digital marketing

Digital marketing in Singapore: 2023

Digital marketing in Singapore is a rapidly growing industry, as more and more businesses are turning to online channels to reach their target audience.

Digital marketing in Singapore is a rapidly growing industry, as more and more businesses are turning to online channels to reach their target audience. Some popular digital marketing strategies in Singapore include search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, email marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

SEO is a process of improving the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). By optimizing a website for relevant keywords and phrases, businesses can increase their visibility and attract more traffic to their site. Singapore is a highly competitive market, so businesses need to ensure that their website is optimized for both local and global search terms.

Social media marketing is another popular digital marketing strategy in Singapore. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are widely used in the country, and businesses can use these platforms to reach out to their target audience and build brand awareness. Social media marketing is also a cost-effective way to reach a large number of people and engage with them in a meaningful way.

Email marketing is another effective way to reach out to customers in Singapore. By sending targeted and personalized emails to potential customers, businesses can increase their chances of converting leads into sales. Email marketing is also a great way to keep existing customers engaged with a brand.

Finally, PPC advertising is a cost-effective way to reach a large number of people in a short period of time. Platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads allow businesses to create targeted ads that will appear at the top of search results pages. This can be a great way to generate immediate traffic and leads for a business.

Overall, digital marketing in Singapore is a dynamic and ever-changing industry, and businesses need to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in order to stay ahead of the competition. By implementing a well-rounded digital marketing strategy, businesses in Singapore can increase their visibility, attract more customers, and ultimately grow their revenue.

Digital marketing statistics in Singapore

As of 2021, there are approximately 4.9 million active social media users in Singapore, representing around 75% of the total population.

As of 2021, Singapore has a penetration rate of 153% for mobile internet users, which means that there are more mobile devices than people in the country.

As of 2021, the most popular social media platforms in Singapore are Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

As of 2021, the average cost per click (CPC) for Google Ads in Singapore is around $1.5 to $2.5.

As of 2021, the e-commerce market in Singapore is valued at around $5 billion, and it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.5% from 2021 to 2026.

As of 2021, the most popular e-commerce platforms in Singapore are Shopee, Lazada, and Qoo10.

As of 2021, the most popular search engine in Singapore is Google, with a market share of around 95%.

As of 2021, the average open rate for email marketing in Singapore is around 24%, and the average click-through rate is around 3%.

As of 2021, the majority of digital advertising spend in Singapore is on mobile advertising, which accounts for around 60% of total digital ad spend.

A Guide to Starting a Digital Marketing Agency

Digital marketing has become an integral component of an effective marketing mix. There have been a lot of digital agencies popping up seemingly out of nowhere.

Find Your Niche

Digital marketing has become an integral component of an effective marketing mix. Because of this, there have been a lot of digital agencies popping up seemingly out of nowhere. This is why it’s so important to make your agency stand out amongst the competition. How do you achieve this? The key is specialization. By specializing in a niche, you can present your agency as an authority in it.

A lot of times, you can increase the attractiveness of your digital marketing agency to customers within your niche. After all, if you specialize in e-commerce businesses, your agency is going to be a lot more attractive and desirable to an e-commerce company than a digital agency that doesn’t have nearly as much experience working within the industry. While you want to niche down, you don’t want to get so niche that you run out of customers. You need to ensure that your niche is broad enough to support your business. Try to come up with a unique value proposition that helps to distinguish your agency from other agencies in the industry.

Figure Out Your Client’s Pain Points

This is the key to selling anything. If you want to sell your agency’s services, you need to figure out and address your client’s pain points. How do you figure out what their pain point is? The key is by talking to them. You need to be actively talking to your customers and listening to what they say. You will find different industries will have different pain points, for example trading online can be fraught with difficulties see here. You need to figure them out and get to know them to know how to effectively address them.

This requires a lot of research on your behalf. It will take a lot of time too. However, once you become an expert in a niche, you can much more easily identify the pain points of your target customers. After all, if you’ve niched down to a specific target market, they generally have the same pain points.

Come Up With Entry Level Positions

When you get into the process of scaling your business, you’ll need to have a reliable and repeatable system for getting new employees into the mix. You need to get a steady influx of quality entry-level employees. To do this, come up with hiring processes. You want to have systems in place to ensure that you are choosing the right people for the job and integrating them into the workflow seamlessly.

