Launching a Digital-Only Brand? Read This.
Two years ago, I co-founded SportsEdTV with a bunch of really committed and smart people. I am learning so much every day from this experience about building a brand in the cyber world, and wanted to share some of my revelations.
After decades of marketing hundreds of brands in as many categories, SportsEdTV represents the first purely digital product I have promoted, meaning the entire experience – from marketing to product engagement – happens online. Users discover the brand online, engage with the brand online, and share the brand online. Only occasionally, do they encounter the brand offline, when they meet one of our coaches on the court or field, or in the gym.
SportsEdTV is aggregating a global community of athletes, coaches and parents across the world, and providing them with free world-class video instruction in over forty sports, as well as a forum for learning and meeting other like-minded people. If you play a sports at any level and want to improve or interact with other athletes, this online destination is for you. Or, as our tagline says: SportsEdTV. Making You Better. Anytime. Anywhere.
So, what have I discovered while launching this brand?
1) When launching a digital-only brand, you are a global brand from day ONE. Be prepared for a world-wide audience.
I am astounded that since we went live with our website six months ago, people from 130 countries have watched our instruction videos (and they are currently only in the English language!). There is no such thing as a gradual roll-out online. The roll out happens when you push the go-live button. When we launched, I assumed that mostly people from English speaking countries would be watching our videos initially, but about 60% of our viewers are from non-English speaking countries. This has forced our team to review all of our videos to make sure the lessons are easy to learn, even when the viewer only has some rudimentary understanding of English. We have used more graphics as a result, and more slow-motion repetition of key movements taught by our coaches. We have had to make sure to be culturally sensitive wit’s every word and action in our videos. No jokes that might offend someone because of the cultural or language barrier. For non-digital brands, a global roll-out can be planned in stages, with learning happening in each stage and applied to the next. Online, the timeline is collapsed and the world is your stage overnight. Literally. Be prepared.
2) Fluctuations in business volume can happen instantaneously. You need to be agile and move fast.
One social post or digital ad or blog post can have an immediate impact on user volume. This is good and bad, but it is a reality you need to assess constantly. In businesses where products are on a shelf, or are shipped to users, this process happens slower, and brands have more time to react and choreograph responses to events. But because our user experience happens entirely online and often in an instant from discovering the brand, I have seen small actions, like a share of a social post, spike views of a particular video wildly and almost instantaneously. Fortunately, I have not seen the opposite possibility, where a negative review or comment could tank the viewing of a video, but we are always prepared for either case. We can also cause a spike in viewing within hours when need be, so we are monitoring all viewing activity 24/7. Having a slow viewing day? Nothing a little boost in spending on Facebook can’t fix within a few hours. This type on instantaneous driving of a result, where you can find a potential user somewhere in the world, promote the discovery of your product within minutes and have them engaging with it immediately is a digital-only phenomenon. The good news of this digital-only reality is that you can manage business fluctuations easily and quickly. Agility matters. The bad news is that you, or your team, need to be watching ALL the time. Make sure you hire early birds and night owls.
3) Don’t overreact to individual data points, look for trends. Make data your friend.
Data is the blessing and curse of marketing today. We have more of it than ever before, yet much of it is useless in isolation and time consuming to wade through. In a digital-only business, data drives almost every decision and action taken. When we launched SportsEdTV, and I was presented with data from multiple dashboards on all sorts of viewer statistics and behavior, I was delighted and overwhelmed at the same time. Which data points mattered? Which data was more predictive? Which data could help drive product development? Which data could inform our ad spend? Which data could improve our website design? The questions are endless and created more than a few sleepless nights. Eventually, however, you find a rhythm to using data. You develop a sixth sense that helps you tune in to the data trends that really matter, based on the stage of development of your business. You develop ratios that represent the health of your business, and you start to figure out how the data can become a strategic and tactical friend, rather than an all-knowing, smothering adversary. If you are a digital-only business, find a way to make data your friend or you will not succeed.
It’s been only six months since our launch, and already I have learned so much. In fact, the team is in perpetual learning mode and that makes it fun to go to work every day. If you are in a digital-only, or even digital-first business, get tuned in to learning something new every day and applying it to your decision making. The internet is a fast-moving space in which to play, but it’s a great place to grow a big brand in a relatively short amount of time. More learning to share in my next post…stay tuned.
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