customer is, the market they serve and misunderstands their own value proposition.
There is of course a secret formula, well a formula that isn’t that secret at all. The formula is to create a strategic plan for the organisation that leads to a strategic digital marketing plan.
So if creating a strategy, a plan and sticking to it is so easy to understand, why doesn’t every business do it? Because it’s easier to Tweet, post to blogs or design yet another website than it is to do the heavy thinking and introspective review required to write a strategic digital marketing plan, based upon evidence and linked with profit related key performance indicators. Doing is a lot easier than Thinking.
iON offer a range of training and strategy creation services. If you need a nudge in the right direction, call Yolanda on 028 90455911.