3 Reasons Your Business Should NOT Go Digital
By: Bill Su
Tags: Digital Strategy, Marketing, Digital Marketing, Startup, Critical Thinking

3 Reasons Your Business Should NOT Go Digital

Make sure digital marketing is right for your business before committing

Our content manager is going to hate me.

He told me to write an article about why all small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) should go digital to market their product/services. But instead, I’m using this article to tell you the exact opposite.

While utilizing digital channels such as social media, ecommerce sites, and blogs can be extremely helpful for increasing reach and revenue for most businesses, digital channels are by no means a silver bullet that can solve all business problems.

In fact, being successful in the digital marketing world requires not only a coherent, well-constructed digital strategy, but also committed team members in your business who are constantly optimizing multiple channels according to this digital strategy.

In short, while digital marketing is an extremely attractive marketing method, it requires significant investment in time and resources to get it to work for your business.

For this reason, before investing time and money into digital marketing, it is absolutely crucial for all businesses to carefully examine whether digital channels are a good fit for their current objectives and commitment level.

Don’t waste time with channels that don’t fit your business. Image via Bob Lee Says.

Otherwise, you risk not only wasting money and effort, but precious time that is essential for your company’s survival.

During my time as a consultant and as cofounder of Humanlytics, I have run into this exact situation countless time. That’s why in this article, I will show you three of the most common cases I’ve encountered of a digital strategy mismatch, to prevent it from happening to you.

Case 1: When going digital does not magnify your “core competency”

A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from one of my clients in China, who runs a weight-loss chain with over 200 stores across the country. The client told me, “Bill, I want to create a product line for digital channels such as TaoBao and Jingdong because there are so many opportunities there!”.

TaoBao and Jingdong are popular Chinese ecommerce sites.

While it sounded like an attractive venture, I strongly advised against it. Why? For one important reason — selling online is not the core competency of their company.

A “core competency” is the key capability or resource that makes a company successful. In my client’s case, it includes their customers (which are mostly concentrated in one city), their service expertise, and their vast experience in weight loss coaching. It is these core competencies that make them so good at what they do — making sure each person that comes through the door finds a weight loss solution that works.

If they were to enter the fierce ecommerce space, they would not able to leverage their core competency in service expertise and coaching experience. Ecommerce would therefore take a significant amount of energy away from their core business, instead of contributing to it.

Given the competitiveness of the weight-loss related ecommerce market in China, combined with the lack of human resources and capital to launch this brand new e-commerce division, the future does not look so bright for my client’s ecommerce venture.

Instead, I recommended that they instead launch an online personal weight-loss coaching service. This service will leverage their vast experience that they have in helping people losing weight, along with the expertise that helped them excel in weight loss.

In addition, this service will also help my client use their underutilized therapists and consultants more effectively, and improve the quality of service they can offer to their customers.

How does this case apply to you?

When you are deciding to go digital, don’t simply pursue the most popular method on the market. Don’t just follow the method that your friends or competitors have succeeded with either.

Instead, look inside your company, and ask yourself, “what is the ‘core competency’ that makes my company successful?” Then build a digital strategy around magnifying that core competency.

Only this way can you have your new digital strategy working with, instead of against, your current business to achieve greater success for your business.

If you don’t think any digital strategy will help you leverage your “core competency,” then digital might simply not be the correct channel for you at the moment. That’s completely okay — I have seen many companies succeed over the years with minimal digital presence.

Case 2: You’re growing fast without a digital presence

If you see me speaking at a conference, or pitching a client, I will usually tell them “having a digital presence is extremely crucial to the success of your business, as over 50% of companies now advertise via digital channels.”

Just because digital is surpassing other ad channels, doesn’t mean it’s right for your business. Image via eMarketer.

While I strongly stand by every one of these words, I admit that I omitted a little fact — almost 50% of businesses still do not advertise through digital, and many of them are doing okay.

A recent experience with a potential client illustrated this case perfectly.

At Humanlytics, while we are developing our AI marketing analytics product, we are looking for companies who will help us test our product as focused beta testers. In return we help them with their digital strategy and analytics (if you are interested, email @bill@humanlytics.co. You get the point :D).

We pitched this idea to a very fast-growing organic pasta company within our personal network, trying to convince them to come on board with this beta testing program. They said no, and they are smart to do so.