(Photo credit: Chris Devers)
How often do we he hear that social media and digital marketing will replace traditional advertising and marketing? It seems someone is mentioning it almost weekly! Here's the truth - digital marketing isn't the silver bullet that will make your companies growth sky rocket.
Consider this example. I was recently in a marketing meeting with a client, and the leader of the company stood up, went to the whiteboard and drew a circle. Inside that circle he drew a few lines until they had a pie with eight pieces. And while drawing he addressed the group, talking about how each thing they do matters to the overall whole of marketing.
In the first pie piece he wrote, "trade groups" and in the second he wrote "public presentations" and in the third, he wrote "national board memberships" and so on until all of the pieces were full with their marketing activities. Only one of those pieces was digital marketing, and social media was part of the digital marketing piece, not on it's own.
What are we to draw from this? Social media and digital marketing are only part of the marketing for this successful business and they are not magic elixirs that will grow your business overnight. In fact, it's the rare business that could succeed by only investing in social media. Most success stories come from businesses who use a blog, Twitter account or Facebook page in conjunction with event marketing, or traditional advertising.
Watching this leader remind his group was a good reminder to me that companies that expect social media and digital marketing tools to carry the weight of all marketing channels will be disappointed by the results. You should be investing social media and digital marketing, and you will see results. Social media has certainly changed how we communicate with our customers, and search engines have changed how people find new information, but all in all - they aren't the silver bullet. They can help grow your business, and they can do it in better ways than ever before - but they won't, and they can't be everything.
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