How Do I Spend On Digital?

To buildand keepan audience, digital marketing is a must. But investing too heavily in asingle platform can cost you money, customers, and opportunity.

- Adam Bornstein

Before consulting, I made my living as an editor in media. Each job I held taught me the same lesson: Digital growth is not about manipulating tools like search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. It’s about using them to reach customers. Then it’s your job to create a sustainable relationship off of those platforms.

I’ll give you two examples of how those tools can go wrong. My first big job was fitness editor at a men’s magazine. Facebook was relatively new, and we built our following aggressively. The result was lots of “likes” but little direct revenue we could track. That audience eventually drove significant traffic to the website—and that was traffic we could monetize. After I left, Facebook changed its algorithm, and posts drove only a small fraction of the clicks they once did. Traffic shrank. So did revenue.