Renting vs. Buying With Digital Marketing
Eight homes in eight years. Yes, that’s right we are masters at packing, moving, and making a place feel like home whether we’ve rented or bought a home. We always struggled about if it’s better to rent a place or buy a home to build equity. There are pros and cons to both situations. The same debate happens in the world of digital marketing every day, but in the context of your digital audience rather than a place to reside. Many businesses focus on rented space, versus building marketing equity.
Renting Your Digital Audience
In the world of social media, the term “rented space” has started to become popular. Rented space is essentially anything where you are at the liberty of the host company. For example, you “rent” space on Facebook; you have to play by their rules, and at any moment, they may decide to pull the plug on Facebook altogether. You may have 5,000 followers, but you don’t really own that audience…Facebook does. The same can apply to Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and on and on.
Now, just because it is an audience that you don’t have full control over, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t a great place to reside. We’ll tell you that some of our favorite places we lived in the past eight years have been rentals. The same applies here too: yes you might be playing on Facebook’s playground, but there are a lot of people at that playground. There is great value in building your audience on these spaces where you may be renting your audience because that is where your audience is and is interactive.
Owning Your Digital Audience
If so much of social media is based on a rented audience, what would be the equivalent of owning your digital audience? Think about digital media where YOU create the rules and make the decisions. The two main venues that come to mind are websites and email lists. There are some amazing things you can do on websites to engage with your audience and invite them to interact back. You control what pop-ups, offers, or signups are available. You control what products or services you offer on your website. You ultimately control the format and design. The other main digital venue you have control over is your email list. You can control how often you send emails, to whom, and to what percentage of your total list. Of course, with either of these, you can’t control the human behavior, which is why it’s rare to see a 90% open rate or higher on an email. However, you can send your email to 100% of your list, which is more than you can do with most social networks today organically.
So, is it better to rent or to buy? We’d argue that you need to do both. Renting digital audiences can help you boost your equity in your owned digital space. The digital audience that you “own” can help you increase your SEO and digital PR, and ultimately your digital equity. You need the rented digital spaces to drive traffic and interest for the places that you own. They work together.
When you take this approach to digital marketing, you see that you can’t just focus on one thing. Social media will never be the ultimate solution. Neither will email by itself, or fill in the blank with other digital strategies. They have to work in tandem with each other. When you do create marketing strategies where you have different digital media working in tandem, you will see the short-term and long-term benefits paying off!
Action Steps:
- Set up your email opt-ins and make it easy for people to join your email list.
- Push people to your website or email opt-ins via social media.
- Encourage people to share your content directly from your website.