A Quick Overview of the Digital Marketing Measures in the Federal Budget

It’s interesting to consider the future implications, in various ways, of the latest Federal Budget.

And while there are wide-reaching, expensive pledges designed to keep the economy moving in the midst of a global crisis, some of the digital marketing measures are particularly notable, and will have long-lasting, evolving impacts over time.

The main point of interest is the $19.2 million allocated to the Australian Small Business Advisory Services’ Digital Solutions program, which aims to provide additional digital literacy training and assistance to 10,000 small businesses over the next year.

The funding is important, and necessary to help many SMBs catch up with the pace of digital innovation, especially given the rapid rise of eCommerce during the pandemic. But at the same time, the more digitally attuned these businesses are, the fewer employees they’ll need.

Will that lead to an ongoing contraction in employment – given that the vast majority of businesses in Australia are SMBs?

Yet even so, additional training is overdue – whether you like it or not, more and more business is now being conducted online, and it’s important that SMBs have an understanding of the evolving marketplace, and where their products and services fit into it.

There’s already a range of free digital tools available, including Facebook’s Blueprint courses and Google’s digital training, and all of these offer important, valuable lessons. But they also, inevitably, place more power into the hands of the digital giants,

Worth noting, too, that right now, the Australian Government is trying to force Facebook and Google to share more of their revenue with local news publishers. Both digital giants have refused - so how will the negotiations over such play out now that the Government is also heaping cash into a significant push to get more businesses using these platforms to re-energize their revenue flow?

It seems like a difficult balance, which, inevitably, will end up favouring the platforms, funnelling more data, and more money, into their vaults.

Data sovereignty is yet another hot issue of the moment, with various nations considering how use data is stored and shared, so it’ll be interesting to see how the Government seeks to balance these various concerns moving forward.

In addition to this, the Budget also allocates $3 million over four years towards developing a ‘Digital Readiness Assessment tool’, which aims to help businesses assess their ‘digital maturity’. Which sounds like Google’s ‘Digital Toolkit’, which provides a range of insights into your business opportunities based on location, URL, business type, etc.

Of course, those tools are more specifically aligned to Google’s own products, but in large part, that’s probably what you’ll be using anyway.

At any rate, the Australia-specific version could provide new options, and a more actionable pathway to improvement.

The Budget also includes an allocation of $2.5 million to support a Digital Skills Finder Platform to assist SMBs in finding digital skills training courses, while there’s also an additional $28.3 million, spread over four years, for the ‘Be Connected Program’ which will help older Australians learn digital skills.

Which is good, digital literacy, as noted, is a critical element, and should now be on the school curriculum. But why a program educating older Australians gets more funding than one aimed specifically at SMBs is difficult to comprehend.

Overall, it’s good to see the Government recognizing the need for more digital skills training, though the full implications of that could play out in different ways, and it’s difficult to understand the variable funding across these programs and how that relates to the importance of each element.