Resources

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What resources do you need?

Resources can often be confused as just money, but the problem with resources is that if you just thinking money, you’re not actually identifying two very key resources in addition to money that social media needs.

• Time: You need to dedicate the right amount of time to social media because it is an incredibly manual platform.
• People: You need to be able to have the right people there who understand the platforms and who know what they’re doing. This is a really underestimated resource. Finding the right people for social media is a massive challenge because it’s becoming such a broad channel. And the biggest challenge we have is that when you interview someone or when you bring someone in is that we use it in our daily life. That does not mean that you know how to use it as a marketer, and that’s what you have to differentiate, is between the person who knows how to use social media as a consumer and the person who knows how to use it as a marketing channel.
• Money: You need to buy ads. Businesses that say that they’re going to be so good at social media that they won’t have to advertise are losing out. If you’re so good that you don’t need advertising, imagine how much better you would be with some advertising. If you can reach a million people through viral content, with the advertising behind it, you might reach five. Just remember that the earlier that you can commit and the earlier you can get your superiors to commit to investing revenue into social media, the better the performance will be.

Resource maps

A resource map is very important in helping you identify the resources that you’re going to need. A resource map is a really rough piece of work. You can do this in a notebook; it doesn’t have to be done on an Excel sheet. You can scribble it down. But, it is important to start to estimate how much time and how much money it’s going to take for your teams to actually execute the channels that you have. And then work out actually what is available because then you’ll very quickly be able to see the discrepancy and where you need more resource in certain sections.

You can break this down into:

• The hours required
• The current ad spend
• The production budgets
• Training

There are four areas that, very quickly, you can understand what’s required. And what’s interesting is that normally what happens is the ad spend is light, the training is light, and we’ve just pumped time and hours into making things. This is where you can balance it out.

So, you would look at your estimate for each channel, so ask the teams or talk to who you’re going to be working with and identify, “How many hours do you think we’ll spend on Facebook this week, on Twitter, on Instagram, writing our blog, managing Pinterest, using Snapchat?” This might be 30 minutes, 20 minutes, two hours, three hours, four hours, then actually sit down and start to go, “Okay, well, ideally how much time per week would we like to see being done?” This isn’t right now about having the right answer; it’s just about starting to plan things out so that you can start to build a picture in your own mind. This might be completely wrong, but quickly you’ll be able to see whether or not your expectations are actually going to be met.

One of the ones I would really call out training as it’s something that we underestimate, and it’s something that unfortunately results in businesses being left behind on social media, is that they don’t allow for training time. Now, training time doesn’t mean that you have to go pay for courses or, you know, after that you have to go and actually invest loads of time in it. Sometimes it’s just spending that extra half hour reading up, making sure that the people who work on your teams know that they need to spend a certain amount of time learning new platforms, learning new formats, and then as you grow, is identifying those key opportunities to invest in training, and in good training.

So, as you’ll see, we start to build the resource map in terms of the resource required, in terms of funding in hours, and you can start to identify the discrepancies between them, and then start to ask yourself, “Why do they exist?” Do you expect too much, or actually is there a problem with the level of timing, and resource, and money being invested in the business?