Digital Marketing

The digital space is fast becoming a platform of influence and almost anything can be done in just a click of a button.  We always have the human urge to connect, to stay in touch with our fellow human species, to communicate, share our thoughts, ideas, feelings, even a not so smart comments, it is also being use to do exchanges of goods and services and it is what we call, The digital marketing age. For marketers it is vital knowing where their website visitors are coming from. By measuring the metrics behind it they can decide how to divide their marketing budgets between social media and paid ads on various platforms.

Let’s have a look at what you should know to optimally divide your marketing budgets.

Start by digging into your web analytics tool to see where exactly the traffic to your website is coming from. This information will be of great use to decide on either of these two options:

you can optimize your presence on a social site if that channel already provides a healthy amount of traffic

you can put paid ads on a channel if the visitors are converting at a good rate

Your own marketing efforts will determine which channels you should measure against each other. Let’s take a closer look at three main categories, to help you determine where to put your focus, and why.

1. Social Channels

If one particular channel already refers a large amount of people to your website, you should definitely consider optimizing your presence there. However, it has become quite the challenge to track your niche communities on each channel individually because of the ever-growing number of social channels.

Once you have determined which specific social channel most traffic is coming from, you should determine what it is exactly they find appealing about your content. Based on that knowledge, you can further optimize your content to keep encouraging traffic to your website.

2. Organic Search

Many people in the industry have stated before that search is no longer as important as social. However, in a vast amount of cases, SEO is still driving very successful traffic. If you notice that indeed your brand search is providing traffic that actually converts, then investing in SEO is your way to go.

3. Advertising

When we say ‘advertising’, we can be referring to three things: paid search, display ads and ads on social sites.

To measure the efficiency of paid ads on for example Google or Facebook, you should take into account several metrics. For example, the number of conversions per user of each channel, compared to your investments into that channel.

Due to the diverse amount of marketing options, it’s beneficial to calculate the outcome of each of these traffic sources. If there’s room for experiment in your marketing budget, seize the opportunity and you will have all the insights you need to determine which path to take.

Fundamentals of Branding

Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business, large or small, retail or B2B. An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets. But what exactly does "branding" mean? How does it affect a small business like yours?

Simply put, your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from your competitors'. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.

Are you the innovative maverick in your industry? Or the experienced, reliable one? Is your product the high-cost, high-quality option, or the low-cost, high-value option? You can't be both, and you can't be all things to all people. Who you are should be based to some extent on who your target customers want and need you to be.

The foundation of your brand is your logo. Your website, packaging and promotional materials--all of which should integrate your logo--communicate your brand.

Brand Strategy and Equity of the Brand

Your brand strategy is how, what, where, when and to whom you plan on communicating and delivering on your brand messages. Where you advertise is part of your brand strategy. Your distribution channels are also part of your brand strategy. And what you communicate visually and verbally are part of your brand strategy, too.

Consistent, strategic branding leads to a strong brand equity, which means the added value brought to your company's products or services that allows you to charge more for your brand than what identical, unbranded products command. The most obvious example of this is Coke vs. a generic soda. Because Coca-Cola has built a powerful brand equity, it can charge more for its product--and customers will pay that higher price.

The added value intrinsic to brand equity frequently comes in the form of perceived quality or emotional attachment. For example, Nike associates its products with star athletes, hoping customers will transfer their emotional attachment from the athlete to the product. For Nike, it's not just the shoe's features that sell the shoe.

Defining Your Brand

Defining your brand is like a journey of business self-discovery. It can be difficult, time-consuming and uncomfortable. It requires, at the very least, that you answer the questions below:

What is your company's mission?

What are the benefits and features of your products or services?

What do your customers and prospects already think of your company?

What qualities do you want them to associate with your company?

Do your research. Learn the needs, habits and desires of your current and prospective customers. And don't rely on what you think they think. Know what they think.

Because defining your brand and developing a brand strategy can be complex, consider leveraging the expertise of a nonprofit small-business advisory group or a Small Business Development Center.

Once you've defined your brand, how do you get the word out? Here are a few simple, time-tested tips:

Get a great logo. Place it everywhere.

Write down your brand messaging. What are the key messages you want to communicate about your brand? Every employee should be aware of your brand attributes.

