Glory or Guts?
Most of us daydream that we might become the next internet “overnight” sensation. Several friends experienced with startups call it the “lottery” phenomenon. “A few hit the lottery,” Steve Kickert of OnePlace told me last year. “Most of us grind it out.”
The vast majority of businesses are still trying to figure out digital promotions. (I’m defining digital very broadly here to include online, mobile, social, location-based and realtime.)
For these businesses, it’s not primarily whether they’re going to do it, it’s how. And this has most of them truly perplexed.
The ones who try to “leap to the top of the staircase” frequently end up many dollars lighter and a little bruised. Unfortunately, this tends to lead to denial, which in turn only delays the inevitable.
It should be no surprise, but the biggest business opportunities lie not in the glorious places. Ironically, the biggest opportunities always seem to lie in the dark, difficult, arduous mineshafts. And in this case, that’s helping businesses figure out how to succeed with digital.
No one is going to put your face on the cover of Wired for helping a modest restaurant chain master SMS promotions. No one will profile you in Mashable for showing a multi-unit salon owner which works best with her customers — email, Facebook or Twitter.
But these are the places in which true value will be delivered over the next three years.
Here are steps to help your external or internal clients strike digital gold:
- What are our customer demographics? (You or they probably already have at least some of this data.)
- How do these customers consume content digitally? Desktop? Mobile? Social?
- How can we rigorously but inexpensively test promotions using various digital methods to learn what’s most effective?
Answer these questions and you will have a robust platform for further exploration and prospecting success.
Photo credits: Wikimedia.org, The Order of St. Andrew the Apostle, the highest military and civilian order of Russia; Techatticup mine, Slideshow Bob
