There is so much that you don’t know that you don’t know!

There is so much that you don’t know that you don’t know!

I spent the day yesterday attending a Digital Marketing Bootcamp in Durban with Sunil Sewpersadh from Digital Mind Club. We covered topics from how to launch the perfect website, to making sure you are visible in the online space through both paid and organic means on google. We spoke about SEO and google ad words. From there we went onto social media, covering the differences and comparisons between Face Book, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin etc. We took a more in depth look into Facebook especially the insights and analytics and how you can use these to tailor your advertising to get the most out of your spend. We then went onto creating and using an email lists and running effective email campaigns. The last part was some useful resources and ideas that can be easily and quickly implemented whilst you start planning your long term strategies.

I really really enjoyed the training, parts of it I already knew but a lot of it was completely new and it made me realize just how much I don’t know and the thing is I don’t know that I don’t know this. I guess what really came home to me yesterday during this training is that we have to continually invest in ourselves as business people. I know that these things cost money, we would love to get them for free, and we sometimes are lucky enough to be able to attend free training but it is important to spend this money…think of it not as a cost to yourself or your company but rather as an investment into the long term growth and sustainability of your business. Not only is it an investment but it is enjoyable, I find it very fulfilling when I learn new stuff and am then able to go home and implement it…and start to see some results from the hard work!

One of Sunil’s biggest take home lessons of the day is that CONTENT IS KING he talks about creating content around things you are passionate about. When people can hear and see your passion for a topic they are more inclined to build a relationship with you online. Video’s are becoming more and more important, people want to see who you are, see behind the scene’s so to speak, make sure that you are who you say you are. This I can already tell is going to be very hard for me to put into practice as I have rather an aversion to being in any kind of movable walking talking kind of media, but it is something that I am going to work on hopefully get more comfortable and better at.

Sunil shared many slides with us during the day long training but this one really caught my eye and made me realize that if I don’t continuously learn and grow,  that my business won’t grow and develop in the digital space. There are 55 million people in South Africa, but there are almost 80 million smart phones, that means more than half the population of South Africa owns more than one cell phone! 28 million people are internet users and 15 million people are active Social Media users and of those 15 million 13 million use Social Media on their smart phones! The statistics speak for themselves if you want to be successful in business you need to be online and you need to make your presence known!