STS is what happens when you get your daughter’s boyfriend to build you a one-page website, but you’re too cheap to pay for your own domain. STS is what happens when you ask your PA to create your company’s Facebook page, but instead of a page, she creates a profile. STS is what happens when you, late one evening, decided to boost a post on your page and the next morning, the whole of Pakistan liked it. STS is what happens when your marketing manager spends more time designing leaflets than researching digital marketing trends.
STS happens more often than not to small business owners trying to do their best with limited capacity and resources. The challenge for most small businesses is managing their cash flow: seeing hard-earned money leaking through the expensive cracks of marketing campaigns is a tough pill to swallow. The kneejerk reaction is to put the new world of digital marketing on hold and stick with the traditional stuff that you know works. Like a sponsoring a 4 ball at a golf game, or an ad in the local newspaper.
For those who have ventured into the new unknown, the gap between managing your digital marketing internally and hiring a smart digital agency on board is massive. So, the company ends up doing it themselves and, most of the time, it happens on the side or gets dumped on the youngest person in the office who has the most active Instagram account. This is a foolproof recipe for STS.
Digital marketing for the small business owner usually plays out like this: You finally decided to try out Google Adwords. After all, you’re a clever guy - how hard can it be? After 50 minutes, you’re all set. Search campaign, keywords, ad group and an ad or two. That first week, you Googled your company’s name like crazy, highly impressed to see your little ad showing at the top of the page. Three months later, you’ve spent R15,000, but have nothing to really show for it, except a sudden spike in website traffic.
What you should have actually done first was put the metrics in place to help you to scrutinise every little action on your account, so that you could make real-time campaign adjustments and take steps to improve your website’s conversion rate. In fact, even before you started your Adwords adventure, you should have taken the time to put a higher-level strategy in place, do the research and understand if your business actually needs it and in what way. Instead, you’re stuck with an underperforming ad campaign and very little appetite for round two.
As an agency which manages social media and ad campaigns for a range of small to medium size businesses, we’ve put together 10 things to know and 5 things to do that will take your digital marketing activities from small-town to uptown.
