You’re a savvy equine business owner. You know your stuff, you’re passionate about horses and you believe in your products/services (and their ability to help the horse community out there). Yet the concept of digital marketing is enough to make you run for the hills, white flag in hand.

Unfortunately, it’s an all-too-common scenario. These days, we all have less time. For many of us, money is tight. Throw expensive and time-consuming horses into the mix, and you have a recipe for discarding digital marketing into the ‘too-hard’ basket.
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For those who are less Internet-savvy, I will start out by clarifying just what digital marketing is. Essentially, it’s any kind of marketing done via electronic media (i.e. the Internet, Apps, text messaging, etc). It is both measurable and instantaneous; great for those of us wanting to ‘squeeze every cent’ and that lack the time to plan campaigns months in advance!

Not only this, but there’s a far greater chance your equine business marketing will be successful if complemented by a sound digital strategy. Think about it. The target markets of most equine businesses are riders, right? Age-wise, the majority of riders out there are from a younger demographic. And what are young people good at these days? Technology, of course!

A few years ago I decided (the sort of decision you make when blind ignorance and extreme optimism collide) that when my third and youngest child started school it might be fun to do a PhD. I was interested in Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War and the differences between that experience and popular culture representations of the war – which are mostly driven by the US experience. So, I signed up and started researching. I was working and raising a family, and such is the nature of the horse industry that I would usually get an hour or so to research before picking the kids up from school and starting afternoon lessons. The early months of my research became, for me, a series of moments of extreme cognitive dissonance – standing in the playground watching children play and thinking about Post Traumatic Stress, Ho Chi Minh and land mines...
 
During that time we went on our first family holiday to Exmouth. After about seven hours of driving I knew the Wiggles entire discography by heart and the children were starting to disappear beneath a drift of muesli bar wrappers and empty juice boxes. We stopped at the Overlander Roadhouse and as I was walking the kids to the toilets I noticed a man sitting, eating a hamburger in a white Subaru and on the window of his car a small sticker that read AATTV (Australian Army Training Team Vietnam). On the way back to the car I tapped on his window and introduced myself.
 
He was happy to talk about his experiences in Vietnam and we stood in the car park and the kids played on this scratchy little patch of grass while road trains tore down the highway. He'd done two tours of duty, the second had been worse because he'd been married by then and leaving had been harder. He told me about his experiences with Post Traumatic Stress. About ten years after his last tour things had got pretty bad and he'd decided he was going to blow up his boss. He'd worked out a way to disable the locking mechanism in his boss's car and was just working out how much chlorine he was going to need for the bomb when his wife discovered what he'd been doing and he was committed. He coughed and said that there were years when things had been hard, really hard.

Horse riding is a unusual past-time, statistically. It's one of the most dangerous sports you can play, with more fatalities and injuries per year than kick boxing, rugby and base jumping combined. Yet, the rest of the world's most dangerous sports are played almost exclusively by men. Horse riding is a statistical anomaly because in almost all equestrian disciplines, female participants usually out-number men.
 
The gender disparity in equestrian sports has long been a topic of discussion and the reasons that are given to explain women's love of horses says as much about our society as they do about the situation. "It's a nurturing sport," or, "it's a social sport" and even, "it's a sport where they get to dress themselves and their horses up." These explanations, which make me think that making stupid assumptions about the motivation of female riders is actually the MOST dangerous past-time ever, speak more to the way that gender operates in our society than to the truth. I'm not actually sure what the truth of the matter is, but I'm willing to bet that it's nothing at all to do with nurturing, because if that was the case we could all buy bunnies and kittens, and could save a small fortune on saddlery, stock feed and physiotherapy.
 
Maybe the answers are in our history, as answers quite often are. From the sixth century BC until the first few centuries AD there were tribes of mounted nomads that roamed around the lands of Russia and Kazakhstan. The Sarmatians were highly skilled horse handlers and fierce warriors.