Social Media Marketing Archives

Marketing - vector modern flat design illustration with laptop, work place, darts

What is Online Marketing and 5 Reasons Why It Is More Important Now Than Ever Before

8 October 2024 17:42:57

Digital Marketing Marketing Social Media Marketing

Marketing online was initially just an alternative platform for companies to market their products, opening up for new and innovative ways to engage with their audience. However, as time passes, the need for connectivity and staying online has become an essential part of everybody’s life. Online connectivity has been ingrained into our lives and the statistics tell us just that. As seen in Hootsuite’s 2019 report, users spend 27% of their year online. This increased usage of the internet over the years shows the need for an emphasis on online marketing, not just as an alternative platform, but as a necessity for businesses to stay competitive and thrive.

Gone are the days where it is just sufficient for your company to have a retail store and an online website that isn’t up to date and unoptimized. Online marketing is more important now than ever. Consumers nowadays look to search for products that they are interested in before they purchase them, with an astonishing 87% of purchases beginning with an online search. In order to capture these consumers, your products have to be visible to them in the first place. Without tools like Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), your company would find itself hard-pressed against competitors in terms of staying visible to the target customers.

Our article today will help you understand what online marketing really is. It isn’t just about creating a website and having a social media page, there is more to online marketing than that. We will also let you in on some of the reasons why certain aspects of online marketing is crucial to your business success. Before we get into the reasons let’s start with what online marketing is about.

What is Online Marketing?

Online marketing is the marketing of your products through an online medium. It could be through social media sites such as Facebook, LINE, Youtube and Instagram or through platforms that allow you to pay for display advertising space such as Google. The main objective of online marketing isn’t much different from traditional marketing, which is to help your business gain awareness, sales, new customers, target new audience and more. There are various methods to sell and market your product or services online, but they are usually categorized into three categories.

They are:

Search Engine Marketing

what is online marketing article picture

Search Engine Marketing is a component of online marketing whose techniques businesses must excel at in order to market online successfully. Recall that we mentioned earlier that 87% of consumer journeys start with an online product search. Search engine marketing refers to using techniques like SEO (helping your site to gain organic traffic in Google’s search engine rankings) or PPC (purchasing paid ad space) to get your product and website more easily visible to the right target audience.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is a form of marketing that is done through the multiple social networking platforms. The main purpose of engaging in this type of online marketing is to connect better and engage your audience, creating loyalty and awareness for your company. This is a very popular form of marketing for businesses as the usage of this medium is high with a projected 2.96 billion users to be on these platforms by the end of 2020.

Email Marketing

This is the online version of the traditional “snail mail”. Email marketing is marketing through the sending of emails to target customers. It is known to be the lowest cost form of marketing compared to search engine and social media marketing. Not only is it cost effective, email marketing also allows for direct engagement with your customers.

Now that we’ve covered the three different forms of online marketing, here are 5 reasons why online marketing is more important now than ever before.

Reason #1: Personalization

personalization image online marketing — Image Source: IMPACT Marketing

When it comes to marketing for businesses, every business would specifically try to convey and shape their message according to their target audience’s preference and needs. With traditional marketing, you are able to do that by crafting a message in your advertisement that is based on your target audience’s pain points to resonate with them. Marketers are said to have seen an increase of 20% in sales when they used some form of personalization in their marketing campaigns. Additionally, 71% of consumers in a DynamicYield research expressed that they believe that personalized emails will influence their decision to engage with the email.

MailChimp - G Suite Marketplace — MailChimp’s Email Marketing Software (Source: G Suite)

However, if you were to use online marketing, you can not only just target specific market segments. Your targeting can go down to even the personal level through the use of email marketing. With email marketing tools like MailChimp out there that offers personalization, businesses can look to go down into the specifics in their message when speaking to consumers. MailChimp’s software enables businesses to personalize everything about their email marketing campaign, from addressing customers on a first name basis, to recommending only the products that they’d be interested in. It is this form of personalization that is only available through an online medium, giving you more reasons to engage in Online Marketing.

Using a marketing personalization software may be difficult for some companies that have to focus on their core competencies and don’t have the time to churn out quality content for themselves. It is also essential to learn how to effectively use these software in order to maximize its potential. Therefore, for smaller to medium sized businesses, a use of a digital marketing agency specializing in online marketing could help to alleviate these concerns.

Reason #2: Act as a Contingency Plan and Alternative Platform for Your Business

The current retail situation in the world is dire due to the COVID-19 epidemic. Online marketing will definitely serve as an essential platform to reach out and connect with consumers to help retain your company’s brand recall and even become the main source of sales during this period.

With countries around the world such as China, Italy and Spain going into lockdown and shopping malls being cited as the third most likely to be shunned places, brick and mortar retail stores are going to suffer majorly if they do not have an online sales channel. Such unforeseen circumstances also highlights the importance of having an online presence in terms of marketing and sales.

Social media marketing serves as one of the best ways to communicate with customers. In this period where people aren’t leaving their house, retail brands without an online marketing strategy may be forgotten by customers. It is no surprise as these lockdowns are going to last for quite some time and as the customers consume more media online about other retail competitor’s brands, it is very likely that those without online marketing would have a diminishing presence in the consumers’ minds. This is the reason why we are seeing many retail stores going on to social media to communicate with their customers. Updates on business delivery means and social responsibility campaigns can be run in order to continually engage with your customers in the case of such unexpected times.

If you haven’t already had your online store set up as a retailer to give your customers an alternate purchasing outlet, there are plenty of great websites out there. Sites like Shopify, Wix and WordPress are user-friendly and not difficult to use at all. They are great for helping retailers without an online store to build one, without having to hire a web developer which usually would cost way more than using these programs.

This COVID-19 emergency does serve as a reminder to retailers that there is a need for an alternative retailing and communications channel to their target audience. Online marketing is needed more than ever to help cushion some of the losses incurred during this period and help businesses push forward.

