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Are You With Your Customers?
The digital world is integrated. Think about your own Internet surfing behaviour.
By now, you should be no stranger to Facebook, Google, YouTube, Whatsapp, WeChat, Instagram, online forums (Hardwarezone), online marketplaces (Qoo10), blogs (Ladyironchef), etc. If you’re everywhere online, don’t you think your customers are too?
Like you, your customers and prospects live in micro-moments. They search online for solutions, they hop on social media to engage with people, and they do their shopping online. Every online media platform is an opportunity for your brand to connect with them.
Instead of asking yourself “where should my brand appear online?”, you should be asking, “what are my customers doing online?”.
How do you reach your audience effectively online? Search and social media are popular choices of platforms in Singapore. In my experience meeting business owners and marketers in Singapore, I’ve encountered some of these answers when asked why they want to do a search or social media marketing:
- “My customers should be using Google because I use it too.”
- “I saw my competitors on Facebook, my brand needs to be there too.”
- “Everyone else is on Instagram, I should do it too.”
For the record, these are not wrong answers, but they are hypotheses and guesswork. Studying the customer journey and how it affects your sales funnel can help with your initial hypothesis, and data can provide actionable insights to make informed decisions.
How To Choose Your Online Media Platform
If you want to know what platform your brand should be on (Google, Facebook, Instagram, display networks, etc.), the answer is – everywhere, because you want to be where your customers are. We live in an exciting time where technology is integrated, so we need to stop thinking of digital marketing platforms and the customer experience in silos.
For a start, ask yourself these questions:
- What is the problem you need to solve with digital marketing? (e.g. lack of leads, lack of awareness, lack of engagement, etc.)
- What is your overall marketing focus? (e.g. customer acquisition, customer retention, etc.)
- Are trying to reach customers in the top, mid or bottom funnel?
- Do you have or plan to have creative content continuously? (e.g. videos, GIFs, photos, etc.)
If You Lack Leads
Reach The Ones With High Purchase Intent
Since people hop on search engines to look for solutions, search engine advertising gives your brand a way to quickly the reach audience with high intent and therefore a popular choice for brands with a lack of leads, focusing on customer acquisition at the bottom funnel.
Sweeten The Deal
Retargeting (a.k.a remarketing) on social media, display networks, search engines reminds your audience they have expressed interest in your brand before. The key here is to show a “deal sweetener” instead of a generic branding ad, something like “Here’s 15% Discount Just For You!”
The Warmest Cold Leads
Don’t undermine the power of your own database because these are the people who willingly gave you their email addresses to be connected with your brand. Email marketing is a cost-effective way to reach your audience directly. It has the ability to add a personal touch with automation and is non-intrusive in the users’ activity on the Internet.
Clickr ran our own email campaign recently that resulted in 7.59% conversion rate at a $2.53 CPA. This is substantially higher than what we usually achieve with our online advertisements.
“So why not focus only on email since it brings such good results?”, you may ask.
Our audience wouldn’t only check emails when they’re on the Internet. They read, they look for solutions, they shop online, they engage with their friends on social media.
We want to reach beyond our database. Had we only focus on email marketing, we would have missed out on prospects who discovered us on Google and Facebook. On the same online media platforms, we generate leads and create brand awareness with different strategies.
This brings me to my next point.
If You Lack Awareness
Reach Out
The extensive reach of display network and social media makes it optimal for reaching out to audiences in the top funnel.
On the display network, there are multiple options available on the display network to reach your target audience, such as in-market audiences, contextual targeting, location targeting, etc. On social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter have user-centric targeting options (e.g. demographics and psychographics), so that your ads reach relevant audience.
This is usually coupled with remarketing to improve brand recall to users who have visited or taken an action on your website.
Make Your Brand Look Exciting
Content can make your product or service look exciting. The use of videos, photos, GIFs are some content format that can engage your audience. Don’t be disheartened if your product or service is not “cool” by default. There is always a creative way to make your brand engaging, even if you’re selling a pen.
The thing with content is that there must be some level of commitment to it. A social media page is not going to get a lot of engagement if it is updated once a week.
With the help of technology, people today are voracious consumers of content. Your brand needs to keep up to stay fresh and exciting enough for people to want to engage and share. This will get you the awareness you need and also grow organically.
If you need help on creating a Facebook content strategy, here’s a guide for you.
So now that you know what to do, let’s find out what your fellow marketers in Singapore are up to in 2017.
What’s Trending in Singapore
According to the Singapore Business Review, the Top 5 digital marketing trends in Singapore for 2017 are:
- Content Marketing
- Conversion Optimisation
- Consumer Power
- Authentic Marketing
- Video marketing
As you can see, the above are not confined to any individual online media platform. Content marketing can be done on social media, blogs, emails, etc. Video marketing can be done on YouTube, Google Display Network, Facebook, etc.
While it is tempting to jump on the bandwagon and go with the flow, you have to consider if it will work for your brand. Ultimately, your digital marketing plan should be user-centred, and understanding your customer journey helps make your strategy on each online media platform a solid one.
In my next article, I’m going to share why combining lead generation and brand awareness is a huge digital marketing disaster. Stay tuned!
If you have any questions regarding the online media platforms planned in your upcoming campaigns, feel free to send them to me at geraldine@clickrmedia.com and I’ll be happy to discuss them. Till next time! 🙂
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