Dinosaurs. That’s what causes problems for most businesses in the digital world. We don’t mean giant prehistoric lizards but marketing officers who are not in touch with the digital side of marketing. Most marketing managers from the older generation made use of traditional avenues like TV or radio ads and that was about it. They could easily hide behind the agencies and shift the blame of ineffective results on them. But with the advent of digital means, marketing has lost much of its opaqueness and moved towards transparency. In this article, we‘ll examine certain hidden digital assets that contribute to entrepreneurial growth.
Digital Assets
Digital assets are simply the investments in building bits and bytes that appear on the radar. They include online traffic, social sharing and search engine rankings to name a few. One way to understand digital assets is to classify them into two types: soft & hard digital assets.
Soft Digital Assets
Soft digital assets are typically hard to see and measure conclusively. That does not, however, mean that they can be ignored. They are core elements to going digital and can provide valuable insights into the success or failure of digital marketing strategies. They include:
Culture: The mindset of the organization towards embracing the digital economy. Are executives abreast of digital developments or believers of old school marketing? Is the CEO technologically informed?
Expertise: Does the core team have the requisite expertise to reap the benefits of digital marketing? This is important to figure out if your organization has the essentials to ‘go digital’.
Customer experience: This helps determine the end-user satisfaction derived from your product or service. While customer experience is hard to measure in quantifiable terms, it is still essential to make sure your strategies are ultimately customer-centric.
Hard Digital Assets
Hard digital assets are more varying than soft ones and are typically easier to quantify. Some examples of hard digital assets include:
Digital Brand Footprint: This focuses on online branding and positioning. It helps determine the impact strategies are having on the target market. Additionally, it helps understand where your brand stands concerning your competitors.
SEO: This involves two objectives. The first one focuses on the rankings on the Search Engine Result Page, and how they position your organization in response, to set queries. The second one deals with creating good quality content to augment search engine rankings and garner better engagement.
Email Lists: This is primarily concerned with the size and quality of your email database. It helps determine if you’re targeting the right audiences.
Social Media Following: Essentially, this comprises of the number of people actively following your brand on social media and engaging with your posts regularly. This helps determine the impact the brand is having on the digital market. This, in turn, allows you to tweak strategies according to specific market segments. For instance, the more you have followers on Instagram, the more you can grow on this network. You can purchase some quality Instagram followers if you are unable to gain them in short order. Cumulatively, hard and soft digital assets make up your organization’s Digital Quotient (DQ). The Digital Quotient is an accepted measure of the digital intelligence of an organization. It directly impacts strategy, asset growth, business agility, and organizational ability. The higher the DQ, the stronger the influence on digital marketing strategies and ultimately, better digital results.
Laila Azzahra is a professional writer and blogger that loves to write about technology, business, entertainment, science, and health.