Reason #3: Increases Your Business’s Legitimacy in the Eyes of Your Customers

Imagine that you’re interested in running and one day decided to search for the best running shoes to purchase on Google. The first page results show the store pages of Nike, Adidas, Under Armor among others. Seeing these results, it is highly likely that you would think that these are definitely the best brands for running shoes since they are ranked so highly on Google.

Using pay per click advertisements and search engine optimization, you will be able to bring your brand to the top of Google’s search engine rankings for keywords pertinent to your industry.

Legitimacy in online marketing is a matter of honing your business’s perception in the eyes of the consumers. This is without a doubt, one of the greatest benefits to online marketing, especially in a time where businesses in general aren’t doing too well. Getting in the front page of Google will give your brand and its products the respect they deserve.

Reason #4: Drives Quality Traffic

online marketing drive quality traffic — Image Source: GraceThemes

Traditional marketing when done right can help you to reach out to your target audience. You can craft a message that your target audience likes and place the advertisement at a prime location for targeting them, yet not have your marketing campaign succeed.

The problem with traditional advertising is that while you can get the geography and message right, you aren’t necessarily going to be guaranteed quality leads. Your advertisements can also appear in front of uninterested people – a form of low quality traffic for your company.

This is the edge that online marketing has over traditional marketing. A successful online marketing campaign should outperform that of a traditional marketing campaign’s in terms of quality lead. This is so because in online marketing, you are able to be more specific when targeting leads.

For example, when running Pay Per Click campaigns on Facebook or Google, you are guaranteed to be targeting certain interest demographics. You are given the freedom to choose the keywords to target as well as the keywords to not appear on. This allows for more focused and precise targeting. Furthermore, other demographics such as income, age group, and location are also available for you to choose. The increased precision available in online marketing helps you to drive more qualified leads, resulting in higher quality traffic as opposed to traditional marketing.

Reason #5 Scalability Compared to Traditional Advertising

If you think that Online Marketing is going to cost a bomb like how traditional billboard ads or video ads are when placed in prime locations, think again. Online advertising and marketing are the most cost-efficient in terms of helping smaller companies that are trying to scale.

Unlike traditional marketing where companies are expected to pay extravagant amounts of money to get that prime television spot to show their ads to potentially uninterested audiences, online marketing allows for flexibility.

To run online advertisements on platforms such as Youtube, Google or Facebook, all you would require is a daily budget. Paid advertising on the aforementioned 3 platforms allow for businesses to allocate a budget for campaigns. Once that budget is expended the campaign would then end. You can then decide based on that ad’s performance whether or not to extend the campaign, increase your budget for the particular ad or re-design the advertisement if it runs poorly. This allows for easy scalability, especially for small businesses.

Additionally, the ease of just popping into your ads account to top up the advertising budget or edit the campaign helps give more flexibility to businesses. In a way, online paid advertisements empower businesses to make their own decisions with regards to their advertising. Gone are the days where you have to negotiate a display advertisement campaign’s duration and commit strictly to it based on the signed contract. You are given the flexibility to run your campaigns as you wish!

Are You Ready to Take Your Business Online?

After reading this article, you should know some of the reasons why online marketing is definitely important right now. It is not just a contingency plan for businesses in case of any unexpected circumstances, but it also is a highly effective and efficient marketing method.

We’ve presented you with some tools earlier in the article to help you get started with building your online marketing strategy. You could also pick up some tips from some of our other articles that will help you with the social media and search engine optimization aspect of your online marketing journey. For some businesses, online marketing may not be their core competency, which is why digital marketing agencies are out there to help people with their marketing. Either way, we hope that this article at least helps you to understand the need for an online marketing strategy!

What is CRM?

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, refers to the combination of strategies, technologies, and practices that help businesses analyze and manage their customer interactions—maintaining current customers’ satisfaction and gaining a relentless influx of new ones. Simply put, utilizing CRM approaches can enhance the feasibility of long-term business growth through an expanding base of happy customers. Apart from that, you can also ensure that your marketing will meet your customers’ needs and expectations with more tailored, relevant, and impactful performance.

Correlation Between CRM Strategies and Online Marketing

When it comes to online marketing, CRM jointly plays a critical role in enabling businesses to create more personalized marketing campaigns, foster customer retention, and ultimately win customer satisfaction.

Here are key benefits highlighting the importance of how CRM strategies correlate with online marketing:

· Data-Driven Marketing

CRM strategies provide businesses with a window into customer data, which is beneficial for the creation of targeted online marketing campaigns. In essence, by analyzing and tailoring marketing messages to specific customer segments, your business can potentially achieve higher conversion rates as desired.

· Improved Customer Engagement

CRM strategies emphasize the importance of establishing and maintaining strong customer relationships. By integrating them with online marketing, you can boost the mounting level of conversion rates with customer engagement. This can be done through personalized content, social media interactions, and email campaigns.

· Enhanced Customer Experience

CRM strategies help businesses track a wide range of customer interactions across different areas, especially for online marketing. This supportively makes your business serve the seamlessly best-fit experiences to your customers, resulting in ever-escalating customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

· Better ROI

CRM strategies significantly bring about a better return on investment (ROI) in online marketing efforts. In this case, your business can enhance the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, as well as increase sales by tailoring the right customers with the right message at the right time.

· Streamlined Marketing Processes

CRM strategies critically play a role in streamlining overall marketing processes by automating tasks, such as lead nurturing, email marketing, and customer segmentation. As such, CRM is considered one of the most time-and-resource-saving approaches. It consequently drives your business to a clear portrayal of effective marketing efforts.

Examples of CRM Integration with Online Marketing Efforts

As we have mentioned earlier, CRM and online marketing always work collaboratively in their powerful roles to drive customer satisfaction and overall business success.

Here are some notable examples of how CRM helps complement the effectiveness of online marketing efforts:

Personalized Email Campaigns

Relying on CRM systems to track customers’ preferences, behaviors, and purchase history can enable your business to create and segment personalized emails. As a consequence, this ultimately drives more satisfying conversions through higher levels of open and click-through rates.

