Whether you are advertising a new or an established business in Singapore, you need a good communication channel that will engage your target audience perfectly. The selected channel should deliver maximum returns to your business at the end. With the improved level of technology and access to internet services, digital marketing has become the ideal way for business advertisement. There are top channels in Singapore digital marketers can use for engaging their audience.
However, there has been established a wide range of choices on which channel to employ. As a result, how to pick a digital marketing channel for your business has become a difficult thing to do. Keeping this in mind, below is a selection of the best digital marketing channels for effective advertisement. Employing one of them will bring back to your business great returns.
#1 Search Engine Optimization
One perfect digital marketing channel is the use of SEO. According to statistics based in Singapore, business organizations that employed SEO in their marketing strategies experienced an increase in their sales. Of course, many people claim that SEO is an expensive channel of advertising. There are also claims that it needs people who have experience in search marketing. This has truth in it, but the returns it brings along with it are worth the price. Note that, if you want your SEO to be effective, link it to different social media platforms. A good SEO will employ the use of social media platforms. This way, it helps to promote content, and at the same time improve search engine ranking. Search engine marketing SEM is one of the best ways to do your marketing. Employ it today, and enjoy the benefits.
#2 Display Advertising
Display advertising is just another digital marketing channel that brings great returns to your business. It features designed graphical adverts that are placed next to a content website, emails, Facebook among other platforms. It can also be displayed on instant messaging applications. This advert can be in form of text, audio, video clip, images, or any other relevant content. An example, when going through your Facebook page, you may have been presented with advertisements of different forms. When you click on the advert, it opens another page with all the information about the advertisement. This is what we call a display advertisement. The number of clicks the advert gets is what we use to calculate its success. Therefore, it is important that you ensure the information is relevant to its viewers.
Almost everyone in Singapore has a Facebook, Twitter, or email account. This means that carrying out a display advertisement will ensure that your message is received by your target audience. It helps to increase the presence of your business online increasing its brand awareness. As a result, your sales will have a high chance of an increase.
#3 Business Website
One of the best ways to market goods and services for new firms is by establishing their own websites. Through SEO, social media, display advertising among other channels, you can direct people to your website. With improved technology, there are a lot of experts who are able to create websites that have the capacity to drive a lot of traffic. It is good you realize that websites will not work alone. You need to do a lot of search engine marketing SEM and social media advertisements. Once recognized, people will be able to access what services your business offer on your website. One can also have access to your business’s contacts and location easily.
For the past few years, social media advertising has gained a lot of interest from a lot of business owners. The fact that they are free of charge to use and set up your firm’s page makes it even more attractive. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are examples of different social media platforms that you can use to promote your business. However, there is a tendency that most businesses will create a page and then leave it. This makes it hard to determine how companies are tracking customers or increasing their sales using social media channels. After creating a social media page on any of its platforms, make sure that your company maximizes its presence on the page. Also, make sure that you also provide good customer care services online. It is on these platforms that potential customers will have access to your company’s product and services reviews. This will be a great chance to give your business brand a good picture to the public.
#5 Email Advertising
In this case, you get to reach your potential customers through emails. Email marketing helps you create a new opportunity to generate new customers. It also allows you to improve your relationship with your old customers. It is one of the perfect channels that work best for companies with inadequate advertising funds. It also gives companies a chance to promote other marketing channels they employ effectively. Make sure that you are consistent in sending as many emails as possible. This will increase the chances of your target audience viewing them. Also, make sure that you are sending emails that need a reply from the receiver.
#6 Content Marketing
Another channel that works to increase your online sales and leads is content marketing. This is a digital marketing strategy that displays the good content about your goods that your customers want to see and read. The content can be displayed on any social media platform. However, in most cases, content marketing is done in form of blog content displayed on your website. Through SEO, content marketing is able to drive new traffic to your website.
#7 Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing occurs between the business owners with one or more website owners. The website owners will place adverts on their websites with an aim of promoting sales of goods and services of your company. For their payment, they will receive a portion of the profit. Affiliate advertising helps you get mass coverage at no cost. It also promotes your brand to a lot of the websites’ visitors. The affiliates will charge you either per click, sale, or lead. This means that the only time you incur a cost is when an agreed activity happens.
