3 Reasons Your Business Should NOT Go Digital
Make sure digital marketing is right for your business before committing
Our content manager is going to hate me.
He told me to write an article about why all small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) should go digital to market their product/services. But instead, I’m using this article to tell you the exact opposite.
While utilizing digital channels such as social media, ecommerce sites, and blogs can be extremely helpful for increasing reach and revenue for most businesses, digital channels are by no means a silver bullet that can solve all business problems.
In fact, being successful in the digital marketing world requires not only a coherent, well-constructed digital strategy, but also committed team members in your business who are constantly optimizing multiple channels according to this digital strategy.
In short, while digital marketing is an extremely attractive marketing method, it requires significant investment in time and resources to get it to work for your business.
For this reason, before investing time and money into digital marketing, it is absolutely crucial for all businesses to carefully examine whether digital channels are a good fit for their current objectives and commitment level.
Otherwise, you risk not only wasting money and effort, but precious time that is essential for your company’s survival.
During my time as a consultant and as cofounder of Humanlytics, I have run into this exact situation countless time. That’s why in this article, I will show you three of the most common cases I’ve encountered of a digital strategy mismatch, to prevent it from happening to you.
Case 1: When going digital does not magnify your “core competency”
A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from one of my clients in China, who runs a weight-loss chain with over 200 stores across the country. The client told me, “Bill, I want to create a product line for digital channels such as TaoBao and Jingdong because there are so many opportunities there!”.
While it sounded like an attractive venture, I strongly advised against it. Why? For one important reason — selling online is not the core competency of their company.
A “core competency” is the key capability or resource that makes a company successful. In my client’s case, it includes their customers (which are mostly concentrated in one city), their service expertise, and their vast experience in weight loss coaching. It is these core competencies that make them so good at what they do — making sure each person that comes through the door finds a weight loss solution that works.
If they were to enter the fierce ecommerce space, they would not able to leverage their core competency in service expertise and coaching experience. Ecommerce would therefore take a significant amount of energy away from their core business, instead of contributing to it.
Given the competitiveness of the weight-loss related ecommerce market in China, combined with the lack of human resources and capital to launch this brand new e-commerce division, the future does not look so bright for my client’s ecommerce venture.
Instead, I recommended that they instead launch an online personal weight-loss coaching service. This service will leverage their vast experience that they have in helping people losing weight, along with the expertise that helped them excel in weight loss.
In addition, this service will also help my client use their underutilized therapists and consultants more effectively, and improve the quality of service they can offer to their customers.
How does this case apply to you?
When you are deciding to go digital, don’t simply pursue the most popular method on the market. Don’t just follow the method that your friends or competitors have succeeded with either.
Instead, look inside your company, and ask yourself, “what is the ‘core competency’ that makes my company successful?” Then build a digital strategy around magnifying that core competency.
Only this way can you have your new digital strategy working with, instead of against, your current business to achieve greater success for your business.
If you don’t think any digital strategy will help you leverage your “core competency,” then digital might simply not be the correct channel for you at the moment. That’s completely okay — I have seen many companies succeed over the years with minimal digital presence.
Case 2: You’re growing fast without a digital presence
If you see me speaking at a conference, or pitching a client, I will usually tell them “having a digital presence is extremely crucial to the success of your business, as over 50% of companies now advertise via digital channels.”
While I strongly stand by every one of these words, I admit that I omitted a little fact — almost 50% of businesses still do not advertise through digital, and many of them are doing okay.
A recent experience with a potential client illustrated this case perfectly.
At Humanlytics, while we are developing our AI marketing analytics product, we are looking for companies who will help us test our product as focused beta testers. In return we help them with their digital strategy and analytics (if you are interested, email @bill@humanlytics.co. You get the point :D).
We pitched this idea to a very fast-growing organic pasta company within our personal network, trying to convince them to come on board with this beta testing program. They said no, and they are smart to do so.
To give you a little bit more background, the company achieved their success by building a supplier relationship with large grocers such as Whole Foods and Fresh Market to carry their products. And every year, they are expanding to hundreds more stores across the country.
Through this “traditional” method of business development, they managed to secure multiple rounds of funding and made it to the prestigious “Chobani” food incubator.
While they have their social media accounts and are selling their products online, it simply does not make sense for them to invest intensive resources into improving their digital presence at this moment, since their current growth engine is already serving them very well.
Will they have the need to improve their online sales in the future? Very likely! Should they do so now? Most likely not!
If you are a small or medium sized business owner out there in the same situation and getting pitched by digital marketing companies like us, simply say no or “come back later.” Don’t let us pesky sales people convince you that your sales driver is not working correctly. Just like programmers always say — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Case 3: You are not ready to commit to building your digital presence
Last but not least, you should only go digital if you are truly committed to make your digital strategy work in the long term. You must be willing and able to invest both monetary and human resources into building (and sustaining) it.
Lots of articles and blog posts out there make building a digital presence sound like a simple 3-step process that you can do to achieve digital success. That’s simply not true.
Recently I was on a call with the owner of a very successful ecommerce business making almost a million dollars annually, and growing at 10%-20% every month.
When I asked him, “what made your company so successful in the digital world?”, he gave me 5 full pages of notes that he wrote from 4 different e-commerce and digital marketing classes over the last few months.
He also told me, “everything is working well now for us because I had to dump thousands of dollars into testing hundreds of variations of ads and audiences over the last few months. You only see my success now but not the work behind it — and that hard work is the only reason everything is working well for me now.”
The bottom line here is — if you are the owner of an SMB without much exposure to the digital world, creating a coherent digital strategy is going to be a steep learning curve. Making it work will be a lot of hard work.
If you make it, you will benefit greatly from going digital. But if you are not committed enough to making it, you will be wasting time and money while gaining little benefit.
If you finally do make the decision to go digital, create a concrete schedule of what you are trying to do on a daily basis, and have someone hold you accountable for taking action. ONly then will you will excel in the end, after a lot of trial and error.
Closing Thoughts
Just like becoming successful in anything in life, building an excellent digital marketing presence requires time, effort, and commitment.
You may fail a thousand times and that’s okay — you only need one success in the end anyway.
For this exact reason, it is important for you, to start with the end in mind before starting your journey of going digital. You should examine why is it important for YOUR business to build a digital presence in the first place.
Even if you have decided that building a digital presence may be important for your business, you also need to make sure that digital channels are the best way to spend your limited resources. Moreover, you and your team must be absolutely committed to make it happen even if takes months and thousands of dollars to make it work.
The bottom line is, don’t just follow what other people say. Make judgments based on the hard facts and core competency of your business. It is completely okay if you decide that you have better things to do than going digital to grow your business.
However, if you decide to pursue digital marketing, don’t expect a quick success.
After all, there are no free lunches in this world.
Good luck!
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