Integrate your brand. Branding extends to every aspect of your business--how you answer your phones, what you or your salespeople wear on sales calls, your e-mail signature, everything.

Create a "voice" for your company that reflects your brand. This voice should be applied to all written communication and incorporated in the visual imagery of all materials, online and off. Is your brand friendly? Be conversational. Is it ritzy? Be more formal. You get the gist.

Develop a tagline. Write a memorable, meaningful and concise statement that captures the essence of your brand.

Design templates and create brand standards for your marketing materials. Use the same color scheme, logo placement, look and feel throughout. You don't need to be fancy, just consistent.

Be true to your brand. Customers won't return to you--or refer you to someone else--if you don't deliver on your brand promise.

Be consistent. I placed this point last only because it involves all of the above and is the most important tip I can give you. If you can't do this, your attempts at establishing a brand will fail.

Importance of SEO, Content Marketing and Social Media Advertising

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

These days, search-engine optimization (SEO) covers a lot. It’s also integrated with many other marketing disciplines. It’s a part of content marketing, as well as branding and visibility. Showing up in Google (let alone dominating the rankings) is sometimes half the battle.

SEO is about getting a grip on the following : Site speed, Redirecting URLs in a redesign, Information architecture, XML sitemaps, Clean code review, Panda/Penguin cleanup.

LOCAL SEO

We are all assuming that SEO is of intended in targeting a broad range of audience, however, rarely do we realize that 22% of all searches are location-based, and most B2C purchases happen within 20 miles of an individual’s home. Local rankings lead to foot traffic, phone calls and purchases. Start by completing your Google Business Page, and go next-level with things like schema and “rich snippets.” Know also that one-third of mobile searches have local intent.

CONTENT MARKETING

If we take Google’s word for it, so much of SEO boils down to the creation of invaluable content and great user experiences. When this content and these experiences are naturally talked about and shared, Google gets signals that your website is a destination worthy of being featured prominently in its results. As a result, better content and a more usable website (i.e., the outcome of content marketing) should translate to rankings.

Another way to look at content in the context of SEO is to apply the principles of content strategy to ensure creative assets are useful, usable and desirable. Content that rewards users is also content that search engines should love.

Content marketing is best described as a philosophy.

Every conscientious marketer knows content creation is a powerful tool to strengthen bonds with customers and meet business goals in a buyer-first world. Devout content marketing disciples already know and practice the principles of delighting their audiences with invaluable content. They know that providing invaluable content translates to loyalty.

FORM VS. FUNCTION

The first rule of content marketing is that it’s not about the form! Substance first, structure second. Blog posts, case studies, white papers, guides, infographics, contests, social media campaigns, videos, webinars, podcasts … it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you’re giving customers something they value.

Rather than thinking about media, channels or any specific tactics, start by viewing content marketing as a set of principles in which building trust, not twisting arms (i.e, the hard sell), is the goal. Your world-class content is what comes first, the vehicle for distribution is second.

TANGIBLE BENEFITS

In addition to the brand credibility and customer satisfaction that you will gain from premium content being central to your marketing strategy, you will benefit from:

Organic search-engine rankings, especially for timeliness or social influence.

Greater audience engagement: Social shares, ‘likes’, repeat visits, avg. time on page/site.

Opportunities for external links (and qualified traffic) back to your site.

Digital Advertising:

Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Display, Social

Google AdWords account management (aka SEM / search-engine marketing, PPC / pay-per-click)

Microsoft AdCenter account management (aka SEM / search-engine-marketing, PPC / pay-per-click)

Social advertising (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)

Display & retargeting / remarketing

Image / video ad creation

SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING

Social media offer another channel for your messages. Potential places to advertise are as vast as the Internet itself. Whether sponsoring videos on YouTube or Snapchat or paying for placement on Twitter via Vine, you can creatively reach audiences wherever they are. Sorting through the biggest players can sometimes be confusing, but here’s an easy way to differentiate:

Facebook

Primarily for business-to-consumer products/services

Increases awareness, fans and acquisitions

Retargeting to custom audiences by email addresses

LinkedIn

Primarily for business-to-business products/services

Currently the only place to target individuals by job title, industry and company

Converts leads 4x better than those from other social media advertising outlets (Facebook, Twitter)

Twitter

For both business-to-consumer and business-to-business products/services

Target by topical interest

Measures engagement by device, location, gender and interest.