In conclusion, before getting into any of the digital marketing channels, make sure you have a plan. Doing this helps you to understand what you will be aiming to achieve. A plan will make you understand what share of the market you hold, and that of your competitors. It is good to know that most companies are turning to digital marketing. Do not be the last one to do so. Consider the above digital marketing channels, and select the one that suitably suits your business.
How to Choose the Best Digital Marketing Channel for your Singapore Business
When planning to start an online business, it is important to consider the digital marketing channel that you will use to reach the target customers. Already, we have discussed the seven best digital marketing channels in Singapore available to small, medium, and large businesses.
Each channel has its pros and cons that make it either great or not suitable for your brand. Before investing in any of them, consider the impact it will have on your brand in the short and long term. Consult widely and reach out to MediaOne Marketing for the best digital marketing services in Singapore.
We realised most entrepreneurs are confused about which channel to use due to the many options available. Here is an expert review on how to choose the best digital marketing channel or strategy.
1. Carry Out Market Research
A shot in the dark rarely hits the target. In the competitive business world, you cannot afford to make decisions out of guesswork and assumptions. Accurate data should inform every decision that you make about the market.
Carry out market research to identify gaps in the market that you can fill by starting a business. Proceed to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the brand and what needs to be done to ensure that it competes with other similar companies and generates sales.
Unlike in the past when entrepreneurs would spend thousands of dollars on research when starting, there are simple tools that you can use to gather the required information. For example, you can conduct a survey for free on social media platforms targeting the specific regions you intend to service.
The data collected will enable you to decide which digital marketing channels have the highest potential of reaching the audience.
2. Set Clear Goals and Objectives for Each Channel
Singapore businesses that are successful rely on multiple digital marketing channels to promote their products and services. Depending on just one means you will miss countless opportunities to connect with other clients who may be unaware of your brand but require the services/products.
In addition, set goals and objectives for each of the channels you decide to use. The goals will act as a blueprint that will enable you to make informed decisions and track their performance. Here are some goals you can set when embarking on digital marketing for the first time.
Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness will increase the popularity of your brand in the market. Customers will get familiar with your logo and brand name, thereby making it easy for them to pick your product when shopping online or at the local mall.
If this is your goal, go for digital marketing channels best known for helping businesses gain mileage and a firm footing in the market. Below are some ideas on how to increase brand awareness in Singapore.
- Run promotional campaigns with trackable coupons to determine the number of sales accrued from each channel
- Use social media platforms to engage and interact with the target customers
- Post visuals representing your brand on Instagram and Pinterest
- Use video as a marketing tool. Post informative and entertaining videos on platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube
- Be open to the idea of participating in offline and online events
Generating Sales
Without enough sales, the financial stability of your brand will be compromised. As a new business, you need robust sales generation strategies to get enough revenue to support daily operations, such as paying salaries and paying for ads.
Digital marketing channels such as paid social media ads are effective in attracting qualified leads online. Nowadays, people have embraced eCommerce and are not afraid to purchase products online. Build your credibility and reputation to attract customers.
Remember, online shoppers read customer reviews before placing orders, so strive to get as many positive reviews as possible. Post them on your website on landing pages or alongside the product description to convince the customers that it’s the best in the market.
Here are some of the channels you can use to increase sales without necessarily spending thousands of dollars.
- Facebook Storefront
- Amazon Resellers
- Google Search Network
- Google Shopping Feeds
- Google Display Network
- Affiliate Marketing Networks
- Email Marketing
Lead Generation
This is probably not the first time you have heard about lead generation. Singapore businesses rely heavily on digital marketing for lead generation. But, what does it mean and entail?
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is the strategic process of generating customer interest in your product or service to transform the interest into a sale. Collecting many leads will allow you to educate and nurture them with the intent of closing a deal.
Here are digital marketing channels that you can use for this purpose and get results.
- Display Advertising
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising
- Email Marketing
- Blogging
- Content Marketing
- Video Marketing
The number of leads from each of the above channels will vary due to the different market dynamics. Use the results to know which channel your customers prefer to get contacted through and focus on them more.
