Setting up in Digital Marketing

You SO need to know what you are doing!

We were asked today by someone who has ‘experienced’ social media and ‘loves it’ how they could set up a business doing social media for people.

In short – it might be easy to tweet, post to Facebook, set up your LinkedIn profile, share, relate and engage with people but to do it professionally with objectives, goals, a strategy, analytics, metrics and determining ROI is another matter. It is NOT as easy as it sounds.

You really do need to know what you are doing – technically, emotionally and professionally.

Engaging is one thing – getting loads of followers, following loads of people – not too hard. But turning that all into sales and profit… this is where a careful strategy, focus and dedication all need to be deployed.

One piece of advice we gave was to niche. Get experience under your belt and train where you can.

It is strange to be at the start of a whole new industry. No boundaries have been set. Emotions are currency. We are currently defining the industry – seeing what works and what doesn’t – it is all a big experiment really. But one that is working, for the most part. Businesses are having to radically change the way they think and do business and market. It may be cheaper to use social media for marketing in monetary terms but what about in time. This is the biggest cost. Banking time is something we are all trying to do and failing dismally – where are our own boundaries between work and play?

So many questions. But this is good. Questions enable us to learn – the answers are being structured at the moment – we’ll get back to you!

In the meantime – take a look as some of these answers to the most pressing challenges of social media in a recent survey of 2,100 businesses by Harvard Business School: