Are You A Digital Jack-Of-All-Trades?

Are we trying to do too much at the same time with our digital marketing strategies? Lisa asks if we are trying to become digital jack-of-all-trades and masters of none or should we be focusing our efforts.

There’s something about the Internet that has us all on the quest to become masters of many. From Wiki How articles, “How to…” Google searches and some About.com articles thrown in for good measure there is no end to our e-learning capabilities.

Lately I’ve been wondering if this age of knowledge on demand is producing a culture of “Jack-of-all-trades but master of none”. Especially with digital marketing, with so many options to consider between email marketing, social media, blogging and more, it’s hard to know where to focus your energies and where to spread yourself around.

For my own blog, I can see this happening. I’m publishing posts, adding in my tags and keywords, trying to share the posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn managing a Google+ page, Pinterest boards and forums. Sometimes I don’t get to do all of this every time or I spend more time on one than I do the other. Should I be focusing more on the few I know I’m good at or should I be pushing to be as many places as possible?

So is it better we try to master all trades or focus our energies?

The Weakest Links 

The biggest risk with a sprawling digital marketing strategy is having a weak link that threatens to let the side down. Every piece of a digital marketing strategy be it a social media account, a mailing list or a blog is a link in the chain that we are trying to encourage our audience to follow. If one of those links is loose, the chain breaks and we don’t get our audience where we want them.

Weak links can come in many forms and more often than not the result of too little time or limited resources. It could be a social media account you don’t have time to set up, or a blog you don’t have time to write. Maybe you have everything set up but you don’t have anyone to manage it? When this happens these resources aren’t working for you, they’re working against you.

An unmanaged Twitter account could be hacked without your knowledge, a deserted Facebook page might attract spam but as well as this, potential customers may find these pages and base their opinions on this – it’s a case of you’re only as good as your worst account.

King of the Digital World

If you find yourself ruler of your own digital kingdom, then no doubt you can see the benefits of a synchronized, comprehensive, working strategy. Your online presence dictates the exposure your business gets online, the number of people you reach, how you rank in the competitive world of search results.

The ideal end result for achieving and maintaining a steady, productive digital strategy is the generation of leads. That’s what we’re all striving for, right? We’re not going to consistently bring in quality leads if we’re not firing on all cylinders.

Striking a balance

Yes, some companies manage to pull off a great digital marketing strategy on top of everything else. They’re the ones who were captain of the debate team, and the basketball team and got straight As in school. How are the rest of us going to keep up?

In many cases, trying to do everything at once is the reason many digital marketing strategies fail. There needs to be room for natural progression, to get established in one area before moving on to another.

Every business will suit one form of digital marketing over another. Some are suited to Pay Per Click while others thrive in email marketing. This is best made the area of main focus, with the rest of digital marketing arsenal on standby as backup. Striking a balance in your digital marketing strategy means putting the focus in the right places and making sure you’re drawing the audience’s focus there too.

We’ve spoken before how, as millennial consumers, we’re constantly multi-tasking; but multi-tasking in business isn’t always the best policy. So perhaps instead of trying to do everything, we should try to bring a bit of organization to this otherwise chaotic digital world.

How do you find that balance between a being jack-of-all-trades and a master of many?

If you want to get started on planning your Online Marketing Strategy why not download our free white paper today.