Nurturing and Educating Potential Clients
As mentioned above, there is a need to educate qualified customers about the product or service to motivate them. This step is essential, especially after introducing a new product or service.
Some of the ideal ways of nurturing and educating potential customers are:
- Blogging
- Press Releases
- Content Marketing
Generate More Traffic
Getting organic traffic is not a mere fete for new businesses. You will be competing against established brands with a high ranking in SERPs. However, it is possible to increase traffic from search engines and other platforms such as social media by using;
- Paid Ads
- Search engine optimisation services
- Hiring influencers and many more
- Display advertising
Budget accordingly for each of the options available to avoid spending more than you can afford. Ideally, it would be best to consider the estimated or projected traffic a particular strategy can generate vs. the expected profits. Focus on channels that can channel thousands of prospects to your website without hurting your bottom line.
3. Create a Comprehensive Budget
Most small businesses start with a loan or grant from the government. Singapore’s government offers many incentives to local and international entrepreneurs willing to set up businesses in the country.
Some of the loan options available to businesses in the country include:
- Temporary bridging loan programme
- Unsecured business term loan
- SEM working capital loan
- Trade financing
- Equipment financing
- SME Microloan and many more
You must manage the funds well to achieve the desired success trajectory. Proper management will enable you to grow the business and repay the loan within the agreed timeframe.
If you intend to use some of the funds for digital marketing in Singapore, make sure that you budget accordingly to avoid financial challenges down the road. Start with free or affordable channels to save money and start attracting customers.
For example, instead of investing in paid social media ads, create a custom page for your brand. Use the page to establish a community of loyal customers, post ads and informative visuals such as infographics to keep them engaged and interested in your brand.
Once you establish a substantial number of followers, proceed to experiment with paid ads. The ads should target people in the areas that you service to be effective in generating sales and organic traffic.
Sites such as Facebook and Instagram have dedicated analytics pages that you can view to know the performance of the ads. Monitor the campaign continuously to avoid spending money on the wrong ads.
Concisely, your budget allocations should also include:
- Salaries for the staff and digital marketing manager
- Paid advertising costs
- Content creation services costs
- Fees to be paid to videographers, graphic designers, and photographers
- Influencers fees
If you intend to use any of the premium digital marketing tools to monitor the campaigns, make sure that you include the cost of acquiring them in your budget. Look out for discounts and other offers offered by software companies to save money.
4. Leverage the Available Talent
Running a successful digital marketing campaign in Singapore requires special skills and expertise. Even though outsourcing the roles to a third-party company may seem like a good idea, it’s not viable if you are on a tight budget.
Therefore, we recommend looking at the available talent in your team and using it to get maximum results. As the business thrives, consider enrolling in some training courses to hone their skills and expertise. The training is a long-term investment that will pay high dividends later on when you start running large campaigns.
The skills required include:
- Website development and design
- Creative writing and visual creation skills
- Research skills
- Analytical skills
- Social skills to interact with potential customers on social media platforms
Hire staff who have at least two or three of the above skills to save time and money on training courses. That said, there are plenty of free digital marketing courses online that one can take remotely. Look for them and check the topics or the skills they provide before enrolling.
5. Create Buyer Personas
When running a digital marketing campaign, you need to have a clear understanding of the target customers. The research will help you get started, but you need to go the extra mile to create buyer personas.
What is a buyer persona?
Simply put, a buyer persona is a research-based profile of the ideal customer your brand strives to attract. It will help you understand the challenges customers face and how your product can resolve them.
After research, you will end up with multiple buyer personas since customers have varying preferences and needs. They are naturally attracted to brands that show genuine care for their needs. Concisely, having a good understanding of the customers will help you develop custom ads, products, and promotions.
The buyer personas will enable you to create marketing strategies that resonate with them. For example, if most of your customers spend time on social media sites such as Instagram, consider creating more stellar visuals to engage with them.
Post-high-quality images of your products, infographics, user-generated videos, and other forms of content to spark their interest in doing business with you. Save time by leveraging social media scheduling tools.
