Thinking of getting started with digital marketing for your small business?
Online marketing, also known as digital marketing or internet marketing, is about getting visitors to your website or landing page, and most importantly, converting them into customers.
Digital marketing is becoming increasingly crucial for all businesses as many people are constantly engaged through online media than they are with traditional mass marketing.
If you’re a small business and you want to get started on digital marketing, this article will equip you to better understand the importance of digital marketing and some key marketing tips to takeaway for your small business.
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What is content marketing? A big part of online marketing consists of content marketing. It’s creating relevant and valuable content through a variety of channels.
Content marketing is one of the main methods that businesses use to secure market authority, dominance, and gaining of consumer trust.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, the top Business to Business [B2B] content marketing strategies involves the social media, articles on a business’ website, eNewsletters, case studies, videos and articles on other websites.
Content marketing involves providing website visitors with relevant industry insight that helps them take the next step in the customer journey. This allows your business to steadily build rapport with your key target demographic and within your industry, and develop a loyal community for your business.
This trend also suggests that [traditional] interruption marketing to the masses like television ads, radio ads, or even ads in magazines are becoming less effective. They typically have a low conversion rate as compared to digital marketing.
For example, focusing on permission or inbound marketing by producing valuable, relevant and engaging content designed for your specific audience is more beneficial to your business in the digital era.
When we hear the term “digital marketing”, we often think about social media platforms and websites.
Here are various forms of delivery methods of digital marketing that you can consider adopting for your business:
By definition, Social media marketing is the use of online social platforms to conduct commercial promotion [as opposed to personal].
Many companies have already started doing this by posting frequent updates on sales and providing special offers through the social media profile such as ‘members only coupons’. Facebook, Twitter, and Tik Tok are examples of the most common social media marketing platform to-date.
Mobile advertising involves delivering an ad copy through wireless mobile devices such as your smartphones, mobile phones, or tablet computers. These usually take on the form of a simple short message [SMS] text, or even multimedia messages [MMS].
Mobile advertising is still relevant till this day for several reasons:
Email advertisements is another way of content marketing for businesses. They are similar to the mobile ads except it is received through email.
By having email addresses of your audience, you can produce marketing emails, eNewsletters, White papers, etc. to your consumers without having to wait for them to come to you physically [in your brick and mortar shop] or virtually [or online website/shop].
Once you think of creating your business website or an online blog, you are entering the territory of content marketing. Personalizing your website is an essential component of content marketing strategy, as it allows you to tailor the user experience to better engage and retain your audience
Content marketing strategy is any marketing that involves the creation and the subsequent sharing of published contents, and media, to help your blog reach full potential in order to acquire and retain customers.
The information can be presented in a wide variety of formats, including news, videos, e-books, infographics, case studies and how-to guides.
When content marketing is done right, your potential consumers can not only easily find out about your product and contact you for enquiries, but also engage with your business or brand and advocate for you through means such as Social Media platforms.
Online classified ads are the advertising of specific products and services in a platform with categorical listings. This would include online job boards, online auction-based listings such as eBay and Craigslist, online real estate listings, online yellow pages and so on.
Display advertising usually conveys its advertising message virtually on your consumer’s computer monitor.
You can setup google display ads using text, logos, animations, videos, photos, or other infographics. Apart from Google, these ads are also commonly seen on search engines such as Yahoo and Facebook.
Such advertisements frequently target users with particular traits and profile to increase the ad’s effect. ‘Cookies’ are used to track users’ buying behaviour. If the user leaves the website without purchasing, advertisers will set up remarketing with google ads. This means that users will be retargeted later with ads related to the product they previously viewed.
Millions of business appear on Google search. To get visibility, you'll need to rank on the first page. However, it is extremely competitive.
It's more likely than not that your business will need hire a digital marketing agency, who is also well versed in search engine optimisation, to optimise your website to secure a better ranking.
This will involve writing good meta description, off page SEO techniques (such as link building strategy and generating brand signals) and technical SEO.
SEM is a form of digital marketing that involves the promotion of your website by increasing its visibility in search engine results pages through advertising and search engine optimization [SEO].
To avoid any confusion, SEM can be seen as a wider discipline that incorporates SEO. SEM includes the paid means of improving the ranking of your website in the search results. This can be done by engaging google ads agency in Singapore. It can also include the use of SEO for organic search results.
Realistically, you do not need all these tools to get started on Digital Marketing. But having an idea of your options will help you decide on the best starting point for your marketing efforts.