Here are some tips:

– Don’t Make Qualifications Too Strict

One of the main things you need to do is not over-qualify your entry-level employees. A lot of these employees will be very capable of learning things quickly. Because of this, you don’t want to require them to have too much experience. Otherwise, you risk pushing away excellent candidates for the job.

– Ensure Rapid Adaption

When you are hiring entry-level employees, you need to keep an eye on them. You want them to be able to effectively adapt as quickly as possible. The digital marketing industry is so dynamic. Constant changes are happening within it. You need your team to be able to keep up with all of the changes.

Here are some examples of entry-level positions at a digital marketing agency:

– Account Coordinator

– Social media Coordinator

– Marketing Coordinator

– Project Coordinator

With the right hires among your entry-level workforce, you can ensure that you get hard-working individuals that can move up the ladder within your company providing you with a steady influx of talent.

Increase Prices

If you will be running your business and looking to scale it, you will want to ensure that you continue to drive more and more profits. Because you will be increasing hiring and other expenses in your company, you need the profits to increase to offset the increase in spending. The best way to do this is by decreasing your outgoings with surplus.net and increasing your prices. This can be a difficult thing to do. After all, a client isn’t going to be happy with having to pay more for something they got lower previously.

It’s undoubtedly the case that you will lose some clients to this transition. However, you will also get a lot of clients to stay who will be willing and able to pay the higher prices. This means you can pull in more per client which should help you better support your growing business.

Optimize Your Agency’s Operating System

You need to ensure that the entire business is running smoothly from top to bottom. Everything needs to be firing on all cylinders. To achieve the kind of growth you are looking for from your agency, you want everything to be running smoothly. This includes digital marketing agencies. You might be wondering what’s the very first step to getting your business running smoothly. Having a clear and concise layout of your entire organizations operating system is the start.

You need to know what your business entails. What are you doing for lead gen? What are you going to onboard new clients? What are you doing to deliver the final product? Once you’ve established the systems, you can better organize things and create an assembly line of sorts that can have everything running as smoothly as butter.

Here is an example of Agency to Client Process From DoInBound

You can leverage this overview to evaluate how effective your business’ flow is and whether or not it needs any changes. You want to continually reassess your business processes as needed to ensure everything is flowing seamlessly.

Leverage Facebook Marketing

Facebook is a platform that is excellent for all kinds of businesses. It features a range of different users. Because of this, your clients are likely already on it. Facebook advertising can be a major asset to your business. You can leverage Facebook advertising in your marketing processes. They offer cost-effective advertising which makes them a good option for digital agencies.

By leveraging the power of Facebook ads and messenger bots, you can effectively advertise your digital marketing agency to ensure that you are constantly feeding new leads into your marketing funnel.

Design a Lead Magnet

You need to have a lead agent designed for your website. Even if you run advertisements or drive people to your site, it’s not necessarily certain that they are going to turn into a client or customers. A lot of clients will end up at your site and bounce off. They are just shopping around. You need to ensure that you are offering them value. A lot of clients won’t exchange their email or phone number just because. Building out a lead magnet is one of the best ways to ensure that you are getting their contact information to put them in your lead funnel. Offering a value-packed e-book can be a great way to do this. Try to make signing up for your lead magnet as easy as possible.

How To Do Branding For Your New Retail Business?

Here is an article for you to do branding for your new retail business. Read to know more.

Brand identity is as important as starting a business. 64% of shoppers build a relationship with brands because of shared values.

Customers are more focused on that and less focused on price, therefore it is easy for retailers to differentiate themselves from their competitors. It is a necessity to do so.

Experts agree brand is an identity for retailer success. Branding is more than just brand identity to retailers. One has to make use of that brand identity in the shopping experience as well. It is very much possible to grow business with digital marketing.

Here are some ways you can do it, without getting confused. In this article, we will be talking about the ways to do branding for your new retail business.

Consistency

Introducing your brand identity, so that customers’ shopping experience can foster that is not only the main moto. It is not only about your store, as a retailer and doing retail business management, it is important to know about all the facets of the brand that work together.

Consistency and impact are the main two features for a successful brand identity and to create a business plan. Every time a consumer interacts with your brand through social media, email, website, or directly in-store, remember the experience should bring forth the exact same emotion. The brand identity as well should remain the same.

Here are some tips on how to keep consistency intact.