All you got to do is upload the images to the tool and set the time they should be posted. Consider the unique features that each tool offers and the pros and cons to get the best outcomes. Check reviews from other marketers who have used the tool to get a clear perspective before paying for the service.
Bonus Tip: Audit Current Digital Marketing Strategy
Using a new strategy to market your brand is great as it can help you connect with a new group of customers. However, the onboarding process can be time-consuming and expensive, especially if your staff doesn’t have the required skills to run the campaign.
Based on this fact, we recommend first auditing the current strategy to know if there is a need to ditch it for another one. Please fix the errors or friction points to make it more effective in generates sales.
If you still don’t get tangible results after tweaking the strategies, start looking for other options. For example, if you rely solely on email marketing, maybe it’s time you shifted to a social media marketing or search engine marketing.
As mentioned earlier, include the new costs in the budget to safeguard your brand’s financial stability. Involve all the departments in the decision-making process so that they all work in tandem and towards the realisation of the same goals.
Top Channels Singapore Digital Marketers Can Use
Digital marketing employs the internet and different digital technologies to promote products and services. Digital marketers should identify the best tools available for marketing their brand and business.
Search Engine Optimization
According to 99 Firms, internet users perform over 75,000 Google search queries every second. Therefore, you can imagine how many internet users are searching the internet. Since people use search engines to research, shop, and for entertainment, business opportunities are huge.
When consumers are looking for products and services to buy, they tend to go with those who rank higher on the search engines. If you stand out from your competitors at this stage, it means that you will be capturing new opportunities organically and drive a consistent flow of leads to your sales funnel.
Recent marketing statistics suggest that 64% of digital marketers are actively investing in SEO. Therefore, improving your rank on search engines will be a lot easier if you adopt modern SEO best practices, including keyword research, optimizing blog posts, and creating linkable content.
Organic search can help you in search rankings and link building. Since internet users mainly use search engines to get information as they shop for products and services, digital marketers who regularly produce quality and optimized content can make their brands rank on top of search results. Once you begin ranking on search engine results pages, you will get backlinks from authoritative sites to follow.
Digital marketers should learn how to optimize their websites with on-page and off-page optimization. On-page search engine optimization involves picking the right keywords and including meta descriptions for every piece of content. In contrast, off-page search engine optimization involves the use of link-building techniques such as guest posting. Both on-and off-page SEO give signals that Google can use in ranking your website.
It is also important to implement local SEO in marketing your brand in your community and the nearby locations. You can apply this by listing your business name, address, and contact number evenly on your website and social media profiles. Doing this will help Google and consumers locate your business as the contacts will work as keywords.
Display Advertising
Display advertising allows digital marketers to use images, audio, and videos in communicating their advertising message better. The images, audio, and videos are shown on websites, social media networks, email platforms, and other channels offering advertisement placements, especially in banner form.
With display advertising, digital marketers get the opportunity to target audiences according to their website content, geography, and types of devices. Moreover, marketers can also pre-define their target audiences based on their demographics and psychographics due to the developments in the display advertising buying process. You can also target your audiences as they shift from one device to another.
Launching a display campaign requires marketers to determine their goals and objectives to develop a sound approach. Next, they have to choose the key performance indicators (KPIs) to help them decide whether the campaign is successful. Some display ad campaigns KPIs include served impressions, conversion rates, click-through rates (CTRs), and cost-per-click (CPC).
Once you have established the KPIs, you can now define your target audience based on their age, gender, income level, etc. Use the information you collect to fine-tune the targeting of the display ad campaign. After completing the targeting exercise, you will want to purchase ads that your clients and prospects will see.
Launching your campaign is the last step once you have established your KPIs. Display advertising works just like paid search by allowing marketers to measure their campaign performance and optimize this performance in real-time. You can use the data you collect through display advertising to create remarketing campaigns along with lookalike audiences.
Business Website
A website is a must-have tool for any business because it provides you with a dedicated platform for educating your audiences about the brand, products, or services. Therefore, you must have a great understanding of the target audiences and an effective content marketing strategy.
Whether you are running a small, medium, or large business, a business website will provide your brand the online presence it requires for communicating and selling to prospects. Modern consumers purchase their products online. Therefore, all businesses need to invest in a website.
