Breakout session 2: Digital Marketing
On the 28th of May Donegal Digital partnership, in cooperation with DEVISE project (funded by Interreg Europe programme), organised a workshop in CoLab (LYIT, Letterkenny), to identify concrete opportunities that can be implemented by companies based in the county.
They organised four breakout sessions to discuss different topics: Process Automation / Factory Automation, Digital marketing, Digital training in small businesses and Test new technologies. In the case of the Digital Marketing session, this group, including local SMEs, local marketing experts and representatives from LEO Donegal discussed and defined a digital marketing pilot they would like to see implemented. In that way, the SMEs participating in that group identified the following aspects:
Needs:
- Participating SMEs think that sometimes companies don’t see the value in digital marketing.
- People are still afraid to signup online using a credit card. This means trust issues.
- Need to segment the market from early adopters to complete laggards.
- Need to show examples of people who benefited.
- People don’t know what they want when they get the online voucher and don’t spend money in the right places. Need pre/post advice.
- Customised plans for every business.
- Awareness and understanding about technology.
Constraints:
- Lack of understanding.
- Where can you go to find information? There is no central location.
- Getting the message across.
- Skills.
- Give advice with vouchers.
- Do webinars, record it for people so as not confined to people in the room but for busy business owners too. Deliver it in bite size chunks. E.g. podcasts.
- Lot of events with broad agendas which can put people off. Have niche events, drill right down to what the event is e.g content creation for Facebook/Instagram and people will know if it is relevant to them or not.
- Learning from what went wrong.
Pilot project/opportunities:
- Series of events like 'Make Money while you sleep' event in CoLab.
- Building positive case studies of how local businesses are using digital across a range of sectors, different adoption of technology and how it has enhanced businesses.
- Has an audit been carried out on the level of digitalisation in Donegal companies? Set a baseline, research project.
- Involve national associations e.g. Irish internet association
- Being able to adapt, up to date training available
- Central location for digital resources, signposting on Donegal Digital website.