The Brand Identity Should Be Documented

To document your brand add voice, mission, and guidelines during logo usage. The documentation must circulate in your company and comes out with examples of good and bad both, to make the employees understand better about brand identity.

Policing The Brand

If given proper and enough training to your employees they can become brand police and present you with off-brand issues if they spot any.

Some businesses have teams who make sure that all channels are attached to the guidelines.

Support Cross-Department Communication

Retailers with a huge size have teams that manage different functions. Ensure that store managers, product managers, the marketing department and other sides of the business are aligned as well as have open lines for communication on the same page.

This can be in the form of weekly meetings and status updates through email regularly.

Target The Audiences

It is beneficial if you document the target audience and focus on the pain points of the customers. It is going to be a wise choice if your business addresses those points correctly, which will in the future help your employees to know the customers better and the goal of the brand.

Posters

The poster is the first thing a customer sees of a brick store and then interacts through it. Even the store name postered on the top while entering a store is also very effective.

The name that you have on your poster must be strong enough for the customers to feel like they are about to enter a different dimension.

To start with an inexpensive way, you can put up a blackboard with chalk on it. Retailers are good at luring traffic, especially those who never noticed your window displays.

If your brand identity is aspirational, decide a name accordingly and add an impactful quote with it, if the brand identity is funny, make fun of it. If the names are eye-catchy, then you can be on Instagram too.

Logo

Besides the topics of visuals, the logo is an important component too for your identity. The logo embodies your brand identity, as well as it demands to be a part of the in-store experience.

You must not just keep slapping the logo wherever you want, the logo must be strategic.

You can put the logo on receipts, shopping bags, price tags, and many more. Remember your action must not overwhelm the customer nor underwhelm them. These decisions depend on the brand identity.

Color

You can paint your store red, with the idea of customers being targeted when they come in. The fun part is, the consumer already knows that by the color of your store. Color increases brand recognition upto 80%.

Choosing colors can actually affect customers and their thinking process for the time being. It has a psychological impact.

While using the color red keep in mind that it denotes excitement, boldness, and youth. Retailers working with health and wellness can choose the color gray or grey, to provide a feeling of peace.

Therefore, blue denotes trust, yellow denotes optimism, purple shows creativity and orange denotes friendliness. Choose every color accordingly that gives a good impression of your brand.

Scent

You definitely have passed by a shop that smelled peculiarly nice. Use that in your shop, use some scented candles or incense. Customers will smell your store’s scent before even noticing it.

Scents can create a special identity and bring out emotional reactions, that’s how powerful smell is as well as ascent marketing.

Just like colors, scents can elevate thoughts and feelings. That is why yoga studios have scents applied in the room, which is calm and refreshing. Many people put some scented oil on the head pillow, to fall asleep peacefully.

The idea of using scents in your store can be more useful if your shop sells those fragrances.

Lightning

Another important feature of your shop is lightning. Customers like soft lights in a shop that don’t hurt their eyes. They also demand a good focus light while going through items. Bright lights help the item to be seen openly.

Children’s stores can be lighted up with lightning that makes the environment creative, playful. Keep the lights dim when the customers are just talking and asking questions, brighten it up when you show them items of your brand.

In these changes, the customer will also snap from one mood to another, and you handle them all.

The Bottom Line

This article teaches you about the ways that will help you in branding your retail business.

Every point mentioned and elaborated here is important for branding, keep in mind how to use it properly to make your business impactful.

Leave a comment down below, if the article has anyway helped you.

Author Bio:

Jais Frank is a freelance content writer and enthusiastic blogger. He is the co-founder of

RSLonline. He contributes to many authority blogs such as Dream Land Estate, Finance Team, SB Newsroom and Emblem Wealth. He also likes to write in many international magazines and journals.

An introduction to measuring your digital marketing efforts

You need to measure your digital marketing efforts. And we’re here to explain how.

For any business hoping to pull in customers online, there’s really no item higher up the ‘to do’ list than digital marketing. But when you’re busy pumping out content, connecting with influencers, and driving SEO, keeping track of your success can take a backseat.

But how do you know what eggs to keep in your basket and which ones are just duds? With data! You need to measure your efforts. And we’re here to explain how.

Set SMART goals

You can’t know if you’re succeeding if you never set goals. And not just any goals, but SMART goals. The kind that are:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely

This might sound like a list of overblown buzzwords, but it’s the different between…

“Get more Instagram Followers” And “Increase number of Instagram Followers by 5,000 within 6 months”.