A business website is an excellent channel to conduct your brand content marketing campaigns. By creating blog posts and announcements, you will provide your current and potential clients valuable and relevant content to solve their pain points. Since websites allow multimedia usage, you will easily provide various types of content ranging from articles, infographics, and videos.
A lot of internet users are consuming different types of content. Therefore, if you have the perfect mix of the top-performing content types, you will be in a position to boost your website traffic and engagement. Eventually, this will result in better brand awareness, authority building, and an opportunity to increase sales.
Social Media Advertising
According to recent social media advertising statistics, 73% of digital marketers report that social media has been an effective strategy for their business. Furthermore, 54% of internet users use social media to gather information on products.
Digital marketers can use social media to grow their customers by creating original social content like blogs and videos and sharing it on their social media. These platforms provide an excellent opportunity for increasing video sharing and image sharing. Additionally, you can engage your audience by asking them questions and replying to their comments.
Email Advertising
Email is becoming more central to marketing today than it was before. This is because it is the most personal way for a brand to communicate with its clients. Additionally, digital marketers can target email marketing to prospects according to their sales funnel position.
Prospects at the uppermost level of your sales funnel would receive different email messages than those in the middle, and those at the bottom would still receive different messages.
Email marketing is an excellent way to promote a brand’s products and services, forge relationships, encourage customer loyalty, and obtain valuable feedback from your clients. The only trick that digital marketers should employ is building an email list, creating engaging content targeted to your audience, crafting enticing subject lines, and strategizing the appropriate time for doing an email blast.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is another very effective digital marketing channel to produce ROI. According to LYFE marketing, content marketing generates triple the leads for nearly 62% less than traditional marketing.
Some of the pieces of promotional content include videos, blog posts, infographics, podcasts, among others. Digital marketers should figure out which type of content will be most effective in speaking to their target audience.
A boost in organic traffic and lead generation is only possible if you deliver consistent and high-quality content. After creating quality content, you must promote it through personalized email marketing or sharing the content on social media. Doing this will get traffic to your blog and also generate leads.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a very lucrative type of digital marketing. The channel involves a partnership with online retailers, which earns you a commission from each sale and lead that you bring in. You can do this by providing unique discount codes to your followers or linking to your site from their content site.
When users plug in the discount codes or click on the links you provide, you pay the affiliate partner for that site traffic or sale. Affiliate marketing is a win-win in most cases. You can outsource some to your marketing team, reach prospects in niche communities, determine your cost-per-click/sale and only make payments for any actual conversion. In return, your partner will earn passive income without upfront costs.
How to Choose the Best Digital Marketing Channel for your Singapore Business
Your brand and business need to establish and maintain a robust online presence to make it competitive enough to reach your target audiences. There are new opportunities available which you can only access through digital marketing channels. However, you must consider the factors we mention below to help you identify the best tools available for marketing your brand.
Carry Out Market Research
Before you start your marketing campaign, it’s essential to do some market research to help you understand more about your audience. Carrying out market research will help you in unearthing vital information about your target demographics, including:
- The sites they hang out with more when online, including blogs, websites, and social media platforms.
- The type of content they like
- The activities they engage in online
- Dislikes, interests, and hobbies
There is plenty of competitor research tools that you can use to get this data. Once you have identified your competition and researched their marketing, you will also get information pertaining to your audience base.
Using the competitor research tools will help you get more input about your audience, significantly impacting your marketing campaigns. Moreover, you will be able to determine the most appropriate outlets for your specific niche and your target audience.
Set Clear Goals and Objectives for Each Channel
According to a CoSchedule study, marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to be successful than marketers who do not set goals. Furthermore, marketers who are highly organized have a 397% more chance of reporting success.
If you want to be successful, it’s essential to know where your brand is heading. You can start by setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Accurate, Realistic, and Timely) marketing goals. The goals will lead you to select the best channels for the business. Remember to set up small milestones that will help you reach your ultimate aim.
Create a Comprehensive Budget
A budget plays an essential role in choosing the best marketing channels. Every channel will require you to invest some cash, whether the channel is paid or organic. After identifying your budget, you must also prioritize marketing channels according to the available budget.
