Every business owner knows the importance of digital marketing. With rates of internet and social media usage increasing every year, the web is an area of tremendous potential for marketing efforts in Singapore. Businesses that fall behind the curve run the risk of giving their competitors an edge, and it is nearly impossible to optimise marketing efforts without relying on some form of digital marketing.

One key trait which sets digital marketing apart from traditional marketing is that the former possesses a great deal of measurability. Whenever digital marketing techniques are deployed, data is created in the process – this allows you to accurately measure and quantify the success and / or failure of digital marketing. As any digital marketing agency in Singapore worth its salt would tell you, data is king when it comes to measuring the performance of your digital marketing campaigns. There are multiple tools and technologies that help you to capture this data, with which you can easily identify the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing campaigns.

When faced with all the demands of running a business, time becomes a precious commodity. Plenty of this time is taken up by marketing activities. Since a day can only afford us 24 hours and no more, you should be seriously considering outsourcing your brand or company promotion activities to a digital marketing agency and focusing on what you normally do best. This is especially necessary as you may not be entirely up to date with what digital marketing is like in a place like Singapore. With the every changing technological landscape, a marketing method that works today can become obsolete tomorrow.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are numerical metrics that are used to measure performance across different areas of measurement – these are deployed by organizations, both large and small, to help assess if they have truly achieved the goals that were set out initially. Especially in business, you would not want to lend support to a digital marketing strategy that does not generate positive results at the end of the day. With KPIs in place, you will be able to constantly measure, monitor and adjust your strategy as the campaign take its course; timely decisions, such as halting the campaign, can also be made to cut losses.

Most digital marketing agencies, regardless of their country of operations, would perceive ad copywriting as a crucial part of any online marketing campaign. There is good reason for them to believe so – paid ad platforms like search engines (think Google or Bing) and social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) only allow marketers a very limited number of characters for them to type and share their messages. Faced with this restriction, marketers must learn to be innovative and create effective ad copywriting in order to attract the target audience to their websites. In the arena of paid search marketing, your online ad is akin to a small door sign, on a busy street filled with competitors. With this harsh reality, it should become apparent that extensive effort is required to make your ad copy appealing enough to attract attention, as well as provide sufficient incentive to encourage the visitor to visit your site.

Mobile apps have surfaced to become an essential and integral part of digital marketing today. We live in a world where there is keen competition for clients, and where technology drives a major part of our lives. Technology today is embodied in our hands, within our pockets – our mobile devices. This makes mobile apps increasingly important in helping your brand stay in touch with the consumers at all times. As a business owner, wouldn’t you want your clientele exposed to your brand or offerings – hence gaining and reinforcing mindshare – each and every time they unlock their phones?

In a competitive place like Singapore, it is estimated that 60% of new restaurants would not make it past their first year. This statistic also applies to many other countries across the world as well – from this, it is not difficult to realize that competition in the food and beverage industry as a whole is relatively fierce and unforgiving. In fact, sustaining a restaurant in such a challenging environment is always an uphill and endless battle for the restaurateur. To improve survivability, your restaurant can always use the services provided by a digital marketing agency. A digital marketing agency, be it in Singapore or somewhere else in the world, has a comprehensive understanding of the industry and more importantly, a viable strategy to help provide your restaurant business a competitive advantage. Translated into business outcomes, this advantage can mean consistent, additional profits all year round. Let’s consider some of the key benefits that you will gain, when you utilize the services of an online marketing agency in the management and execution of marketing tasks for your restaurant.

How a typical day in a digital marketing agency goes really depends on a wide variety of factors including the agency’s area of specialization, activities of different departments, strategic plans being undertaken, and clients being served. Due to the dynamic nature of the business, staff are likely to be working on a broad range of projects on any given day. Before we get into specifics on what a typical day at an agency is like, let’s first define what digital marketing entails and what a digital marketing agency actually does.

When reading a magazine, how often do you view the ads in it? Do you afford most nothing more than a cursory glance and check out of the most eye-catching of them all? If you are an advertiser investing in ad space in print material (magazines and newspapers come to mind), it is impossible to determine just how many readers actually see or even read your ad. Companies have realized this and, rather than pay full price for an ad without getting any indication of its performance in return, are now turning to more cost-effective, interactive and measurable online advertising. Marketers and advertisers are now incorporating verifiable consumer actions and responses as an integral and important component of their digital advertising strategies. This is what performance-based marketing is all about.

2016 was a great year for digital marketing in Singapore but 2017 seems to hold greater promise given that the industry never slows down. New innovations and technologies are always emerging in every sphere of digital marketing from social media, PPC and SEO to content and email marketing just to mention a few. It is time every digital marketing agency began evaluating the current trends in the industry and prepared accordingly.