Targeted Advertising

Utilizing CRM data is advantageous for creating targeted advertising campaigns on particular platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, and Instagram. This means your business can target specific customer segments, fostering the effectiveness of your ads while also reducing ad spend at the same time.

Dynamic Website Content

Using CRM data allows you to personalize the content on your website to match visitor interests and preferences. For instance, you may show different products or offers to customers based on their past interactions with your site.

Social Media Engagement

Counting on CRM data helps your business cordially engage with social media comments and messages in a prompt and personalized manner, according to the customer’s purchase history or preferences.

Customer Loyalty Programs

Identifying CRM data can clearly reveal groups of your loyal customers, which is your prominent job to create further personalized loyalty programs. For example, you may provide exclusive discounts, rewards, or special deals to encourage repeat purchases and customer loyalty.

Predictive Analytics

Considering CRM data, augmented with predictive analytics, will be beneficial for the forecast of future customer behaviors, trends, and outcomes. This helps your business identify patterns and make informed predictions about the tendency of customer actions. Importantly, all gathered information can be applied to personalize online marketing strategies, leverage customer service, and optimize better sales efforts.

Conclusion

To sum up, Customer Relationship Management is the integration of strategies, technologies, and practices that eventually drive successful online marketing efforts. In other words, the use of CRM provides you with a holistic view of your customers, which enables you to target and personalize your marketing efforts in a more effective manner.

Winning customer satisfaction means winning a healthy outlook on your business achievements. In the same vein, having a digital marketing expert like MarketingGuru means having a vibrant potential for your online marketing success! Contact us today and find out how we can leverage your business to the next level with the endless mainstream of customer satisfaction!

What is Influencer Marketing?

You’ve probably heard of the term “influencers” on social media before. Influencer marketing is a collaboration between a brand and one of these influencers to market the brand’s product or service. The purpose of course is to tap on the influencers’ popularity to gain brand recognition and win customers from the influencers fanbase.

The question that you’ll probably then ask is “What difference is influencer marketing compared to using a celebrity?”. Influencers are different from celebrities in the sense that they can be anyone found on anywhere. They don’t have to be popular movie stars or A-list personalities. It could be a reputable journalist, a respected designer in the fashion industry or anyone in any industry really. What makes them an influencer is the following and reputation that they have because this is what gives them influence. They are known people or experts in their own domain and hence, this makes the content that they share the most engaging and noteworthy. Thus, businesses in their domains will look to reach out to use their influence on the particular demographic that they are targeting.

The Influencer Marketing Industry

Influencer marketing has grown into a $15 billion industry. Despite the problems faced by this industry, such as influencers with fake followers, it is still an industry that continues to grow rapidly. This can be attributed to consumer trends and behavior such as, 74% of consumers trusting social networks when making a purchase decision. Influencer marketing also has shown significantly high returns on investment for businesses with the average influencer marketing campaign earning $6.50 for every dollar spent.

While it is important to grow your business through digital channels like SEO, the influencer marketing industry is definitely a good alternative mean. The figures mentioned above should allow you to grasp how this industry is able to grow into an industry with the magnitude it has today. It should also very likely kindle your interest in trying to grow your business through such a channel. To help you in your influencer marketing journey, here are some trends that your business should look out for in influencer marketing for 2020.

Trend #1: Use of Micro-Influencers

When engaging in influencer marketing, typically businesses would want to be as cost-effective as possible. This means getting the most value out of the money spent on engaging these influencers. At the same time, businesses would require the meeting of certain KPIs like engagement, conversions and leads generated when utilizing influencer marketing.

This brings about the struggle of what is the appropriate kind of influencer to pick. Influencers can be categorized into three different categories: nano, micro, and macro-influencers. Nano and micro refer to the influencers with smaller reach – in the range of 1,000 to 100,000 followers.

Now, your first reaction is probably that nano and micro-influencers probably won’t get you enough traffic and awareness that your business is looking for as they could only get you 100,000 followers, at best. But, do bear in mind that costs for engaging in influencers are not cheap. Engaging influencers usually cost in the range of $10 – $25 per thousand followers for a post. Below is an influencer engagement pricing chart did up by Influence.co. You can see that the rates scale exponentially when it goes into the macro/mega-influencer range.

influencer.co marketing influencer rates — Average Sponsored Instagram Post Rates by Influencer.co

If your business operates in a niche field that the micro-influencer is actively involved in or has a follower base that may have interest in, it may be more cost-effective for you to use these smaller influencers. This is because consumers these days desire engagement with the brand and it has been proven that engagement rates are higher with micro-influencers who have an engagement rate of 3.6% compared to macro-influencers’ 1.5%. Higher and more genuine engagement is also more likely to help translate the extra reach you’re getting into sales.

Engagement Rates Among the Different Influencer Categories (Source; Later.com)

Trend #2: Emerging Alternative Influencer Marketing Platforms

Typically when engaging in influencer marketing, you would think of Instagram as the undisputed king of influencer marketing and that is probably still true today. However, there are other platforms that are starting to emerge as major channels in influencer marketing.

Tik Tok, a short-form video social platform has seen a sudden growth over the past year, amassing 2 billion total app downloads. Its young user base – 66% of them under 30 years old, has allowed it to be a platform that is suitable for businesses targeting the younger age demographics. Major brands like RedBull have also engaged in smaller Tik Tok influencers. RedBull hired KeeOh, a Tik Tok content creator with 5,000 followers to create a funny short video involving their product, using humor to make the followers interested in its product. It is a perfect example of using smaller-scale influencers to gain cost-effective yields on TikTok by utilizing memorable content.