If you’re pretty wily, you’ll have noticed that the second of the two is much easier to measure and attach defined metrics to. Here’s a worksheet from SmartSheets to get started.

Choose either an on-site or third-party measurement platform

Once you have well-defined goals, you can go down one of two routes:

Use on-site analytics platforms and plugins to keep track of your success
Farm the hard graft out to a third-party measurement platform

Google analytics

Google Analytics is everyone’s favourite on-site metrics tracking tool. It allows you to access standard metrics like site traffic split by source (e.g. social media referrals, organic search), click-throughs (people who click through to another page from the first they landed on your site) and bounce (how many people leave from the first page without interacting with the site)

And you can create custom metrics that better fit your goals. It’s compatible with most website builders, so you shouldn’t have any trouble setting it up, even if you’re just getting started.

So, why would you use a paid tool if Google Analytics is free? Well… because Google Analytics is not particularly specific. Meaning, it can’t offer the range of tailored information that a third-party measurement platform could.

Ads manager

If your digital marketing campaign involves a lot of paid advertising like PPC, you’re best off using an ads manager. These are usually off-site cloud-based software solutions that you pay for on a monthly subscription.

On the whole, these platforms help you both run and analyse add campaigns. So, you can set up your ads natively and then crunch the numbers and generate automatic reports to see how you’re doing.

Generally speaking, you can set up Facebook Pixel, edit ads, increase and decrease budgets, and share your insights with team members all from a typical ads manager.

Social media dashboard

While some social media dashboards include an ads manager, that’s not their main or only function. Social dashboards go beyond advertising to look at impressions, engagements, click-throughs, and other metrics associated with all of your social media posts.

You can usually attach as many accounts as you want, from different social platforms, and get automatic or customisable reports about your activity, audience, reach and other important metrics.

Where social media dashboards are most useful is in identifying what is working, which tells you what you should be investing more time, energy, and money in.

What should you measure?

Whether you’re using Google Analytics, an ads manager or a social media dashboard, you’ll have to decide what to measure. Rather than overwhelm you with an endless list of specific metrics, we’ve broken them down into categories based on what you want to achieve.

Traffic metrics

Traffic metrics essentially break down your audience by source (traffic source) and help you see whether you’re growing or maintaining your reach (new vs returning visitors).

When you know whether your visitors are coming from organic search or social and which social platforms are performing best, you can put more of your time and money into the channels that make the most impact, there are many digital marketing services providers who can help you to identify the same.

Engagement metrics

Engagement metrics include impressions (how many people view a post or page), time on page (for websites), bounce rate (how often people leave a page without engaging), exit pages (the pages people are leaving your site from) and pages per session (how many pages a user views in a session).

They tell you how ‘sticky’ your content is. As in, how good the words, graphics, images and other content on a web page or in a post are at keeping visitors looking.

Conversions

It’s all very well tracking traffic and engagement, but your ultimate goal is to get those lookers to take a specific action. This action might be making a purchase, subscribing to your podcast, signing up to a webinar, or even entering a t-shirt design idea.

Your conversion rate is the percentage of your total engagements that go on to take that specific action. And, it includes the ream of metrics that help you determine how profitable that conversion rate is (e.g. cost-per-conversion and value per visit). As well as those that break down your overall conversion rate into more specific metrics (e.g. new visitor conversion rate and return visitor conversion rate).

All of these metrics give you an idea of the profitability of your digital marketing efforts and provide some insight into which aspects of your strategy are behind it.

To sum things up

It takes a lot of effort and insight to stay on top of your digital marketing efforts. But if you know your metrics and choose the right tool to crunch the numbers, you’ll make your life a lot easier. So make sure you’ve set your goals, picked your software, and know what to track before you splash the cash online.

Automation in SEO: 4 Critical SEO processes that can be automated

To choose the best segments of SEO for automation, here are a few you can add to your strategy and the tools you can use to streamline your processes for your marketing team.

A growing brand needs a flexible, scalable strategy for its digital presence, and search engine optimization remains a key piece of that digital puzzle. Putting yourself on the map and remaining relevant despite the rising competition takes serious planning and creativity, which is why expert marketers spend most of their time refining their battle plan for SEO. With that in mind, marketers also need to take various processes off their busy hands: to be more productive, and to pour their precious time into other, more time-sensitive tasks.

