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Contrary to popular belief, being on multiple channels and social media platforms is not necessarily the best choice for your brand.

Search Engine Optimization is the fly in the ointment here and can penalize your brand for a multitude of reasons.

Before you brief in your social media agency to build you pages across the multitude of platforms, make some hard decisions on what is really required and what you can give a skip.

Reasons to limit exposure

You may think that it goes against all marketing principals to limit your channels, but the main reason you may want to play it safe goes back to money. Yes, budget is the main reason you need to be selective. It is much better to do an excellent job on one channel, than do a terrible job on a few. Many clients believe that they need to be everywhere, but this is counterproductive when there is not enough budget to support all of the channels all the time. What tends to happen is a few of them get neglected, which is brand suicide. If you do not have enough budget to fully support all the channels you have selected either with Ad spend or retainers for your social media team’s time, then just don’t do it!

Penalties abound

The all-encompassing Google universe scores every brands digital ecosystem and ranks your platforms, website, search campaigns and even your agency to better serve their customers. If you have channels that don’t have regular new content or are badly managed, they start to rank your brand’s digital overall quality score.

This quality score is what determines your platform, pages and websites ranking in an organic environment and can also affect your rates in a paid for environment. Yes, Google will charge you more on a cost-per-click campaign if you have a bad quality score. This does not mean that if you pay more you can get a higher ranking. You may not get served at all, regardless of your allocated budget.  Google do this because they want to ensure the best experience for their customers, something we can all learn from and implement in our businesses.

So what do we need to do?

In an ever increasing digital world, places and spaces traditionally reserved for the early adopters or tech innovators is becoming mainstream to even the most tech challenged individual.

It is becoming more critical for businesses large and small to be playing in the digital marketing space. Our friends at Silicon Valley are making this so easy for even the solo entrepreneur to enter in to a world where they can have real conversations with their customer.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

The immediacy of marketing online is unparalleled. You can post an advert on Facebook, Instagram or Google and within minutes you have data to support whether your target audience will like to engage with your product or not.

Target Marketing can be as broad or as narrow as you need it to be. Many small businesses make errors here though, thinking that more is better. This is not the case for most brands that have limited budgets to work with.

Marketing online can be very cost effective for small businesses that need leads and sales in order to invest more marketing budget. Digital Marketing channels allow for smaller budgets to be allocated daily, so the budding business owner can plan accordingly, manage cash flow, make sales and re-invest into the business.

Some of the challenges that companies can be overcome with digital marketing are:

- Generating Traffic to your website and getting leads of new customers

- Providing ROI for your marketing activities and spend

- Securing enough budget to have an impact in the marketplace

- Identifying the best platforms for your requirements

- Managing an ecommerce website, linking in the lead generation and marketing activities

- Targeting content for a regional, national or even international market

- Hiring top talent to your team

All of these elements can be addressed with a limited amount of knowledge about marketing in general, the platforms that are available to use and of course, your own business.

Where to start

There is a plethora of free training material available on the large platforms like the Google learning platform. You can access many useful resources on this platform. You can access it here: https://learndigital.withgoogle.com

Facebook has it’s Blueprintportal where you can research more about advertising on the platform and even get certified.

The best part about getting your business on to the various digital marketing platforms, is you get to have real conversations with your customers. Instant feedback, their likes and dislikes and ways you can improve your business. All without spending anything on research.