Twitch, which is a video game streaming site, home to the best gamers and internet personalities, is also utilized by non-gaming related brands to advertise their products. For example, KFC has used one popular Twitch PUBG streamer’s (Dr. Lupo) channel to advertise their marketing campaign. This helps their brand be noticed by the viewers and create demand amongst them. Twitch’s platform, while primarily gaming related, also has streaming categories such as “Just Chatting” and “IRL”, allowing these streaming personalities to just stream live feeds of themselves hanging out and talking to viewers instead of playing games. The interactivity for influencers on these platforms with their audience is high because of the live chat in each streamer’s channel, which allows advertisers to also engage almost directly with the influencers’ audience.

These alternative platforms are definitely worth checking out as they may help businesses to be more specific in targeting and could prove to be more cost-effective in terms of gaining engagement and brand awareness.

Trend #3: Long Term Partnerships with Influencers

Another trend that will prove to be effective in 2020 for influencer marketing is long term partnerships with influencers. Brands are going to become more invested in influencer marketing and as such, they start to seek long-term partnerships with influencers instead of a one-time advertisement or endorsement.

Brands will start forming partnerships with influencers and engage them in the long run. This is useful as it creates more touchpoints for the brand with the influencers’ followers, allowing for more content to be produced. The result is a more cohesive campaign with a better brand recall among the influencer’s followers.

gymshark influencers marketing — GymShark’s long-term collaboration with Fitness Influencers helped them grew exponentially (Source)

One trend that will be useful to marketers in 2020 is to go beyond the series of influencers endorsed posts and have the influencers be involved in the products. Brands like GymShark were first to hop onto this strategy early on in their business. GymShark started off its marketing by sending out free samples of their workout clothing to influencers and eventually ended up collaborating with some of these influencers to create the influencers’ own line of products. The partnerships and collaboration with these influencers will help businesses to build a greater sense of trust and commitment toward the brand with their followers, resulting in long term benefits.

Trend #4: Using a Storytelling Approach

Generally in sales advertisements, companies tend to come up with catchy, memorable and short captions in order to ensure that its target audience is kept interested and that their attention is captured. In influencer marketing, however, it has become a trend for companies to do the opposite of the traditional advertising methods.

The use of an influencer would mean that businesses want to create a message that will resonate well with their followers. As such, the best way is to craft a story that details the influencer’s personal experience with their use of your products or services.

Instagram’s caption limit of 2,200 words has allowed influencers to write in detail their story and experience with using the endorsed product or service. Functions like Instagram Stories can also be utilized to craft a cohesive story regarding your brand.

Since followers of these influencers get a glimpse into their daily personal lives, they would be able to understand and see some of the struggles faced by these influencers. By showing how your company’s product or service helps these influencers solve some of the issues that they face or their personal experience with your product, their followers would be more sold and feel more involved with the product.

Trend #5: Utilizing Video Content

Video content in marketing is definitely hot with online marketers now with 87% of them using it. This is probably due to how video content gains on average, 135% more organic reach as compared to other forms of content.

This explains why it is essential to incorporate video content marketing into your influencer marketing campaign. Influencers are able to help you create an array of different video content, from product reviews to short-form stories, unboxing videos and even live streams

By creating content based around your product will allow these influencers to better promote your product and in the case of live streams, they can engage your target audience better as it allows for direct chatting with their followers. The result of these efforts is a greater appeal visually for your target audience.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a channel of marketing that should be tapped on due to the number of engagements and brand recognition you can create. These 5 trends on Influencer Marketing in 2020 should be able to help guide and give you an idea of how your influencer marketing campaign should be like.

You may wish to consult a digital marketing agency with these tips in mind to help you run your next influencer marketing campaign!

What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Before we start helping you plan a strategy, we must first establish an understanding of what social media marketing is. Social Media Marketing is a format of online marketing that involves the creation, curation, and sharing of content on social media platforms. Its purpose is to help businesses gain traffic, brand awareness, and attention through social media platforms.

Some companies may think that getting organic traffic through search engine optimization or having a well-optimized pay per click campaign is enough. What these companies have to understand is that social media and SEO are closely related.

Social Media mentions are beneficial in helping with search engine rankings. When you build your brand’s content and get people talking, your webpage’s search engine performance will be positively impacted. Social mentions are a factor in Google determining which websites have more authority which will in improving your rankings. This is why you need a good social media strategy to complement your search engine efforts, which also explains why digital marketing agencies tend to recommend using their SEO services and social media marketing services together.

Step 1: Setting Your Social Media Goals

There could be many reasons why your business is doing its marketing on social media platforms. Generally, companies use social media for purposes such as generating community engagement, increasing brand awareness, driving sales and boosting web traffic. However, before you embark on your social media marketing journey, it is important to establish which of these is your main objective.

Choosing an objective would impact the way your social media marketing strategy is crafted. The types of content would differ from objective to objective. Here are some social media goals that you can set and examples of content that you would be looking to produce for each goal.

Generate Community Engagement

Community engagement can be increased by giving your target audience something to do. Be it a question or contest that encourages user-generated content. Engagement will be generated if you get your community working!

Hosting live streams are also a great way to get your community to hop on to your stream and interact with you. These engagements can help to increase brand loyalty as it adds a personal touch for your business.

Increase Brand Awareness

Increasing brand awareness is different from driving sales. The kind of content that you would be looking to publish would NOT be content that hard sells your products and services. Instead, look to create content that shows your brand’s vision and values. This is the primary focus when it comes to increasing brand awareness as you want people to know your brand for more than just the products that you are selling.

Increase Sales and Traffic

When your goal is to be increasing web traffic and sales, it is more appropriate to be coming up with content that has a strong Call-to-Action. These posts can usually be boosted through the social media platform that you are marketing on. One crucial component in having a goal like this is to ensure that they are measurable, as such, you should make use of tools like Google Analytics to keep an eye on acquisitions through your social media channel.

Step 2: Determine Your Target Audience and Platform

Target Audience Graphic — Image Source: Infographic World

Social Media Marketing isn’t just marketing on Facebook and Twitter. There’s a whole array of platforms out there for you to choose from to market on! To find the right fit for your business, you must first establish who is your target audience and whether or not they use the platform that you’ve selected to market on.

