Look beyond social media
DIGITAL strategy expert Richenda Vermeulen had some sobering views on the effectiveness of social media in driving growth when she spoke at a FoundX meetup in Geelong.
“Social media is massively overplayed as a driver of revenue,” the founder and CEO of Melbourne digital strategy agency ntegrity said.
“Most of the time when clients have come to us seeking social media advice to grow, we have actually had them pull back from that.”
Started in 2012, ntegrity specialises in digital capability building and strategy for non-forprofits and government agencies.
Ms Vermeulen told moderator Adam Murray, a partner at Findex, that a focus on a client’s website and email and search engine marketing offered greater value over social media marketing as that was usually where people were making their decisions.
“Social marketing plays a role in getting new people’s attention but how you get new people’s attention is getting harder and harder,” Ms Vermeulen said.
Because people were being inundated with messages, with greater use of video and dynamic creatives, “you can’t have bland messages anymore, because it is fiercely competitive now and expensive”.
The former social worker who “fell into marketing” had been working at World Vision before launching ntegrity with the aim of partnering with NFPs to build their digital marketing skills.
She said digital marketing agencies with similar sales offerings and had not been interested in training their clients, which was what she had been doing across the organisation at World Vision.
“In the early days we were mostly doing social media focus work, we became a strategy agency, because the core of doing good strategy is building good capabilities,” Ms Vermeulen said.
Now employing a staff of 20, ntegrity has also launched a digital marketing training academy and an online training product.
“Our way to scale is different to other agencies, where they just set up in different cities,” she said. “We want to stay focused in Melbourne but we want global reach (through the online training product).”
Ms Vermeulen said investing in the training product also helped the service side of the business.
Held at Deakin University, the FoundX meetup on Thursday night was organised in collaboration with Spark Deakin as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week.