Digital marketing is growing tremendously in Singapore.
You need to implement the best digital marketing techniques for your business to survive the massive competition. According to research, eighty-one percent of Singaporeans do online research before buying products and services.
It is hence crucial for you to take a step into marketing your business online.
For small business owners, most of them do not know where to start when it comes to online marketing.
They move from place to place trying out what may work best for their business. Online marketing incorporates a lot of stuff from social media marketing, blogging to the email newsletter.
Different from what many people see it, digital marketing is easy to integrate with the right support team and the proper knowledge.
This article goes through the top best tips for social media, SEO, and email marketing for Singapore SMEs.
One of the most effective online marketing for small businesses is social media marketing. It’s easy to start a social media marketing campaign making it a great option.
Neither do you need a huge marketing store or a lot of cash to market your business?
You are only required to establish a strong social media marketing strategy.
Social media has different top marketing platforms that are perfect for your small business marketing.
Let’s look at each of these top platforms and the best marketing practices that you need to incorporate in your online marketing strategy.
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Instagram
Research conducted reveals that there are more than eight hundred million monthly Instagram users. Approximately half of them open the app more than one time daily. This makes it one of the platforms in which your target audience is more likely to be found.
What makes it popular is its attractive display and user-friendly culture making it easier for business brands to interact with their potential and already existing customers.
How can you promote your business using this immense Instagram popularity? Instagram has many business tools features that help you improve your business.
One of the tactics you can use is connecting your business Instagram profile to your Facebook business page, getting relevant followers’ insights and monitoring how your Instagram posts are performing.
Hashtags
Instagram hashtags are turning to have a great significance in Instagram marketing. You should use hashtags that are based on your industry and are popular. This way, they enable your posts to be seen by more people hence giving your business more extensive exposure.
Examples of hashtags that you can use include #localshop or #smallbusiness. Ensure that the hashtags you use are effective in targeting your target audience. Other Instagram tools that you can make use of are our IGTV and Instagram stories.
Instagram Posts
One of the critical considerations about this is the best time for you to post and the posting frequency on Instagram. But one thing to note is no matter the time or how many times you post; the crucial thing is ensuring consistent posting. All the marketing best strategies require consistency. Your Instagram followers follow you due to your content hence you need to give it to them consistently. By making use of these tips, Instagram marketing will improve the performance of your small business.
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Facebook
Facebook is the biggest social media platform with a population of more than two billion people. It is hence a marketing opportunity that you cannot afford to lose. However, you need to do it right for you to succeed. According to research, more than sixty-two percent of small businesses are not successful in Facebook marketing.
Moreover, approximately fifty percent of small businesses are not getting a good return on investment on Facebook marketing.
These statistics mean that you need to use the best strategies for you to succeed in Facebook marketing.
This is not difficult as ninety-seven percent of B2C marketers are into successful Facebook marketing.
One of the things you need to do is gain knowledge of digital marketing and content marketing for you to get fruitful results from Facebook marketing.
Target Audience
With social media marketing, you can easily reach your target audience and analyse your conversion rate as compared to traditional marketing. More so, Facebook provides a perfect platform for interacting and engaging your target audience at any location worldwide.
Traditional marketing cannot offer such services. Understanding your target audience in Facebook marketing is crucial.
The majority of the people on Facebook range from eighteen to twenty-nine years old.
Your business could massively benefit from Facebook marketing if your target audience is mostly youths of this millennial age range.
Other tips for effective Facebook optimisation are being organised, creative, and approachable. If your small business can upload regular posts with high interaction rates, then you will get massive results.
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Twitter
Twitter is an ideal small business marketing platform with a user population of about three hundred million. Twitter is useful in increasing your brand recognition, and developing and establishing your business voice.
All businesses have their voices. For example, Coca-Cola’s digital marketing and advertising revolve its voice of happiness.
Some of its slogans have been, ‘open happiness’, ‘have a coke and smile’, and ‘share coke-spread virtual happiness’.
You need to find your best business voice that goes in line with the values and mission of your brand. Posting about it consistently on Facebook will increase your brand recognition.
The use of hashtags is essential on Twitter similar to Instagram. You can consult Twitter marketing services in a bid to get the best hashtags for your small business. Uploading your blog posts on Twitter or any other content from your business website helps to increase your conversions in the form of customers or email subscribers.
You can also use Twitter to maintain top trends in your business industry.
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LinkedIn
LinkedIn is often overlooked by small businesses as it is mostly used by large companies. Getting into this platform hence keeps you a foot forward ahead of your business competitors.
More than five hundred million professionals spend their time linked in finding colleagues, businesses, and jobs.