To help guide you along, we have compiled a list of social media platforms and which demographics are they appropriate for.

Facebook

Total Users: 2.5 Billion

Good For: Advertising Products and Services, Increasing Brand Awareness, Engagement

Main Demographic: Gen X, Millennials and to some extent, Boomers

What’s Special: Facebook Business Page – Allows for you to have a community hub for your customers to interact and communicate with your brand

Instagram

Total Users: Over 1 Billion

Good For: Visually Appealing Content, Visual Promotion, and Advertising, User-Generated Content

Main Demographic: Millennials

What’s Special: Instagram Stories – which are short-form video content for you to promote your business’s offerings

Twitter

Total Users: 330 Million

Good For: Audience Engagement, Audience Interaction, Brand Awareness, Customer Relations

Main Demographic: Millennials

What’s Special: Tweets are short-form messages that allow for witty engagements with your target audience, helping your company build a brand personality

LinkedIn

Total Users: 575 Million

Good For: B2B Businesses and Business Development

Main Demographics: Gen X and Millennials

What’s Special: LinkedIn Publishing Platform – Allows for your company to publish articles on LinkedIn’s platform and for the content to be distributed organically within your network on LinkedIn.

TikTok

Total Users: 800 Million

Good For: Short-form videos content, Companies that can produce creative and attractive video content in 15 to 30 seconds, Increasing Brand Awareness and Advertising

Main Demographics: Millennials

Social Media Comparison Infographic — Image Source: Leverage

What’s Special: 66% of TikTok users are under the age of 30. If your business can produce visually striking video content and is targeted at young adults and teenagers, TikTok is right for you

If you still have trouble deciding on how and where to market your products or services, you can refer to HubSpot’s extremely useful Make My Persona tool. The tool can help you to create your target audience’s persona to give you a better idea of how and where should you be targeting.

Step 3: Content Creation

content creation social media marketing strategy

Having decided on the platform, your next step will be to create the content that you will be sharing on your social media platforms! If content creation is new to you, you can read up on how to get started with content marketing.

Based on the platform chosen, you will have to add value to give your customers reasons to follow your brand on its social media account. Content creation is an absolute must as it is the easiest way for you to start adding value to your audience’s lives on social media.

It isn’t easy to immediately think of ideas to generate content on social media. One useful tip to get you started would be to look at your competitor’s content. Through analyzing the kinds of content posted by your competitors, you can identify gaps in content and ways on how to improve on existing content from them. This will give your target audience reasons to follow your brand over your competitors.

Additionally, make sure to utilize your platform fully for content creation. For example, if you are going to be running your social media marketing on Instagram, fully utilize functions such as Instagram stories and Instagram product tags in your posts. For Facebook, you have to utilize its dynamic product ads to help you in converting leads.

Social Media Marketing is also good for using your customers to help your business generate content. You can either get social media influencers to help your brand generate content by reaching out to them to repost your content or gain organic content from your customers. Organic content can be created by creating your own hashtags and encouraging your audience to utilize the hashtag to share their stories and experiences of your products and services.

There is an endless variety of formats for you to create and present your content, find inspiration and create valuable, unique content to maximize your social media marketing!

Step 4: Create a Social Media Schedule

To keep your content fresh and up to date with trends, you can create a social media schedule to help plan ahead on what’s to be posted.

An easy solution to keeping a schedule for all your social media content would be to use a social media management software. SproutSocial and Hubspot both offer social media management solutions that allow you to plan and write posts ahead of time. They also help you to share the created content on the different social media platforms based on your schedule and help to monitor engagements and interactions of your posts.

Keeping a schedule will ensure that your business is able to consistently post content and create content that is relevant to the trends. For example, you can plan for blog articles related to things to do in the New Year when it is nearing New Year’s Day.

Step 5: Assess and Analyze Your Social Media Campaign

To measure the success of your social media marketing campaigns, social media metrics can be tracked and analyzed. The metrics will allow you to understand how well is your content engaging your customers and how much reach it is getting from the platforms.

Some of the metrics that you can measure include:

Impressions: The number of people that your content has been seen by
Engagement: Interactions with your post. This refers to things like clicks (even on the view more button in a Facebook post), likes, comments, replies, etc. Different platforms may have different engagement means. For example on Instagram, posts that are “saved” by users are also considered engagement
Mentions: The number of times that your company’s page has been mentioned in a post or tweet by the public
Shares: The number of times your content has been shared by people to their pages.

To track these metrics, you could use built in tools on different platforms such as Facebook Analytics and Instagram Insights. The social platforms would usually have tracking tools for social accounts. But do remember to set a conversion path for your website on Google Analytics if you want to track your campaign’s conversion!

These metrics when tracked will help you to plan for future content as they give you a clearer picture of what your target audience wants from you.

Help Your Business Float Like a (Social) Butterfly on Social Media!

The 5 steps listed above should help you get a good idea of how to create a social media marketing strategy. With the amount of time the world is spending on social media platforms as well as the reach you can gain from it, it isn’t hard to see why businesses these days see social media marketing as one of their key efforts. Get started today with these simple steps and help your business become the social butterfly it deserves to be!

If you have any questions regarding our blog content or are just looking for a Digital Marketing Agency to help you run your campaigns, you can contact us today!

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Terms

Pay-Per-Click advertising is a method of digital marketing where businesses pay for the clicks received to their website through search engines. These advertisements are run on platforms such as Google, Facebook and LINE Ad Platform to name a few.

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR refers to the percentage of users who click on your link per impression. Calculating CTR is simple, you just have to take the total number of clicks to your link in the ad and divide it by the impressions, which is the total number of times that it was shown to people. CTR shows how engaged people are with your advertisements or link, helping you determine if the advertisement is effective in getting people to click.