Organic traction is not free. Whether you use social media platforms or the search engine, you will need to pay someone to manage the activities. Therefore, when making your marketing estimates, you shouldn’t forget to include these costs.
You must understand your budget and what you are willing to spend on your marketing campaign. There isn’t a set price, and as a marketer, you should have a reasonable budget to work with. You must also set your expectations accordingly.
A good understanding of your budget is the initial step in choosing the best digital marketing agency.
Leverage the Available Talent
While considering a digital marketing channel, you should identify the skills that your team has. HubSpot reports that 16% of marketers believe that hiring top talent is the most complex inbound challenge. Many people ignore talent acquisition efforts in their marketing strategy.
All marketing channels require specialized skills and knowledge to be effectively leveraged. Prioritize on a channel that you will be available to target with your present marketers’ skills easily. Then, you can broaden your scope afterward.
As you hire staff ensure they have the essential skills you need to save time and money on the training courses.
Create Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are research-based profiles depicting target customers. They describe who your ideal clients are and what challenges they are facing when making decisions. You can have multiple buyer personas for your brand and ensure that they have different criteria to evaluate your products. Nonetheless, you will require various strategies to address their needs.
A buyer persona will help you know more about your clients and empathize with them to acquire and provide them with the best services according to their needs. Marketing can use a buyer persona in building effective strategies by focusing on keyword research efforts. Moreover, client support teams can also use buyer personas to serve their customers better.
As a marketer, you should clarify the type of people who benefit from your products and services and the challenges your brand helps them solve, which is critical to attracting and retaining customers. There are plenty of ways to approach customers online. Digital marketers must therefore choose the right marketing channel for an effective marketing strategy.
Top Mistakes Digital Marketers Make and Solutions
We have already discussed different advertising types, including search engine optimization, display advertising, social media, email marketing, content, and affiliate marketing. In addition, we established various techniques to identify appropriate digital marketing channels. Let’s now break down the top mistakes digital marketers make and how their solutions.
Not Clearly Defining Audience
One of the significant mistakes digital marketers make is advertising to a significantly broader audience, believing that it will expand their market and reach more customers.
In reality, only a tiny portion of this wider audience brings revenue to the business; this approach limits them from identifying and establishing their actual prospect’s needs, interests, behaviour patterns, and challenges to find the best way to provide them with a suitable solution.
Itsma research shows that 90% of brands and businesses using personas have developed a clear understanding of their buyers. Knowing your customers helps you create an effective digital marketing strategy, making it crucial to define your market and ideal prospects.
As 63% of digital markets would recommend, one of the best practices is to create buyer personas for two to three types of customers you identify. Hence, guiding your strategies and unveil platforms to invest in to maximize ROI.
How to define your ideal prospects:
- Define buyer personas: create market segments and put them into different ‘customer types.’ Based on their demographics, pain points, and expectations.
- Use experts for market research: Work with experts to better understand your market, changing habits, current trends, and expectations.
- Talk to your prospects: Engage your ideal prospects through surveys, polls forums, social media platforms to gain perspectives about them. Also, communicate directly with them to learn about them right from the source.
Not Addressing the Target Audience Pain Points Directly
Ideally, the target audience is never interested in your products or services but in how you solve and address their challenges and pain points.
Therefore, it’s crucial as a digital marketer to focus more on how your solutions will make the lives of your prospects better. Describe features of your products that will transform their lives in a way that satisfies their expectations. A successful digital marketing strategy depends on the clarity of your offering’s desired outcomes.
To gain insight into your audience’s pain points:
- Do an analysis of their current status by conducting surveys, customer interviews, and customer support.
- Ensure to directly communicate with sales and support team to identify customer requests and the appropriate stakeholders.
- Find research conducted by third-party industry to figure out the shared pain points and list critical findings to help you curate a better approach.
Brain and company indicate that companies that excel at giving the best customer experience generate 4-5% revenue above their market.
Implementing An Ingenuine SEO Approach
Statistics indicate that we have over 2 billion blog posts released every day. Therefore, optimizing your content for search engines is the only and better way to gain visibility and rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a game-changer in the digital industry. There is a need to keep up with the trends to ensure you apply the latest best practices to remain ahead of the game. 93% of online experiences by internet users start with a search engine.