Automation in SEO is one of the smartest ways to optimize your workflow and overall operations. However, some processes are more responsive to automation, while others demand your undivided attention. No matter how many innovative tools we have at our disposal, some tasks are best left in the hands of your skilled SEO experts. To choose the best segments of SEO for automation, here are a few you can add to your strategy and the tools you can use to streamline your processes for your marketing team.

Keyword opportunity research

When you have a brand-new business, most of your keyword research will still involve a fair amount of manual labor. Although you’ll use tools that search for you, such as SEMrush or Google AdWords, you’ll still need to be the one to look into the relevance of keywords and find a way to implement them effectively. However, if you’ve been around for a while, you can actually start refining your keyword research by looking at your competitors.

With certain keyword research tools, you can use a feature that specifically targets keyword opportunities still unused on your site, but that already exists on your competitors’ websites. Their ranking and level of traffic will help you determine if you can and should pursue them and sprinkle them into your latest content pieces, too.

Complex reporting and analyzing

Marketers love statistics and pie charts, all for the sake of refining their strategies and getting those thumbs up from their customers. Alas, getting those numbers right is often a demanding job, and when done manually, it’s often riddled with errors. Instead, using comprehensive SEO reporting tools has become the go-to solution for marketers in need of smarter, on-point, reliable data reports, sans the stress and hassle.

By engaging various integrations and allowing your reporting tool to access all of your web performance information, you allow the software to generate reports based on insights that are supported by pure, unbiased data. Although highly automated, the software meant for reporting is also highly customizable, allowing brands to utilize their various features and tweak them to their exact liking. So, you can finally say goodbye to endless spreadsheet manual filling-out and replace them with automated reports.

Monitoring backlinks

Among many other SEO-vital factors, your backlinks can be a burden to monitor and manage. Especially for a business that has been around for long enough to have numerous pages of content that might have been there for years. So many of those content pieces may exist all around the web, as guest posts, or as links shared by various relevant sites. Now, since backlinks are considered one of the most relevant ranking factors in the eyes of search engines, you need to make sure that all of your backlinks are of top quality, truly relevant, and up and running.

Now, merely letting your backlinks be won’t help you improve your ranking or ensure your digital reputation. So, using a backlink monitoring tool can be vital in ascertaining the quality of your backlinks, their overall presence, and you can then choose when and how to resolve backlink problems to always protect the links that are of the greatest importance to you.

Social sharing made simple

Content creation is one of those aspects of your marketing strategy that cannot be handled by machines – at least not yet, or at least not that effectively. You still need to put all those carefully-researched keywords to work through every piece of content you produce, get your designers to craft stellar visual content, and engage with customers regularly to ensure a better digital presence. All of that aside, content dissemination is easier when you automate it!

No matter how brilliant your latest article may be, you still need to get it in front of as many people as possible, and in addition to guest posting and your website, social networks are perfect for just that. In order to avoid cramming your social media managers’ entire schedule with link-sharing tasks, you can actually use a social sharing tool that automates social posting. Now, your marketers can focus on engagement and creativity instead of the menial work of social sharing, and you’ll never have to worry about forgetting to post something – the software will do it for you automatically.

Twitter Auto Follower Tools

Now that you have an overview of certain SEO segments that are easy to automate, take a closer look at your existing strategy and try to find room for improvement. After all, automation is all about boosting your business performance on a bigger scale, and allowing you to retain and grow your online presence without overburdening your employees or your budget. These seamless solutions will let you scale your digital presence efficiently and you can rest assured that their implementation will prove to be beneficial for your ranking down the line.

Integrating programmatic direct mail into the digital marketing funnel

In real-time digital marketing campaigns, programmatic direct mail is the new buzzword.

In real-time digital marketing campaigns, programmatic direct mail is the new buzzword. It is a personalized and dynamic direct mail delivered to anonymous visitors of your website through postal hubs. The process relies on real-time analytics to measure conversion data and daily responses for optimizing the results.

Programmatic mails are based on high-level automation that enhances campaign efficiency through a closed-loop system. It is a task-oriented marketing technique that uses tangible goods to engage with potential buyers. If you integrate direct mail into your digital marketing campaigns, it can reduce the load from your sales funnel. Here’s how it can do that:

Choose the Right Recipients

Through programmatic direct mail, digital marketers aim to reach and convert potential customers on their website. It is an ideal approach for brands looking for new methods of interacting with consumers. Using Personalized URLs or PURLs, marketers can measure response rates and create custom audiences for mail retargeting.

