Defining Your Digital Portals
Digital portals offer individual members of your community the means to connect deeper with your mission, your brand, and each other. For the past 20 years, email has been the most important digital portal for connecting and engaging communities. Nonprofits, corporations, artists—brands of all kinds have leveraged email to deliver value, earn trust, and build community. For years email stood alone as the most effective digital portal for most brands. Even as social media platforms rose to prominence, email retained its place as the primary communication tool for many brands even if the content of those emails changed.
Collecting emails from the very beginning allows you to build what every creator wants—a tribe of devotees who will follow you from platform to platform. They’ll be beta testers for your new products, the first to leave reviews, and the last to close the livestream. Email is just as important today as it ever was, but more and more email is being eclipsed by new platforms—like Circle, Tribe, & Mighty Networks—that give you the power to build a robust online community where you can interact with your fans, they can interact with you, and most importantly they can interact with each other.
The field is changing, though, and email is no longer the only digital portal considering as you consider the role digital media can play in building your brand and business. Podcasts, online videos, webinars, online courses, e-books, paid newsletters, and short videos can help you reach your goals, while providing new content to include in your regular email communications.
The 2020 lockdowns afforded many brands their first opportunity to dabble in digital media—publishing podcasts, YouTube videos, and weekly webinar series. As the COVID-19 pandemic begins to ease, many brands have reached an inflection point regarding the role digital media can and should play moving forward. The first objective of these conversations should be defining the digital portals that make sense for your brand. If you’re someone in this position, the best way to start is by considering:
1. Who is this media for?
2. Why are you producing it?
3. What digital portal bets suits your answers to 1 & 2?
Once you consider these questions, you’ll be able to spend your time more wisely, building the digital portals that best suit your brand. Stuck? Feel free to reach out! I’d love to be a resource to you on your journey.