Below are the most effective SEO techniques you should add to an SEO strategy to help your content appear on search results and rank better.
- Use the right keywords: this applies to the keywords you want to rank for and those your target audience uses to search for what they need. Focus more on those that are more likely to rank and that have a higher search volume.
- Curate quality content: Google and other search engines highly consider and prioritize high-quality, relevant, well-researched, long-form content. Make it more engaging and compelling by adding multimedia and visually rich elements such as videos.
- Consider mobile-friendliness: many online consumers use mobile devices to access the internet. Therefore, most internet traffic is obtained from mobile devices instead of desktops. Optimizing your site for mobile devices is a strong SEO signal.
- Include backlinks: Getting and including backlinks from authority domains and influencers from your area of experts increases your chances to rank higher, making you one of the authorities.
- Optimize images: to ensure your mages are efficiently optimized, focus on the details, including keywords in naming image files and defining the alt tags.
- URLs: To have a great SEO strategy, use short and clear URLs that contain a primary keyword and describe the page’s topic.
- Internal links: use internal links to boost page 2 rankings.
- Clean up toxic links: you can utilize the Google Link Schemes guide to look at links highlighted as unnatural and toxic. The wrong types of links can significantly damage your rankings.
Creating And Investing in Campaigns Without a Proper Strategy
Another great mistake digital marketers make is investing without a plan, lacking suitable structures and end goals, making their digital marketing efforts challenging to manage, measure and scale. According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 32% of marketers use a content marketing strategy.
To develop an effective digital strategy;
- Clearly define your target audience.
- Set SMART (Smart, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely) marketing goals.
- Evaluate your existing digital marketing presence.
- Automate marketing.
- Understand digital sales funnel.
- Establish channels, tools, and platforms for your digital marketing goals.
- Keep track of your progress, review your strategy based on results.
It’s vital to set KPIs to measure your metrics. Once you define, test your strategy, you will gain deeper comprehensive insights on well-performing areas and those that require improvements.
Spending unreasonably on paid ads
Once implemented effectively, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing on channels such as Facebook and Google Ad words can yield massive returns in growing audience reach, boosting traffic, and increasing conversion rates. However, it can be extremely costly when implemented without a solid strategy. Further studies show, 90% of companies spend at least 25% of their digital advertising budget on specific targets.
Before deciding to advertise on Facebook and Google Ads, ensure to;
- Have comprehensive research about your target audience. Create segments for various sub-groups, containing different age groups, interests, locations, income levels, and levels of education.
- Run A/B testing on several ad campaigns using different ad formats and audience segments to determine which one will yield the best results. Don’t overspend; the idea is to identify credible results to make conclusions for future reference.
- Establish your paid ads budget and review for adjustments on the go. Track and monitor their performance to determine the next steps while still running the ad campaigns.
- Save for paid ads and focus more on testing other strategies such as getting to know your customers better, refining your targeting to increase ad Return on Investment. (ROI).
Expecting Overnight Results
It’s a no-brainer that digital marketing campaigns and tactics require effort and time to succeed. Facebook ad campaigns, for instance, takes approximately a week to show comprehensive stats that point to its success. A new SEO strategy shows a conclusive outcome after two months or more.
Easy access to the internet and tools in an ever-evolving digital world gives the wrong impression that digital marketing is a shortcut to achieving instant revenue goals.
Digital marketing involves targeting people, which requires effort to gain their attention, keep them engaged, and convince them to convert into potential customers.
For effective results, digital marketing requires consistency and constantly trying and refining marketing techniques.
Using social media Without a Strategy
Social media platforms have great potential to engage with customers, increase audience reach and build authentic relationships. Several businesses lack proper strategies to leverage social media for optimal results. A good plan includes; good timing and regularly updating of social media.
Further research suggests that posting at specific times of the day increases the post’s reach and drives engagements. However, this varies across different social platforms.
Here are some pointers for using social media to grow your business:
- Start with a plan this includes defining realistic end goals you want to attain on social media.