When you have massive goals to engage consumers during the shopping season, you can gain their attention effectively by using personalized messaging through direct mail. It connects with the audience who have already expressed their interest in your brand. After determining your target audience, choose a mailing list that delivers the messages to these people.

Repeat the Mails

When using direct mail for retargeting interested online buyers, you can’t rely on single-time mailing. Data states that the response rate to direct mail moves up when you send the second or third mail. However, you needn’t stretch your marketing budget to accomplish this target. Instead, focus on getting better responses by mailing 100 people three times rather than mailing 500 people together.

Resolve the Issues of Digital Marketing

Issues like ad blocking, brand safety, and online frauds impede the conversions in most of the digital marketing campaigns. Such lackluster performance of online ads has led to a resurgence of traditional snail mail.

So, design your programmatic direct mail to remove these pain points and get optimized data-driven results. It has a high-delivery mechanism that creates innovative channels for improving sales.

Estimate the Cost

The postage cost of programmatic direct mailing becomes a component of your overall digital marketing efforts. So, it is wise to make a budget and estimate the mailing costs before initiating the process. The size and design of your printed mail can influence the cost to a great extent.

Explore your options before setting aside a mailing budget. For example, the costs may be different for programmatic catalogs and postcards. You can choose the right medium depending on consumer interactions and behaviors.

Maintain Consistency

Whether you are using digital marketing techniques or programmatic direct mailing, maintain consistency in the campaign offer and calls to action in every material. It implies that each marketing channel should put across the same message to the buyers. Since they’ve already explored the content on your website, they can quickly identify your brand and campaign as soon as they see the offer.

With these best practices for integration of programmatic direct mailing into your digital marketing campaigns, accomplish your overall marketing goals, and get more sales.

Word of Mouth Marketing: 5 Tips for Improving Your Online Reputation

Word of mouth marketing is still crucial today.

Word of mouth marketing is still crucial today. The internet connects people from all over the world, allowing them to talk, and may mean it’s possible for a business’s customers to have an impact on sales based on what they say to others about the business. When an online reputation is poor or it’s not enough to help the business, there are a few things the business can do to boost their reputation.

Use a Review Management Platform

Reviews are the main way for customers to let others know what they think about the business. While it’s not possible to get perfect reviews all of the time, the more reviews a business has, the more positive reviews potential customers can see. It’s also a good idea to respond to reviews, which means there needs to be a way to track the reviews as they’re posted. A good review management platform can help businesses get more reviews to help their reputation improve, visit this site.

Improve Customer Service

Customer service is crucial. When customers have a poor experience, they’re going to leave reviews talking about it. Instead, make sure everyone has a great experience with the business and go above and beyond the minimum needed to make the business look good. Listen to any complaints that customers may have and work on improving the business so those issues don’t occur again.

Target Influencers

Influencers can encourage others to try out a business and can help boost the business’s reputation quickly by talking to their followers about how great the business is. To take advantage of this, identify and target influencers who may be interested in talking about the business online. This can also help boost branding awareness and help bring in new customers. However, make sure you keep away from influencer databases and instead learn to get straight to the good stuff.

Give Lessons Online

Consumers love to learn new things and maybe willing to check out online lessons offered by a business if it’s something they’re interested in. This helps encourage new customers, but it can also impact the business’s reputation online. Stick with something that’s short and that customers will be interested in and they’ll help generate good publicity when they’re done with the lessons. This is an excellent way to give back and to encourage customers to talk about the business.

Contribute to the Community

Businesses can help get the word out about their business and improve their reputation online by giving back to their local community. When a business helps the community, it can generate a lot of good publicity and will help make it look like the business is charitable. Customers notice when businesses help their community and will generally talk favorably about the business to others or when they write reviews for the business.

The internet has made it possible for many more businesses to be created, which can mean a lot more competition for a small business. However, word of mouth marketing online can help boost the business above their competition and help them gain a better reputation with their customers. To do this, the business must use some strategies to boost their reputation and get more customers talking about them. If you’re looking for ways to boost your business’s reputation online, try out these ideas today. They could have a huge impact and lead to a better reputation and more business.