There are many benefits for a business to engage in Digital Marketing:
Businesses can keep their marketing costs much lower through digital marketing than traditional mass marketing or offline ads.
Online advertising through social media marketing a business website provides not only a low-cost channel for advertisers but also tap into larger customer base that extends beyond postcodes. Some studies show that advertising online offers better returns than in other media.
Online marketing also offers a form of measurability. You can collect data on your ads’ effectiveness, such as the size of potential audience vs actual audience response, how visitors react and respond to the ads.
You can even run regressions on how your advertising output [expenditure, number of actual audience response, actual ads sent out, number of new members, etc.] has affected your sales. Measurability allows you to analyse, review, and importantly, to improve your ad campaigns in the long run.
Through online marketing, publishers have the added ability to reach an intended and very narrow market segment for targeted advertising.
Online marketing has the advantage of using ‘geo-targeting’ to display relevant advertisements to the user’s geography. This means that if you know the interests and preferences of your target consumers well enough, you can customize each individual ad to a particular user profile based on their previous preferences.
You can also track whether your target consumer has already seen a particular ad in order to reduce unwanted repetitious exposures [again useful for regression analysis] and provide adequate time period between exposures to the same ad.
Speed is another benefit since online ads can be deployed almost immediately once the backroom work with the ad design is completed.
The delivery of online ads does not need to be linked to any publisher’s publication schedule, and not queuing and bidding involved such as those in television marketing. It is also worth noting that in case a glaring mistake was made, you will be able to modify or replace the ad copy more swiftly than advertisements offline.
Of course, the advantage of online market marketing on the World Wide Web, means just that. You can potentially target pretty much anyone in nearly every global market, without being bounded by geographical constraints.
Given the benefits, there are also potential concerns that should be noted:
Eye-tracking studies published in the Review of Marketing Research Journal has shown that internet users often ignore [or become cognitively blinded] by web pages that likely to contain the display ads, and this problem is worse online than offline. Then again, studies also suggest that even with ‘banner blindness’, users may still be subconsciously influenced by the display ads.
Fraud cases involving Cost per Click [CPC] might occur during your campaign. For example, a third party with negative intentions would manipulate your CPC ads without legitimate buying intentions.
This could be done for numerous reasons, one of which is to deplete your advertising budget, or when third party publishers want to artificially manufacture revenue.
Many free ad-blocking or ad-filtering applications are available out there on the market, that allows users to block out ads such as pop-out ads on your website by default.
There are also software programs or browser add-ons that block the loading of ads, or block elements on a page with behaviours characteristic of ads such as HTML auto playing of audio or video.
The collection of user information by publishers and advertisers has raised consumer concerns about their own privacy according to the Wall Street Journal. Some internet users even go to the extent of using Do Not Track technology to block all collection of information if it were in their means.
According to USA Today, Gallup finds more than half of all Google and Facebook users concerned about their privacy when using Google and Facebook. It is true that tracking your users’ online activities allows you to understand their interests and preferences better, but consumers have reservations about such data mining and online behavioural targeting.
Since online marketing is heading into an all-time high, it is unsurprising that amount of spam content would increase too. The internet’s low cost of disseminating advertisements contributes to the spam as well, especially by large-scale spammers.
This phenomenon then creates an effect called mistaken filtering. It is when online advertisements are mistakenly filtered away from users’ view through blacklists or regulatory-required labelling.
This means that while you are busy designing your online ad copies and distributing them honestly, there are others who have committed to combating spam.
Finally, the scammers themselves could take advantage of your consumers’ difficulties in verifying the source of their online ads. These can lead to artifices like phishing, where scam emails are generated to your consumers’ inbox that look identical to those from the original source and a well-known brand owner [like you].
According to the year 2012 Internet Crime Report, the Internet Crime Complaint Centre has received over 250,000 complaints in 2012 alone, totalling over half a billion dollars in losses, most of which originated with scam emails and scam ads.
You should have an idea on what online advertising is by now, what options you have for delivery methods, and the benefits and potential pitfalls that goes with it.
There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to digital marketing. Which option you choose depends on your own preference for your business, the goals in mind and the budget and target audience that you wish to pursue.
Check out our other articles if you need for more information on Marketing Through Blogs or Beginner’s Guide to SEO. You may also contact us, a digital marketing agency in Singapore for a proper consultation on your business’ digital needs.
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