- Determine which social media platforms are appropriate for your business. Different channels vary in their audiences.
- Facebook is an excellent platform to connect with local community groups and personal networks.
- Instagram is a more visual network, ideal for sharing exciting photos and videos. Hence, a great way to build an authentic brand.
- LinkedIn is a more professional-oriented platform. It’s a great way to network and build an industry reputation.
- Hire a social media accounts manager who will assist in:
- Strategic thinking when it comes to creating social media posts and engaging followers.
- Creating a step-by-step guide for timely scheduling and posting on social media.
- Implementing brand expertise to understand your company’s brand better and add a professional voice for it.
- Consistently curate social media posts that are educative, inspiring, relevant, and entertaining. Here are a few tips to consider;
- Conduct research to understand your audience.
- Speak their language.
- Develop your voice.
- Be optimistic.
- Keep it short and straightforward.
- Use compelling images and videos.
- Add a clear call to action.
- Collaborate with influencers to gain credibility, and tap into their audience who already trust them. 50% of buyers seek influencer reviews before making a purchase decision.
- Focus on growing followers: Your business should organically boost the number of followers on social channels relevant for promoting products and services.
- Engage your audience in the comment section, conduct live video streams, communicate with them directly, and develop a brand personality and credibility while at it; this will foster trust between your business and followers.
Neglecting Keyword Research
Keywords form the foundation for your business SEO strategy. Ignoring proper keyword optimization equates to missing out on customers who organically search for products to make purchases. 87% of your customers start their product search online.
Best tips for keyword research include;
- Build a list of localized keywords.
- Identify keywords your competitors’ target.
- Utilize Google search suggestions.
- Begin with a list of general keyword terms.
- Type them in the Google search toolbar.
- See what the search engine returns for potential similar keyword phrases.
- Identify common customer questions.
- Check out the “People also ask” section on Google.
- Try using an SEO toolbar such as Mozbar.
Benefits of correctly identifying your keywords;
- It boosts your organic traffic.
- Increase number of qualified leads.
- It provides insights into audience preferences and pain points.
Leverage keyword tools to establish and develop a robust SEO strategy; SEMrush and Ahrefs provide insights, analytics, and competitor’s insights.
Writing Blogs That Do Not Offer Value
Digital marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x are likely to see positive ROI. Low-quality blogs risk damaging their credibility and reputation online.
Having a good strategy to write blogs provides real value to customers, among other benefits such as;
- Increase organic traffic and visibility in search engines.
- Obtain 97% more indexed links.
- Enhance trust and relationships with prospects and existing customers.
- Build an online reputation in the area of interest to establish authority.
- Build and promote a community around your website and organization.
- Generate new leads.
Consider these eight critical strategies for writing influential blogs:
- Optimize your blog’s on-page SEO using relevant keywords, optimized URL, well-written meta description, use of internal links, use mobile-optimized templates/themes, etc.
- Develop a research-backed content strategy to identify your ideal readers, their pinpoints, content formats to offer solutions, and unique selling prepositions for readers.
- Consider using long-tail keywords.
- Use guest posts on authoritative blogs in your niche.
- Encourage readers to become email subscribers to build on your mailing list.
- Besides sharing on social media, answer questions on more community-oriented platforms such as Quora and Reddit.
Pro-Tip: To reap optimum benefits, make sure you create and publish high-quality, well-researched, in-depth content relevant to your audience.
Ignoring Social Proof, Including Case Studies and Success Stories
The majority of digital marketers underuse case studies in B2B content marketing despite them being highly effective.
Case studies and success stories are robust in influencing lead purchasing decisions. Since they help prospects visualize the benefits of your products and services, they trust your ability to meet their expectations and drive results. Why are case studies great?
- They boost organic traffic.
- Increase brand credibility.
- Easily converts leads.
A typical case study includes:
- An introduction.
- Background of the creation of a case study.
- A presentation of relevant findings.
- Conclusion with data and references.
Final Thoughts
Identifying and using the right digital marketing channel will increase your popularity in the market and help you generate sales. Hire MediaOne for professional digital marketing services in Singapore. We offer holistic services that are customised to suit client’s specific needs and goals. Contact us for more details.