Most of these customers are educated and earn lucratively and getting them as your customers would hugely boost your business.
LinkedIn Content
One of the essential LinkedIn marketing strategies that many brands do not know about is content marketing. You can upload your LinkedIn content through pulse and status updates.
Pulse is a type of online news feed in LinkedIn where users follow exciting topics. Pulse receives many curated articles daily.
You should write and share your business content on the pulse to improve your business reach out. According to the expertise shown in your content, more people will look into your business deeper.
You are most likely familiar with status updates on social media.
You can use your status updates to share your website blog posts. SEO implementation can also help you promote LinkedIn content on other social media platforms.
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Pinterest
It is not likely that many people think about Pinterest as a marketing tool to promote their small businesses. However, Pinterest is handy for small businesses. Research shows that ninety-three percent of Pinterest users use the platform to decide on what to buy.
More so, twenty-five percent of site referral traffic is generated from Pinterest. This makes Pinterest a vital marketing tool for e-commerce and small business brands.
One of the great marketing tips on this platform is the use of high-quality photos to display your products.
This is because Pinterest is a visual platform. Use attractive pictures and bright graphics on your blog posts.
You can also share photos of your happy customers who have used your products or services.
Your followers can repin your quality content and share it with your friends, and the friends continue to repin it.
Two or three posts are hence enough a day. More so, it is not a must that all your post’s content is original; you can repin quotes and images from other Pinterest accounts.
Best SEO Practices
Search engine optimisation includes the strategies that enable you to boost organic traffic to your business site. The traffic is generated from ranking higher on the search engine results page.
The majority of internet users do not scroll to the second page of search engine results.
This means that a perfect SEO strategy will enable you to rank higher on the google front page.
You should ensure that you optimise your small business website for SEO. Approximately eighty-one percent of online shoppers use google to make their purchasing decisions.
This means most of online consumers research before interacting with a business brand.
SEO enables you to easily reach your target audience through the search engine hence a valuable digital marketing tool.
However, SEO is constantly changing and thus needs you to conduct some research before getting into it.
SEO Keywords and Posts
It is always tempting for many business owners to overuse keywords that are related to their business with the aim of targeting more people. This may have worked in the past years, but it works no more.
Google is now able to identify this kind of keyword stuffing and has started to crack down on such articles.
The best practice to help you rank higher is creating and publishing blog posts on your websites that have naturally incorporated keywords. This content will be more relevant, pleasant, and valuable to the readers.
The more time people spend on your site, the more Google becomes convinced of your higher authority and ranks you higher.
This will also lead to a higher conversion rate and improved growth of your small business.
Best Blogging Marketing Practices
You cannot afford to overlook blogging as a digital marketing strategy.
Blog posts are effective in boosting leads to higher conversion rates, engaging your audience, and increasing traffic. Business websites with consistent blog posts receive eight times more traffic than those that have no blogs or do not update them regularly.
This traffic generates six times more conversion rates than sites without blogs.
Blog posts provide an appropriate platform to insert SEO keywords in your website for a better ranking on search engines.
Additionally, consistently updating your blog posts helps to keep your site fresh and maintain the top rankings on Google.
The best place to start blogging is by writing about what your company deals with.
This helps to establish yourself as an expert in your industries to the people.
Create topics that your audience is interested in for improved website traffic.
Get into the blogging bandwagon and start competing with businesses in your industry that already know the significance of blogging.
According to research, about ninety-one percent of people like getting promotional emails from the companies they engage in business with.
More so, email marketing is forty times more efficient in converting users to customers as compared to Twitter and Facebook. An email newsletter is different from a sales email.
Here, you want to make your content as informative and educational as possible.
Your followers are more turned on to read heartwarming blogs rather than sales pitches. When the time for making sales come, they will have warmed up towards your business and will be ready to listen to you.
When designing your newsletter Copywrite, make sure it is simple and easy to read.
This is made possible by the use of many white spaces for links to remain visible and to tailor the images and graphs used to the branding and voice of your business.
Email Newsletter Frequency
Your potential customers and subscribers should be aware of what they are getting into before subscribing.
Sending about two emails a day to your customers is spamming them.
The best email newsletter frequency is once a week. Let your customers know about it even before they subscribe. Additionally, unsubscription steps should be simple and painless.
Increased customer interaction is one of the best pros for email newsletter marketing. This way, your small business will grow by building close relationships with the consumers.
Email newsletter marketing is an effective way of increasing your conversion rates, generating increased traffic for your website, strengthening your trustworthiness, and reinforcing your brand voice.
You already know the need to send newsletters to existing customers and people who have shown interest in your business and subscribed to the mailing list.