Content Marketing

I came across reading about new technologies marketer and author Arnie Kuenn, about content publishing on social networking site and how your content marketing can reached countless audience through this platform.

I thought to myself, the world of marketing, sales has level up to new heights, every marketer, corporate advertising has moved several notches upward to reach more and more target audience.  Unlike in the regular brick and mortar store concept, everyone who is onto the social networking sites are potential target market.

In the traditional business of trading, marketing, retailing, its a face to face transaction, one customer at a time, then the surge of internet changes everything, we have boundless reach, a world without border and this plays well especially to the big league companies who have jumped into the online bandwagon earlier since they have seen the future of marketing.

I would have to say that digital marketing has been a great equalizer, as the possibility of a total unknown brand that cannot compete spending so much as against the advertising budget of multinationals can become instant household name if only they have the right content in their marketing.

Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.

Though much can be told, the real winners are the consumers, they don't have to go queue long lines to pay for products they want to buy, or getting inside a shop to browse through thousands of SKU's and learn about why they have to buy those stuffs.  Nowadays, even at the comfort of their own home, workplace, even in public places they can use their tablets, smartphones, laptaps to check and even compare prices.

The challenge of every company that digitally markets online is to have quality content, thus content marketing is one of the most essential factor that will make your products, services stand out among the millions of gadgets, services, merchandise, goods.  This requires a well thought out plan, organized and targeted towards your expected target market. Its a battle of good, relevant content information that will in the end benefit both the brands, retailers, consumers alike.

Thought leaders and marketing experts from around the world, including the likes of Seth Godin and hundreds of the leading thinkers in marketing have concluded that content marketing isn’t just the future, it’s the present.

Retailing and Social Media

The Philippines has been named the social media capital of the world in 2011 for the most sign up in the biggest social networking site Facebook. according to research from 24/7 Wall Street after topping the social penetration scale rate of 93.9% ahead of the world's #2 - Israel that posted 91%, #3-Turkey 90.9%, and world's #4 - Chile 90.2%.

In 2012, The Philippines ranked #10 as a 9.5M strong Twitter users, who exchange tweets, information, conversation and news feeds to fellow twitter users.

Not to mention the other social media platforms such as Instagram, Google+, Linkedin and other social networking sites.  Yet if we look at the social media presence of local and international brands in the Philippines, there is still a huge vacuum and most are absent from reaching out the dynamic changing market behavior. Many traditional retailers still haven't foreseen the future of doing business in the fast-growing netizen community.

Some may have place their names on a Facebook Page, but if you will carefully look at their corporate or brand pages, there's really not much value to it.  Sometimes, to some point, they are not even being updated of their latest trends, products, mostly indicating their sale events or after-event photos.

What the digital and social media consumers need is an interactive, up-to-date and the latest information about the company or brands, information that may prove useful in the social media community to have a better judgement to spend on the given brand or products.  The new way of doing shopping is a well-informed consumer, its no longer the same as a shopper walking into a department store or supermarkets and pick up anything through impulse behavior.  People these days in the age of digital commerce have become more sophisticated.

The number of online social media users has been growing leaps and bounds from the time Facebook first came to be recognize  for use by many Filipinos in 2009 and Twitter in 2008.  But the traditional retailers have never catched up with the growing dominance of people staying longer in these social media sites and are still lurking expenditures on traditional forms of advertising.

With the growing commercial value of these social networking platforms, that has taken the mobile use by storm either through their Iphones, smartphones and tablets beyond their desktop or laptap usage, there is the likelihood of the those traditional retailers who has not taken advantage of the power of social networking sites to be left behind and gradually become obsolete towards the new generation of digital natives, online netizens.

Why has this been happening? Perhaps because most traditional even international product brands are owned, franchised, by traditional thinking businessmen and entrepreneurs, who are just looking at one side of the retail sales, especially the local chinese businessmen who perhaps in their traditional way of making their sales, are not aware of the growing social interactions since they themselves wouldn't have tried signing up for a facebook or twitter account.  Sometimes its having the first hand use of these networking sites, and in their daily interaction, can they truly grasp the power of the purse of these so-called social networking consumers.