2. Cost Per Impression (Sometimes known as CPM)

CPI generally refers to the rate that is being paid for 1,000 views of an advertisement. Impressions strictly refer to an appearance of your ad in front of your user, regardless of whether or not the user has engaged with the advertisement.

3. Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are keywords that can be added to your advertising campaigns to ensure that your ads are not displayed when people search certain terms. For example if you don’t want your advertisements for your travel agency to show up when someone searches for tour cancellations, you can add in the broad match negative keyword “cancel” to your campaign. This helps to increase your lead quality, boosting your campaign’s effectiveness.

4. Geo-Targeting

Geo-Targeting is a method used to specifically target and only reach the users from the area of your choosing. The method of geo-targeting is good especially for local businesses looking to draw the crowd of around their vicinity. Google is able to locate where a person is searching from and will only show them ads that are the most relevant to them

5. Broad Keyword Match

When adding in a new keyword to target for a PPC advertising campaign, the default match setting will be broad match. This basically means that if somebody searches for your keyword in any variation, your advertisement will appear.

6. Exact Keyword Match

When you choose exact keyword match your advertisement only shows up when a user keys in the EXACT same phrase as your keyword in the exact way that it is written. This means that your advertisement will not show even if relevant keywords are being queried. This is good for your ad if you don’t want it shown against the broad range of search variants that people could search for to get to your products.

7. Phrase Match

Phrase match is a PPC keyword setting that only shows your ad when the user’s search has the exact phrase of your keyword or similar variations of the phrase of your keyword. Phrase match allows for additional words before or after the keyword phrase.

8. Cost Per Click (CPC)

CPC refers to the average cost that you are being charged for a single user’s click on your advertisement. Cost Per Click can be calculated by taking the amount spent on the campaign divided by the total number of clicks from users. CPC is an essential tool when running PPC campaigns because an optimal advertising campaign would best have low cost per click, maximizing the value of each click.

9. Remarketing

essential digital marketing term remarketing ads — Example of Remarketing Ad (Source: BlueCorona)

Your business ads will be shown to users who have previously visited your website when they continue browsing other pages on the display advertising platform. Remarketing is an especially useful tool for convincing potential buyers who have shown interest in your website but previously decided not to make a purchase for various reasons. The purpose of utilizing remarketing is to target high-quality leads, as these previous visitors have higher intent and are more relevant to engage with.

10. Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)

essential digital marketing term dynamic product advertisement example — Example of Dynamic Product Advertisement (Source: Advertisemint)

Dynamic product ads (DPAs) are paid advertisements that appear on Facebook and Instagram, making them relevant to both PPC and Social Media Marketing. Like retargeting ads, DPAs target individuals who have shown interest in your website based on their internet browsing history. Businesses with a wide product catalog ranging from 10 to 20 products find DPAs particularly useful. DPAs dynamically display different sets of items from the product catalog to users with varying interests, giving them the name “dynamic.” Users can set their goals for DPAs, whether it involves upselling or cross-selling products. DPAs serve as an effective retargeting method for companies looking to expose their customers to complementary products.

Search Engine Optimization Terms

This is the part of the glossary that confuses people. Businesses looking to acquire SEO services are often met with companies that will give them recommendations or tell that what they would do to optimize the website. Things like meta description, alternate text and backlink building will be some commonly seen terms. The following section will explain these keywords (pun intended) relating to SEO and help you in the future when you encounter them.

11. Meta Description and Meta Title

Meta description, keywords and titles are tags that are added inside the HTML document of a website.

meta title and meta description — Meta Title and Meta Description

The meta description serves as a concise summary of a page’s content and appears in the snippet of the search engine results page. These descriptions play a vital role in increasing user click-through rates when engaging with search results.

Meta titles, on the other hand, function as the “name tag” for a webpage. They serve as the title of the webpage itself and are displayed on the browser tab, indicating the current page to the user. Meta titles are crucial elements in search engine optimization (SEO) as search engines read them, and altering them can impact your website’s search engine rankings.

12. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to optimization to help your business rank better on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that occurs off your business’s webpage itself. These form of optimization could come in the form of lead generation activities such as email marketing, social media marketing or even content marketing.

Generally when SEO companies talk about helping your brand do off-page SEO, they are referring to backlink building (another term in this guide!). Backlink building is a strong off-page SEO technique for helping your business rank better on search engines as backlinks help search engine robots to recognize your website as being more trustworthy and credible.

13. On Page SEO

On-page SEO are optimization activities that happen within a website. On-Page SEO activities include writing quality relevant content for your keywords, optimizing your webpage’s load speed (yes, this matters in helping you rank better!) and tagging pictures with alternate text. All of these would help in making your web page rank better for your keywords as it would increase your web page’s relevance to search engines.

14. Organic Search

Organic search refers to the unpaid listings on the Search Engine Results Page. The display of organic search results is determined by the relevance ranking of a web page to a search term. Search engine algorithms evaluate this relevancy to provide users with the most relevant search results based on their queries.

Likewise, when companies refer to organic traffic, they are discussing the unpaid traffic that a website receives.

15. White Hat SEO

One feature that digital marketing companies like to promote is their white hat SEO techniques. White hat techniques basically refer to techniques that comply with Google’s guidelines. This means that when a company promotes themselves as using white hat tactics, they are basically just telling you that they do not engage in unethical SEO methods like keyword stuffing which would result in penalties from Google.

16. Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the text that is being used to hyperlink to your website. Anchor texts are important in SEO because it helps Google’s search engine algorithm understand what the page that is linked to the anchor is about. For example if I were to link a page in this article using the anchor text “Budget Hotels”, Google would be able to tell that the page is likely to be a page related to budget hotels

By doing this often enough in a natural manner, Google will be confident that the page in question has definitely got to be relevant to the search term budget hotel and will therefore rank it for that search term.

17. Robots.txt

Robots.txt is also known as the robots exclusion protocol. This is a standard that helps website to convey to web crawlers and robots which pages of the website it should crawl and which parts of the website should not be scanned.

