How To Scale Up Your Business With Digital Marketing

Digital marketing has seen a huge growth since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and businesses have started to allocate more resources in multiple digital channels. With more consumers researching and buying products online today, digital marketing enables businesses to effectively reach and engage with their target audience online.?

The Potential of Digital Marketing

In the context of Singapore, it has a 92% internet penetration rate and 89.5% of Singaporeans being active users of social media. It is also important to take note that Singaporeans have a huge appetite for online shopping, with about 62.8% of Singaporeans making an online purchase on a weekly basis[1]. Thus, the potential of digital marketing in Singapore is extremely high as a huge majority of the population are actively using the internet and social media.

Why should businesses consider using digital marketing?

• Wider reach:?With digital marketing, you are able to reach out to your target audience in a cost-effective and measurable way.?
• Lower cost:?A well executed digital marketing campaign that is optimised has the potential to reach out the right target audience at a much lower cost than traditional marketing. Additionally, the cost of setting up is not as high as traditional marketing.
• Social currency:?Digital marketing allows you to engage with your audience and has the potential of gaining social currency, which can be passed on from one user to another and become viral.
• Improved conversions:?If you have a e-Commerce website, your customers are only a few clicks away from making a purchase.

What do businesses need to consider before running a campaign?

• How much budget do I need to set aside?
• Will there be any results from the digital marketing campaign?
• Am I able to meet the goals and objectives?
• How do I measure the success of the digital marketing campaign?
• How do I track the campaign results?

How To Get Started With Digital Marketing?

Before getting started with digital marketing, it is important to understand your industry and goals that you would like to achieve using digital marketing. This would then help you shape your digital strategy and subsequently, the tactics that you would employ.

First and foremost, it is good to understand your business and identify its USPs. This would help you with the content creation for your website, landing pages, ads or even advertising messages.

Most businesses can be classified under two major categories (B2B vs B2C), some businesses have customers across both segments. Knowing where your industry/business falls under will help with defining clear segments and target audiences when planning for your campaigns.

Identifying Your Key Objectives

Next, identifying your key objectives would be crucial for digital marketing. This would translate into your campaign being tailored to create awareness, drive traffic or achieve conversion objectives such as leads, purchases, newsletter sign-ups, etc.

On the other hand, your objective could be you trying to increase the followers for your pages or even improve customer loyalty.

List of possible digital marketing objectives could include:

• Increase brand or product awareness
• Drive traffic
• Engagement
• Generate leads
• Increase sales revenue

If you have a limited budget and/or wish to achieve significantly better ROI/ROAS for your digital marketing campaign, you would need to decide on your campaign priorities and create a campaign that works best to achieve your top objective.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (STP Framework)

In digital marketing, STP is an acronym for?segmentation, targeting and positioning. Most digital marketers are familiar with this model because it’s quite effective for deciding on the best type of content for ads. The STP strategy uses marketing personas to target the right messages to the right customers.[2]

Segmentation is the first step in knowing if you have the right audience fit for your product/service and creating a persona takes the guesswork out of running random campaigns where its effectiveness is severely limited.?

The following questions and categorised factors below can help you in deriving a better understanding about your potential target audience:

• Shopping Behaviour: Which are the channels they spent most time on, How do they decide if a product/service is credible,?
• Decision Making: Which person in the household has the decision making power? How do they arrive at a specific choice/decision? Is your product seasonal based?
• Customer Mindset:?How much are they willing to spend on a product? What do they perceive about your product in terms of quality?
• Demographics: What is their age/gender? Do you have a narrow or broad base of target audiences?

Following through on the process of STP puts the initiative into the hands of marketers where they get a certain degree of certainty in forming a credible hypothesis when it comes into the stage of creating the right visuals and choosing the right digital channels to market.

Competition Analysis

In addition, it is also good to check on the competition and how your competitors are using digital marketing. This would give you an insight on whether or not certain strategies and tactics are potentially effective for your business. You can conduct competition analysis by researching on how your competitors run their social media marketing advertisements, the content that they post and also find out what are the digital marketing channels they use by simply visiting their digital touch points such as their website, social media pages and even on search engines like Google. Additionally, you may also use SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush or SE Ranking to run a competitive research. This would essentially give you a broad understanding of what your competition is actively doing within the digital marketing space.

Identifying Digital Marketing Channels & Platforms

Once you have researched your industry and competitors, the next step would be to identify which digital marketing channel and platform would be appropriate for your business.?

There are many different digital marketing channels that are available, and these include:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Google
• YouTube
• TikTok
• LinkedIn

In Singapore, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google and TikTok would be viable channels to consider for digital marketing across most industries. However, there are exceptions for specific industries and objectives, such as Recruitment. In this case, LinkedIn would be a much more suitable option.

This step would involve the following questions in mind:

• Which platform does your target audience hang out on??
• What is the age group of your target audience?
• Which is the channel they are most receptive to?

How to determine your Marketing Budget?

The next thing to take into consideration, would be the budget for your digital marketing strategy or campaign.?It is crucial to note a minimum amount of ad budget will be required to achieve optimal results for your marketing efforts. The amount will depend on your objectives, with conversion driven type of campaigns requiring a minimum budget of at least $500 per platform and awareness campaign can start from $300 onwards (per campaign lasting around 2-4 weeks).

The other broad factors that would influence your budget would also include:

• Your Industry
• Objective, Goal or KPIs
• Digital Marketing Channel & Platforms
• Competition

Overall, the starting point to launch an effective marketing campaign is not to daunting and while the research and setup phases may require some initial effort, it would still be useful to have a shot at reaching out to your potential audiences via digital marketing channels.