Like other forms of communication, you need to be extra careful to safeguard your credibility and generate leads through newsletters.
Here are the top 11 best email newsletter practices for businesses.
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Create an Engaged Community by Providing Double Opt-In
It’s every business goal to have a community of newsletter subscribers who are highly engaged and interested in the brand. You’re probably experiencing a low open rate and many people unsubscribing because they no longer find your content interesting.
Reverse this trend and get more results by eliminating random people from your mailing list. A double opt-in means that apart from someone signup and providing their email address, you also send a verification link to the address provided to confirm it’s legit. They should also click on the link to confirm the subscription process.
Yes, this strategy often results in fewer subscribers, but it’s the most effective way of building a list of qualified leads. Here are three primary benefits of a newsletter double opt-in option.
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- Higher email deliverability
- Higher conversion rates
- Low risk of emails being marked as spam
MailChimp and other reputable email marketing software have a double opt-in feature you can activate in just one click. Check the software settings and check the box to send verification links to new subscribers.
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Write Catchy and Concise Subject Lines
Like a blog post title or meta description, subscribers decide whether a newsletter email is worth opening based on the subject line. 35% of people use the subject line to determine whether to open, delete or mark an email as spam.
Thus, your subject line directly impacts your newsletter email open rate.
Take the time to write it in a catchy and concise way to get results. Here are tips on how to write subject lines that spur an open rate and positive response.
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- Be brief – No need for unnecessary words
- Language should be focussed on the recipient
- Use the scarcity principle to encourage readers to open and read the email
- Personalise it
- It should be aligned with the email copy
A boring subject line will result in your newsletter being marked as spam or doomed to the trash can before it’s opened. Monitor the results from different subject lines to know the best way to pique your audience’s attention.
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Inform Them of What to Expect
Let the subscribers know what to expect in your weekly, biweekly or monthly newsletter emails. Inform them about the contents you intend to send before they subscribe and the frequency of the emails. This information will help them to know whether subscribing is worthwhile.
For instance, if the subscribers are people who have previously purchased your product; inform them that you will send a newsletter with information about new product recommendations and discounts.
You can also list links to blog posts with valuable information on how to get maximum utility from the products/services.
Concisely, setting clearing expectations from the go will result in an engaged list that is genuinely eager to receive and read your newsletters.
As shown in the above form, the subscribers know precisely what content to expect from the brand when they sign up.
Another excellent way of setting expectations is by sending a welcome email to new subscribers.
Casper informs their subscribers of the kind of information to expect in the newsletters to avoid nasty surprises and guesswork.
Concisely, being transparent and upfront about the content and newsletter email frequency will cultivate a healthy relationship with subscribers, reduce unsubscribe rates, and supercharge your email marketing campaign.
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Increase Open Rate with Compelling Pre-header Text
The pre-header text is not the email subject line but rather the text that readers see in the email app before they open it to read the contents. Despite the considerable potential of this text to increase the open rate, many brands overlook it.
The pre-header text gives the recipients a hint of the email contents, helping them decide whether to open the email. It should elaborate or build on the subject line, so ensuring the two are aligned is imperative.
Take the time to write this section of the email in a succinct, personal, and friendly way to increase the newsletter email open rate.
Generic text such as “Having trouble viewing this email” will make you sound like a broken record and hurt your credibility.
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Use Personalisation
If this is not your first time doing email marketing, you’ve probably come across posts on the need to personalise your emails.
This hack applies to marketing or promotional emails and newsletter emails. Personalisation shows the recipients that you care and appreciate them. You are not just bombarding everyone in your emailing list with the same newsletter.
One of the personalisation tricks that work like a charm is mentioning the recipient’s name in either the subject line or pre-header text. Research shows that including the recipient name in either of the two sections increases the open rate by 29%.
That’s not enough to get the most results from the newsletter email. It would be best if you went the extra mile to ensure that the newsletter’s contents are relevant to the reader. One way of achieving this goal is by segmenting your audience based on factors such as;
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- Previous purchases
- Demographics
- Behaviour on website
- Past interaction with your emails
- Geographic location and more
For instance, you can send a personalised newsletter with a special discount to subscribers who recently purchased a product. Product recommendation newsletters also win back past customers and cart abandoners.
Congratulations, you have successfully encouraged the subscriber to open the email. The next thing you should do is convince them to take the desired action. They should recognise your brand immediately after they open your email.
Please don’t make them guess the source of the email by including your primary brand elements, such as the logo and brand colours. These elements should make your email stand out from other emails in their inboxes.
Below is a recent email we received from Headspace to help you understand this hack better.