The robots.txt file is important in SEO as it will help you to block off pages that are duplicates in your website to web crawlers. Blocking them off will improve your web site’s search engine performance as duplicate pages can hurt SEO rankings. Additionally, robots.txt help you to block off pages from users and not allow them to be indexed on Google’s search engine results page.

18. Web Crawlers

Web Crawlers are robots that are used by search engines to index the content of websites all over the internet. Crawling the web to search for sites will lead to these websites being indexed by Google so that it appears in search engine results

19. Responsive Site

This refers to having a website that is designed to adapt according to the user’s screen size. Regardless of the user viewing it on a desktop or on mobile, a responsive site will change accordingly to fit the screen size.

Having a responsive site helps your website rank better in search engines because Google does mobile-first indexing, primarily prioritizing the indexing of a website’s mobile site first. This shows the added emphasis for having a responsive site.

20. Backlink or Inbound Link

Backlinks, sometime known as inbound links, are links to a webpage that comes from an external website. An example of this would be if this blog article were to be linked on another website, it would count as an inbound link to MarketingGuru.

21. Domain Authority

Domain authority is a score that is developed to indicate a website’s relevance towards a specific field or industry. The relevance of the website impacts a website’s ranking by search engine as search engines algorithms take into account domain authority when trying to rank websites.

22. Long-Tail Keyword

Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that are typically three to five words long. These phrases are specific and are usually in the form of questions. The significance of using long-tail keywords is that they are generally easier to rank for compared to normal keyword phrases. They also are very specific, which implies that the customer searching for this already know what exactly it is they want, this makes them a higher quality lead as it takes less to convince them to buy your products.

Social Media Marketing

Last but not least, we will be covering some of the commonly seen terms in Social Media Marketing.

23. Lookalike Audience

Lookalike audience are created by using emails list. Lookalike audiences refer to users that are similar to your existing customers/users. To target lookalike audience, you can upload your email list onto your Facebook campaign. Facebook will then use data of these emails and find users similar to that of those in the email list to target.

Lookalike audience is particularly useful in helping companies discover new customers similar to their existing customers.

24. Engagement

Engagement in Social Media refers to interaction that users have with your brand. They may come in the form of comments, shares or likes. Having higher engagement is great for your brand as it helps search engine view your website as being more credible, helping you get better domain scores.

25. A/B Testing

This term could fall under multiple categories, but we generally use this method for paid social media advertisements and Google advertisements. A/B testing refers to split testing in which you will run around 2 to 3 similar ads at the same time and determine which one is the better performing ad. After which, you can choose to use the advertisement that perform the best as the main advertisement or make alterations to the worse performing advertisements.

A/B testing is useful in helping you learn what your target audience likes more and is essential in optimizing your social media advertising campaigns.

26. Relevance Score

For Facebook advertising campaigns, there will be a metric known as the relevance score. This score is given to your advertisements by Facebook and will help them to determine the relevancy of your ad to keywords.

Relevance score is an important factor as a higher relevance score would allow for your ads to show up more often compared to your competitors and for less money. This will help drive down Cost Per Clicks in your Facebook advertisements.

That Was a Whole Lot!

That was, indeed, plenty of Digital Marketing terms for one article! We hope that you were able to learn something new today and cleared up some of your queries with regard to certain digital marketing terms.

Having a better understanding of these terms can help you as an aspiring marketer learn how to fix things when something goes wrong with your campaign. As a business owner, learning these terms will help you to know what some of the marketing agencies you’ve contacted are talking about when you’re being pitched to.

We know that this article doesn’t cover the full scope of digital marketing terms. Let’s face it, there’s a whole lot of it out there! But if you have any questions regarding digital marketing terms or digital marketing strategies, feel free to contact our gurus at MarketingGuru! We will be more than happy to help you with improving your digital marketing knowledge.

What is LINE?

LINE is a leading social media platform in Thailand, with 84% of internet users in Thailand reporting that they’ve used the social messaging platform. In 2019, it is reported that Line has a total of 44 million users in their country whose population is 69.2 million. This is as good as having two thirds of the country actively using the platform! When it comes to the power of Line ad in the Thai market, the numbers don’t lie.

LINE’s Presence in Thailand is massive, giving you more reasons to advertise on it.

However, wanting to advertise on Line is different from Facebook or Google Ads. For Facebook and Google, you can just create an account for yourself and set up the advertisements on your own after putting in your ad budget. Line requires you to look for a company that provides Line Ad services in order to put your advertisements on LINE Ads Platform. Which is why it is important for you to first look for an agency that provides Line Ad service. Our company, MarketingGuru, are happy to help you with that! We have staff that participated in Line Ads Platform training and are well equipped with skills imparted from LINE’s training to help your company succeed in advertising on the Line Ad platform.

In this article, we will be covering what exactly Line Ad platform is, 4 of its interesting features and how it will be able to help raise your business’s status in Thailand.

Introduction to the LINE Ads Platform

LINE Ad Platform is an advertising platform that allows businesses to advertise on the social messaging platform LINE. Advertising on the platform requires for companies to do it through a marketing agency that is a partner of Line only. This means if the company doesn’t engage in marketing services as its core service, they wouldn’t be able to become a Line partner.

In the Line Ad platform, there are multiple types of advertisements that can be done. Advertisement styles include static image advertisements and videos. These advertisements can be displayed on different places in LINE including LINE timeline and LINE Today. It works similarly to Facebook in which companies would set the desired budget and use only that amount. However, in Line Ad the user gets to choose which campaign objective they want. LINE will through the use of its SMART Channel algorithm, help you optimize your budget and display the ads at appropriate places across their platforms for your target demographic.

Additionally, the algorithm will measure the users’ behavior on websites that they’ve been on and will analyze this accumulated data. After which, LINE will help you to place your ads at appropriate places for the target audiences you have in mind based on their behavior.

