A Primer About Digital
PreAMBLe
Why a digital primer? Who will even read it? Why bother?
Those were the questions that floated around our team, advisors, and potential clients when this idea was first suggested. It took us hours of editing, debating, and ensuring that this is what we all believe, in 100% consensus, is the value that we will bring to those we work with.
This primer has turned out to not just be useful in business development, but also customer and partner education on a wider scale. It is a manifesto of sorts for potential investors, a culture code for all team members, a starting pitch-script for new Account Executives, and a reminder of our true north for Partners.
It is a constant work-in-progress as it changes with times, and is what we might come to know as, in true web programming fashion, a dynamic primer.
Dynamic, static, digital, traditional, whatever you have – it provides our belief system, and a preview of what is to come, for those who choose to work with, or (we prefer this term) journey with us.
building A Pushcart
Digitalization, especially in the business growth context, as a concept is not hard to understand. We need to first recognize that consumers today spend their time on two platforms: social media and search engines.
Each platform can then be thought of as a shopping mall. The first step is to create a pushcart. On social media, this means a business page. This is free to create. On search engines, this would be a website, which can sound daunting to build, but we can help.
Then, we need to get the word out. On both platforms (social/search), there are two ways to do this (paid/unpaid). Paid channels involve paying the social media or search platform a fee to advertise a certain creative, while unpaid, also known as organic, is a channel in which content and long-term user engagement is the focus.
In the shopping mall context, these channels are paying the mall for ad space, getting approval to put your pushcart at the entrance, or building great word-of-mouth such that people search for you. Partnerships can be struck with other stores in the mall too.
With that, we can essentially form a 2×2 matrix, and while we’re at it, we shall, instead of labelling the axes search-social and paid-unpaid, let us do active-passive and performance-community. Your business determines which quadrant of the matrix you start at, and then you move on the others over time.
building Your Team
Businesses getting into new business frontiers, or leveraging on trends, often hire personnel in that area, and with the hiring team being industry outsiders, risks such as a lack of business-level alignment, or, in the case of working with fresh graduates, the lack of technical mentorship, would present themselves to limit the effectiveness of such ventures.
Million dollar reveal: the same happens for digitalization.
IT Engineers implementing changes with management having no idea on use cases. Young designer submitting work with no manager providing critique and feedback. Sounds all too familiar? Your firm might be falling into that trap.
So What Now?
In this primer, we have shared with you in 10 minutes what you might have paid $10,000 to learn (in the hard way). It’s a steal, but that has always been our core belief – to share knowledge freely with clients. We have a handful of divergent thoughts that are all centered around the interests of SMEs, so while this page is still incomplete, you can contact us if you’d like to hear a crazy pitch.