Exclusive: Meet Anuradha Tiwari, The TEDx Speaker Who Is Changing The Face Of Digital Marketing

Anuradha Tiwari, a TEDx speaker, founder and CEO of JustBurstOut, among India Today’s Eight Unique Entrepreneurs of India, and much more.

Recently we had the chance to interview digital marketing veteran, Anuradha Tiwari. She is the founder and CEO of JustBurstOut, a digital marketing and branding agency. Anuradha is also a TEDx speaker and among India Today’s Eight Unique Entrepreneurs of India. She has helped more than 40 brands in India and globally to leverage the digital platform well to increase user growth. Her client list includes some big names like Apollo Hospital, FabIndia, Amity University, etc.

How did you get into branding and digital marketing?

I started my career in writing where I was involved in both creating campaigns as well as measuring its effectiveness. From there I went on to digital and brand promotion. From helping just one startup to taking care of 10 brands at the same time, it’s been an amazing journey. I have also kept myself educated since the SEO norms change in a span of months.

How do you make a strategy for a brand?

After getting a thorough idea about product or service, we focus on the target customer, which includes demographic information and customer who will walk through the door. My main motto is to carve out a distinctive identity of a brand.

What do you think is most important in branding?

I personally believe in not giving everything on a plate, but create some intrigue and allow customer to find more about your brand. Social media is a great way to reinforce your mission, but avoid indiscriminate discounting just to create new customers. Offer more, better.

How do you decide digital marketing budget?

It depends on what exactly client needs- do they need a complete inbound marketing plan or want to get the word out about the new service launch or simply looking for online conversions by 100%-200%. The goal helps translate how much do you spend- tools, SEM, email, social management etc.

Do you consider what your competitors are doing?

Of course. Well, I don’t follow their strategies, but I need to stay updated on industry trends. Are we ranking below in search? Are we out of date? With so many accessibility of tools, spying has become much easier. The best part is you can use their mistakes to figure out how to stand out.

What do you want to say to upcoming startups?

Branding strategy is the most important of a business plan but most startups opt for branding once they have everything in place, which results in taking a toll on an existing budget. So, it is crucial to get organized with the cold, hard numbers before you start planning your budget.

In the cluster of digital marketing space how can an entrepreneur think differently

Here’s what an entrepreneur can do to rise above the digital din in an attention economy.

White noise. Clutter. Information Overload. Short attentions spans. We’ve heard these being bandied about plenty whenever any “expert” waxes eloquent on digital marketing.

But how do you leap over these inevitable hurdles while on your way to building digital equity? Let me be honest, it’s tough. It comes with time and it comes with keeping up with change. Here’s what an entrepreneur can do to rise above the digital din in an attention economy.

1. Bank on content – Tell me a story

At the core of any product, individual or brand is a story. Tell that story and tell it well. Make content the blood that runs through the veins of your brand and you will never fail. With consumers becoming more and more ad savvy by the day and suffering from ad fatigue, a good story is truly the only way you can possibly ensure stickiness.

2. It takes a few turns and swings – Evolve with the times

Each day we have a tiny window to grab people’s attention and make an impact with content. And it takes a number of elements to succeed. Test these elements. Do your AB testing and analyze what’s working and what’s not. It’ll take a while and the formula will change every now and then. There’s no shortcut to building an audience. It’s a long, winding road. Accept that and evolve.

3. Stay ahead of the change – The first-mover advantage

New platforms and new trends breed new opportunity. If you look at vine stars and brands who made the first move to Instagram like Starbucks, Nike or Red Bull – they are far ahead of the curve now and reaping the benefits of having taken the risk to play with a platform when no one knew how to. They earned massive followings when the platforms took off and latecomers were just left picking up scraps. Early adopters get a unique chance to build an audience before it gets too crowded. So, get on Snapchat NOW!

4. Video made the digital a star

You know that every single day, the readership of newspapers and long form content is dumbing down. That also explains the rise of the single most childish but undeniably successful form of content – the listicles. But how about jumping the queue and getting on to the video bandwagon right away. Look at what Truly Madly did with an expensive but exceptionally successful video with the comedy collective AIB.

They reached their audience, made them laugh and download the app. And no one says, you need to start big – take the plunge with small videos where the stakes aren’t high. But do them now, because they are going to be the reigning medium of storytelling online – from choice point videos to augmented reality. The digital natives have given up on TV and they are now counting on you and the web. Why should you wait?