Connecting the brand with the email is super easy by looking at the logo and colours in the email copy. They match the main website, so the recipients know that the email is from the company.
Never underestimate your subscribers’ ability to recognise your brand when creating a newsletter campaign. Either create a custom email newsletter template from scratch or optimise the existing templates to achieve this objective.
Our brains process visuals such as product images and videos faster and more efficiently than text. However, that doesn’t mean you should replace all the text in the newsletter with visuals.
Contrary to popular belief, images, videos and GIFs can be a double-edged sword if misused. They will make your newsletter stand out and effectively deliver the intended audience’s intended message.
Spice up your newsletter by not only using still images but also animations and GIFs to illustrate your brand, as shown by Noble Desktop below.
The highlight of using GIFs in an email newsletter is that they are super effective in piquing recipients’ attention than still images. They also make the emails look different from other brand messages to the subscribers.
That said, before adding creatives to your newsletter, keep in mind the following pitfalls. One, avoid using images that are either too large or small. Optimise them for viewing across multiple devices, and with most people using smartphones via content, make sure you preview the visuals before hitting the send button.
In a nutshell, too large or small images will negatively affect user experience and discourage recipients from taking the desired action. Strike a balance between text and imagery.
Subscribers often don’t have time to read every sentence in the newsletter. They skim through it, only picking the main points and clicking on the CTA button or links if the content makes sense to them.
Thus, it’s vital to decide when to send a long-format newsletter and when to send a short newsletter. The length largely depends on the intent and the action you want subscribers to take after reading the contents.
A short format newsletter is ideal for sending subscribers a more significant content piece such as a webinar, video, blog post, or case study. You don’t need to include much text, imagery and formatting in such a newsletter.
On the other hand, marketing or promotional newsletter tend to be longer and contain more visuals. Make it easy for subscribers to understand by breaking the text blocks using relevant images and photos.
As shown above, by Everlane, you don’t need to use hundreds of words to market a product. Get straight to the point by including a relevant image and short text to motivate the subscriber to click on the CTA button.
The point is, read through your newsletter and eliminate all unnecessary words and phrases. Keep it short by only including essential info and images to increase the open rate and the click-through rate.
Earlier, we mentioned that most people read emails via mobile. The mobile email open rate is as high as 46% in most industries.
Based on this fact, you need to ensure that your newsletter email contents are optimised for viewing and reading on multiple mobile devices. If they cannot read the contents or the CTA buttons or are not clickable on mobile, they will not hesitate to subscribe or delete the email.
Keep your subscribers interested in what you do and encourage them to do business with you by spending time optimising your newsletter for mobile. All elements such as the images, videos, and headers should be responsive.
The subscribers should get the same user experience irrespective of the device they use to open the email. Here are a few points on how to optimise your newsletter for mobile.
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- Avoid including large blocks of text
- Reduce the number of large visuals
- Ensure CTA buttons are accessible and responsive
- Avoid lengthy subject lines and pre-header text
The secret to knowing whether your newsletter is mobile-friendly is by previewing them across different mobile devices. Also, have people in your circle receive the newsletter and give you an honest opinion before you send it to the subscribers.
Knowing the right time to send a newsletter is always a gamble for most brands. Guesswork will not get you the expected results. Strive to send the newsletter on days and times when most subscribers are online.
Research shows the best days to send a newsletter are Monday and Tuesday. However, we recommend reviewing the open rates when you send the newsletter on other days of the week to know the ideal days and times for your business.
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Test, Test, Test Continuously
A/B testing every facet of your newsletter emails will help you get maximum ROI from the campaign. Everything in the newsletter, from the subject line, pre-header text, CTA buttons, and imagery, should be tested to confirm that it moves the needle for your brand.
For example, test the results achieved when you place the CTA button at the top or bottom sections of the email. Do GIFs and animations result in a high click-through rate?
Virtually all email marketing software has analytics pages you can use to monitor the performance of your newsletter campaigns. Regularly check this page and make decisions based on the data presented – no more guesswork.
Here is an article we recently published on the top 30 email marketing software. Check it out!
Get in touch with MediaOne Marketing for more tips on how to write a stellar newsletter and run a successful newsletter campaign. Our copywriters and email marketers will guide you through the process until you achieve the campaign goals and objectives.
Conclusion
For your small business to grow in Singapore, you have to incorporate the best marketing practices for your digital marketing.
Follow these stated tips for each of the marketing platforms and your small business will become bigger and bigger.
You can contact Singapore-based marketing and advertising agency to support you in your online marketing campaigns efforts.
Take a step today and watch your business succeed by contacting us today for SEO, social media marketing, and digital marketing services in Singapore
