There is a continuing disconnect with people’s personal use of the internet and how they then apply digital marketing to promote their business.
The company CEO will use Google for researching and buying a new car but when it comes to optimizing his web site for ranking high in Google he struggles to see the value and perceives that building a website is all he needs to do to be “found online” and generate mountains of cash.
The Company With A Feeble Digital IQ
Only the other day I heard about the owner of a company who had recently won a business award and when they came to present it they mentioned that everything was great about his business except they were surprised that he didn’t even have a website!
This disconnect between time spent on media and use of media for marketing becomes quite apparent when you look at the hard data and becomes apparent that organisations are lagging the consumer.
Companies Media Marketing Dollars Are Being Wasted
JP Morgan research shows that only 7% of media is consumed through our newspapers, yet corporate America is allocating 20% of its media dollars to traditional newspaper marketing (this is a bad forward leading indicator for shareholders of newspapers).
Looking at the Internet figures it reveals that only 12% of media marketing spend is allocated to online media but 26% of media time is spent online. If we dig a little deeper on the numbers it is even more damning. If you are under 40 and earning over $50,000, media consumption increases to over 50% for the internet. In essence corporations are spending much more on media where the consumer is no longer hanging out and is somewhere else.
Note:For more on this and the trends and impact on digital competence check out Scott Galloway’s presentation
The reality is that we are still transitioning from the traditional TV industrial complex into a knowledge economy that is continuing to disrupt traditional business models and the advertising monoliths and corporate CEO’s are still struggling to adapt to the digital economy.
In fact you could say that their Digital IQ is in some cases severely challenged!
Scott has come up with an interesting take on how you can measure companies Digital IQ and here are the 5 categories.
The 5 Digital IQ Categories
Category One:
Category Two:
Category Three:
Category Four:
Category Five:
Brands With A High Digital Marketing IQ Sell More
The commercial reality is that the top categories are outperforming their peers in sales according to NYU Stern.
- Brands ranked as “Gifted” or above demonstrate a 6% advantage over brands ranked “Average” or below
- Brands categorized as “Challenged” or “Feeble” saw sales decline 12% or greater
So what is your companies Digital Marketing IQ and what are you doing about it?