5. Honey! They shrunk the screens – Make for mobile

More than 50% of digital content is now consumed on mobiles and tablets. So, whenever you set out to strategize your content or design, envision its effectiveness on mobile. Remember that people won’t read for too long on mobile, or they won’t be impressed with designs that bleed on small screens. So, optimize for the smallest screens and you’ll not lose an audience that is always on the go.

6. Be the home of all things digital – But find your niche

Do one thing but do it well – there’s still wisdom in that. Make sure that you can deliver every aspect of digital marketing – from analytics, to design to the all-important strategy. But find your niche, your groove. It could be video or a certain segment of brands or a specific kind of campaign like Twitter QnA. But aspire to be in top tier of a certain kind of digital marketing – so that when brands need that specific skill, they know where to go – to you.

7. It’s human to err – Be transparent

It’s one of those words that has the best of intentions but the worst of implementation. It might seem counter intuitive to tell prospective customers what you don’t know. But admitting that you struggle actually increases you credibility. It shows that behind the Brand or the organization, there are humans who are learning and evolving, just like their audience. So take your mission statement to the streets. It could take the form of a blog that charts your organization’s journey through case studies of success. It could be that one thing that helps your rise above faceless agencies or brands.

So, bring your personality and humanity to marketing – whether digital or offline. That, along with a willingness to bounce back from pitfalls and embrace change is really all you need.

6 Inbound marketing strategies every startup could adopt

Inbound marketing strategies have gained popularity over the years as they are less expensive, hold a wider range of benefits and are estimated to generate a higher rate of return.

Inbound marketing strategies have gained popularity over the years as they are less expensive, hold a wider range of benefits and are estimated to generate a higher rate of return. Inbound marketing deals with providing value to the customers.

Some in-bound marketing strategies every start-up could adopt are:

1. On-site content marketing

Engaging your customers through on-site content marketing is a great option as you provide the customers with fresh and informative content on your own website. If you could provide the readers with high-quality original and detailed content which is informative yet interest them, it could go a long way in maximising client retention. It also gains an entrepreneur enough hits on social media and boosts SEO rankings. With growing market for content, this is definitely an opportunity which should be tapped by all budding marketers.

2. Search engine optimization tools (SEO)

SEO aspires to feature your start-up on the first page of search engines like Google, Bing, yahoo etc. SEO tools are every start-up’s dream come true as a start-up can gain great visibility and publicity through organic (unpaid) methods. Some popular SEO tools every start-up should be using are Followerwonk, Wordstream, Copyscape, URI valet, Ubersuggest and Facebook pages. A start-up should also venture into more complex SEO tools for optimization of apps and to target keyword phrases in latter stages.

3. Off-site content marketing

Off-site content marketing is huge these days. It means publishing your content in other spaces other than your own website. Well-written and informative content in famous blogs and media publishing forums can help you gain visibility among a new set of people. Also, if the traffic garnered is good, your content is likely to be picked up by big media houses which is a dream come true for every start-up.

4. Social media marketing

Even though organic social media gives you a fair share of visibility, SMM is definitely the way to go in order to make more people aware of your venture. This is done with the help of inorganic (paid) tools through social media and aspires to gain visibility and a loyal audience. The power of social media is huge and can make or break your brand and it is thus important to use these tools carefully for a positive outcome. Facebook ads is a very good example of how powerful social media can actually be.

5. Personal branding and influencer marketing

Using influential people for personal branding is a very clever strategy and works well when one has to promote an idea quickly and effectively. For instance, Jabong has tied up with Alia Bhatt to promote a few of their collections.
The influential person plays a crucial role in reaching out to the audience via social media/advertisements and helps to garner more response. However, it is very important to choose a person who resonates your brand image without which the whole idea could go for a toss.

6. Maintaining tends and analytics

Almost all companies log onto Google Analytics to find out where they are currently positioned. Keeping a tab over analytics also allows the marketer to keep a close watch over the competitors and adopt new marketing strategies. Google Trends helps the marketer to gain a fair idea about the changing trends in the current market.

All in-bound strategies working together can help to gain positive response for your company. Also, these strategies could help a budding entrepreneur to achieve success very early after setting up his venture.

Image Credit: www.blueinteractiveagency.com