With the explosion of digital and social media usage over the past years, brands have been made increasingly vulnerable to digital and social media. Digital impacts every business and if you keep putting it off you are not serious about future-proofing your business.

Some of the excuses I hear for not using digital and facts to rebuff them all:

• We don’t need it – every business needs digital to some extent, whether it be for internal systems and process or external marketing
• It doesn’t apply to our business – wrong, it applies to every business as we are now in the digital age. Digital has impacted our lifestyle when impacts how we do business. You are a fool if you think it doesn’t apply to you
• We’ve been doing things the same way for the last 10 years so why do we need it – for that reason alone, it is time to change. If you are not doing digital then you are not future proofing your business. The ROI is will your business be here in 5 years time?
• It’s not a priority and generating business is – digital can generate business for you. It gives you a presence online so people can find you, a platform to communicate and a way to generate more leads than you can be using traditional marketing methods
• We don’t have the budget to invest in it – yes you do but you just aren’t making it a priority or understanding the positive impact it will have once you set it up. If you invested just 10% of your sales you get started. It’s just another excuse
• It’s too expensive – digital is one of the least expensive marketing platforms to set up. It is cheaper than traditional marketing, has no lead time, allows you to make changes in the click of a button and you can test and measure everything you can do
• We don’t know where to start or what to do – there is access to so much information online and offline so there is no excuse. Take some time to educate yourself to help you get started. Or get help or advice from specialists who can point you in the right direction.

If you continue to bury your head in the sand and think digital won’t impact you or your business then think again. It already is! Your clients expect you to have some sort of digital presence, whether you think so or not. Every day I see businesses literally let business walk away from them by not having even the most basic of digital assets. Then they pour thousands of dollars into marketing campaigns to generate business that they are not capitalising on.

The above are just excuses – not real reasons. And perhaps remember these names when you think digital is not important or doesn’t impact you > Yellow Pages, Kodak, Blockbuster, Virgin Mega Stores, Nokia, Blackberry, Borders to name a few. They didn’t think digital was important either!