What is your digital real estate?

• Are all those digital marketing efforts really necessary? Are we increasingly looking at quantity over quality?
• What if we used the same model that we’ve been using in the physical world and extrapolate our approach for a digital world?

I WOKE up one morning and this flashed across my face: “What is your digital real estate?” Some might say that it’s disheartening to make an attempt to cut through the clutter and the noise. Some are contributing to the noise.
 
Eric Schmidt of Google said it best, “Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information created. We [now] create five exabytes every two days. See why it’s so painful to operate in information markets?”
 
That was back in 2010. Today, I am certain we’re creating much more data than that and at a faster rate as well. Every other day we see the creation of a Facebook fanpage, the sharing of an Instagram or Pinterest image, an uploading of a YouTube video, and multiple tweets from a brand.
 
Are all of these necessary? Are we increasingly looking at quantity over quality?
 
That morning, it dawned on me. “What if we try and approach it differently?”
 
I started wondering if we could use the same model that we’ve been using in the physical world and extrapolate our approach for a digital world – that brands in the digital ecosystem should treat each new platform as a store.
 
In the physical world, we create stores to sell our products and services. We determine the physical real estate location based on cities, buying patterns and densities of the communities surrounding it. We invest dollars to build it. We drive traffic through marketing and brand campaigns. We analyze through sales per dollar spent and then we refine our tactics in order to increase our ROI (return on investment) and the value of our real estate.
 
In a nutshell, we do not build stores for presence but for purpose. We pick and choose carefully where we should locate ourselves because we believe it will give us good ROI.
 
So what if it’s the same in the digital ecosystem? That each platform – regardless of it being a fanpage or a twitter profile – is a store?
 
We then determine what is best suited for our brand by studying the densities and “fit” of the communities that are engaging in that platform. Once we’ve determined that, we can move on to create our presence there.
 
Our currency of investment is money, time and effort – to build the right store for the right community and to enhance the velocity and quality of engagement in that particular community.
 
So in the following order:

1. What are our brand values and characteristics?
2. Which are the platforms that echo our brand’s core values and style of communication with regards to fit?
3. How dense is the community?
4. Are we able to generate ROI from being in this particular community?
5. How do we promote ourselves to the dwellers in this specific community?
6. Are we able to build digital highways to drive more people to frequent our online presence there?
7. Have we worked out our mechanics of measuring ROI?
8. Are we committed to this in the long run?

By doing the above, I believe it’ll be easier for us to determine the necessity of setting up any presence in a particular platform. We won’t just jump into Facebook or YouTube but instead will craft out a game plan that will ultimately bring value back to the brand in the long run.
 
I think brands today need the focus. With this in mind, it should help them create high value digital real estates.
 
Alex Ooi cuts the digital clutter at PR Labs. Here’s how to connect, connect & connect with him.

Previous Installment:
 
Making marketing sense of social media