The tourism and hospitality industries are experiencing first-hand the impact brought about by breakthrough developments in the digital world. While the Internet has been extremely effective in streamlining business processes across diverse fields (such as e-commerce websites cutting out the middleman by offering products directly to consumers), it has also transformed the travel industry into a messy, crowded marketplace where competition is stiff. Today, every travel agency is striving to stay competitive – in certain cases, just simply trying to stay afloat – by employing all forms of digital marketing techniques. As a travel agent, you are not only competing for leads (would-be travelers) but also with airlines and hotel chains which are offering competing travel and vacation packages directly on their websites. In order to be able to stay in the rat race for travelers’ share of wallet, one must have a robust digital marketing strategy.

The rising popularity and use of digital media have greatly influenced the marketing landscape in Singapore nowadays. In particular, businesses from every industry conceivable seem to be jumping on the bandwagon leverage on influencer marketing, with the objective of gaining credibility and new customers in the digital world. Just exactly what is influencer marketing, and how critical is in in marketing your brand or business?

Technology now plays an instrumental role in the hiring and recruitment industry. In fact, in the world of digital marketing, one can draw parallels between the seemingly distinct talent and customer acquisition process. In a customer acquisition process, a business starts off by developing marketing content, which may contain ads press releases, white papers, blogs and lead-capture landing pages. This content is then used to generate sales leads for the business, which are further nurtured until they become fully qualified buyer leads. The entire workflow is made possible by what is known as Marketing Automation – a process by which the launching and monitoring of required tasks for the purpose of lead generation can be automated.

Regardless of the size of the business, devising a solid digital marketing plan is critical. Your marketing budget is an integral component of your overall business strategy. To help realize business goals, the budget must be realistic and the outcome measurable – you will want the investment to translate to tangible results, such as improved brand recognition or increased revenues. Without a solid, well-defined digital marketing plan, it is possible for you to overspend on your marketing costs.

How do you define online reputation management? To some, it may mean monitoring the various social media platforms and responding accordingly as and when the need arises; to others, online reputation management is akin to a public relations exercise. Regardless of how you perceive and define this term, it is critical to be cognizant of the important role online reputation management plays in today’s world of digital media marketing. Be the entity engaging in online reputation management a small or a big organization, an independent blogger or a world-famous celebrity, this aspect of digital marketing must always be properly managed.

Marketing through video is becoming increasingly popular these days, and its rate of growth has been truly phenomenal. The underlying factors of this development are effectiveness and acceptance by the masses, giving every marketing agency in Singapore convincing reasons to make it one of the key tools in its arsenal.

Nowadays, many hotels rely heavily on online travel agents (OTAs) such as Expedia, Booking.com, Zuji and many more such portals to drive bookings. However, that may not be the ideal arrangement as these OTAs require a substantial commission from each reservation. Instead, they can look to leverage on the precision of digital marketing to bypass the “middleman” and bring about greater profits from each booking. The process is simple, maintain a direct online channel (i.e. hotel website) and drive highly targeted traffic to it through digital marketing. If properly executed, this method can be very effective in driving hotel room bookings.

Digital technology and practices are constantly evolving, which makes it important for businesses and marketers to stay updated with emerging trends in digital marketing. Business-to-Business (B2B) marketers are no exemption to this rule. What is seen as a hot trend today could be irrelevant tomorrow and what is anticipated as tomorrow’s big thing may be overtaken by something else. At the same time, a B2B marketer who relies on traditional marketing strategies will not go far in the present business environment. 

In this modern world, everyone is leveraging on content for marketing in some way or another. Specifically for branded content, it has become way more than writing something with a specific tone and language that resonates well with a target audience. As most would agree, it now needs to be capable of increasing brand awareness and equity that will in turn raise the overall value of a company. With such an objective in mind, run-of-the-mill content will certainly not fit the bill. Instead, a company needs stuff of utmost quality to effectively build positive relationships with its audience and cultivate a sense of identity with its products/services. Furthermore, such content can allow a company to position itself as an authority or opinion leader in its industry. 

When recession hits, the first thought that comes to mind for a company’s management would be to downsize a marketing department or cease the engagement of a marketing agency. As much as it may seem like a logical move on the surface, sacrificing on such areas of the business in tough times can prove to be a big mistake. From what statistics have shown, doing just the opposite during a recession can prove to be a wise move that will help to grow a company at an impressive rate both at present and in the future. But why is that the case? After all, marketing departments and agencies are neither responsible for creating a product/service nor closing a sale with a client? Well, let us take a deeper look into the importance of sustaining marketing activities even during tough economic times in the paragraphs that follow.