Feature 1: Campaign Objectives

As mentioned earlier, LINE ad requires you to pick a campaign objective and use its machine learning to help with your advertising. Listed below are the 4 campaign objectives that users can choose from in LINE ad.

Brand Awareness

This objective is particularly good if you’re a new brand looking to penetrate the Thai market. By choosing this objective, LINE’s algorithm will help you to position the ad banners at the right places sch that you can gain the most clicks and be the most visible to your target audience.

Increase Customer Base

Businesses looking to gain registrations, installations, or lowering down their cost per customer acquisition can look to use this objective in their Line Ad campaign. This is because Line will help to promote links that lead to their app download page. Another method is to use the company’s LINE official account to gain friends on LINE to send out future promotions, helping them to gain more customers.

Increase Sales

Brands can use LINE ad to collect information on interested audiences who clicked or purchased their products. LINE can help increase sales by helping them to retarget these audience in the future, that way increasing sales.

Maintain Existing Customer Base

With Line’s dynamic product placement, maintenance of a business’s existing customer base can be done by personalizing ads shown to the LINE users. LINE’s algorithm learns what the user is interested in and can help businesses to more effectively target the correct audience with interests relevant to their products.

The existence of such a feature on LINE makes it superior to other ad platforms’ advertising since LINE is able to help you decide on the most effective places to put your ads based on your budget

Feature 2: Cost Per Friend

Line Ad platform has a unique feature cost per friend. This feature allows for advertisers to let their audience click on the Follow (or add friend) button for their page while watching the video or display advertisement that is being shown. This makes the experience more seamless for users as they wouldn’t have to leave the page in order to follow the advertiser.

The cost per friend feature most importantly is a feature that is effective in helping companies that want to engage better with their target customer base since cost per friend is essentially trying to get the audience to follow the company’s official Line account. Therefore this is certainly a feature of Line Ad that will help businesses who want to have better engagement and increase their sales through promotion of their products on their Line page.

Feature 3: Target Lookalike Audience

Line Ad platform also allows for a similar function to Facebook in which businesses can target a customer group that is similar to existing customers of either their own company or another company similar to theirs. This customer base to be targeted is known as lookalike audience. Being able to successfully target audience similar to your existing customer base on a larger platform like Line Ad will help your business increase sales since it is one of the widest reaching platforms in Thailand with users averaging 63 minutes per day on the app.

Feature 4: Precise Targeting

The Line Ad platform also allows your business to be very precise in choosing your target audience, granting you the ability to choose the reach and frequency that your business wants out of the campaign. LINE’s ad platform also allows for very accurate Geo targeting, letting businesses choose the exact coordinates and specific provinces that they want their ads to be shown to.

The ability to have these customized targeting features makes Line Ad a very attractive platform for businesses to be marketing their products on as it will help them to be effective with their campaigns.

Ready to Get on the LINE Ad Platform?

With the massive reach that LINE Ad Platform is able to help your business achieve in the Thailand market, this is an opportunity that should not be missed if you are looking to grow. Whether is it to get more awareness in the Thai market or to create more conversion, LINE ad’s different features have got you covered. This of course, can only be done through a marketing agency.

If you’re ready to get on LINE Ad Platform, why not contact us. We will be able to help you customize your marketing campaign based on your marketing needs. Whether you are in need of graphic designing, video advertising, or targeting the appropriate audience, we’ve got you covered!

What is Online Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Email Marketing

Reason #1: Personalization

Reason #2: Act as a Contingency Plan and Alternative Platform for Your Business

Reason #3: Increases Your Business’s Legitimacy in the Eyes of Your Customers

Reason #4: Drives Quality Traffic

Reason #5 Scalability Compared to Traditional Advertising

Are You Ready to Take Your Business Online?

Read More...

What is CRM?

Correlation Between CRM Strategies and Online Marketing

· Data-Driven Marketing

· Improved Customer Engagement

· Enhanced Customer Experience

· Better ROI

· Streamlined Marketing Processes

Examples of CRM Integration with Online Marketing Efforts

Personalized Email Campaigns

Targeted Advertising

Dynamic Website Content

Social Media Engagement

Customer Loyalty Programs

Predictive Analytics

Conclusion

Read More...

What are Influencers?

What is Influencer Marketing?

6 Best Practices to Finding an Influencer

1. Know your marketing goals

2. Know your desired influencer campaign

3. Find influencers in your industry

4. Find influencers who have promoted your competitors

5. Understand the influencers’ authority

6. Track your influencer campaign results

Conclusion

1. Crafting a Social Media Marketing Strategy

What’s your goal?

Which social media platforms should you focus on?

What type of content should you share?

2. Planning and Publishing AKA Getting Ready and Taking Action

3. Listening and Engagement: Interacting With Your Audience

4. Analytics and Reporting

5. Paid Advertising

The Bottom Line

Read More...

What is Influencer Marketing?

The Influencer Marketing Industry

Trend #1: Use of Micro-Influencers

Trend #2: Emerging Alternative Influencer Marketing Platforms

Trend #3: Long Term Partnerships with Influencers

Trend #4: Using a Storytelling Approach

Trend #5: Utilizing Video Content

Conclusion

Read More...

What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Step 1: Setting Your Social Media Goals

Generate Community Engagement

Increase Brand Awareness

Increase Sales and Traffic

Step 2: Determine Your Target Audience and Platform

Step 3: Content Creation

Step 4: Create a Social Media Schedule

Step 5: Assess and Analyze Your Social Media Campaign

Help Your Business Float Like a (Social) Butterfly on Social Media!

Read More...

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Terms

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

2. Cost Per Impression (Sometimes known as CPM)

3. Negative Keywords

4. Geo-Targeting

5. Broad Keyword Match

6. Exact Keyword Match

7. Phrase Match

8. Cost Per Click (CPC)

9. Remarketing

10. Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)

Search Engine Optimization Terms

11. Meta Description and Meta Title