What about marketing?
It is crucial in any situation possible and plays an even bigger part if you have a business of your own that can make use of some marketing tactics.
Marketing is a general term used in one of the many business strategies to promote a product or service.
Would you believe me right now if I mention that the population of people who goes online every day is still increasing at this point, especially with how accessible the Internet is today?
The number of people ranges from all ages, from youngsters to older ones and they are from all over the world. They are countless.
Logically, you can’t really comprehend the total population that uses the web or search engine online, but as the infamous quote, “nothing is possible”. There is, in fact, a way to connect them all together.
After all, marketing always has the means to connect with your audience or customers at the right time in the right place. In today’s age, something that has changed is definitely the place where you can meet them, the place where they are spending the majority of their time on, the Internet.
A way you can connect them all together is through digital marketing. This is pretty similar to the conventional way of marketing.
But what about it, really?
The difference is that the process of digital marketing is done mostly using the Internet and online. The main purpose remains the same, which is obviously to market your business, but this time, it is a whole lot convenient.
The old, traditional ways are long gone. No more using newspapers, magazines and brochures as means of advertising.
How is Digital Marketing in Malaysia?
Digital marketing in Malaysia is indeed at its point of no return. Marketers in Malaysia have been setting aside a huge part of their revenues towards the digital world, from its way of advertising and also the products they are selling, they would incorporate some parts of it technologically.
Companies and organizations realized just how important digital marketing is nowadays when almost all of the users on the Internet are the younger generation who are very tech-savvy.
Today, where do most people go when they need to look for something? Or, when they need to get information on something they are interested in?
With no doubt, the answer is correct, yes, it is the Internet.
The Millennials, Generation X and even some other oldies, realized just how easy it is to go on the Internet to search for something they need.
On the search engine, they are literally a keyboard away from typing, “nearest café in Damansara” ..and there you go!
Just a tap or a click away on your highly advanced technological devices, and boom, instant answers to your questions.
Marketers in Malaysia need to be aware of the digital technologies that can be tools to accelerate their businesses to another level.
Our country is not short in the game for digital marketing, there are a lot of agencies out there with so many benefits to offer for companies that are just starting up or others.
However, make sure that you have the right strategies employed by choosing the right digital agency in Malaysia for your business. Their marketing solutions are a variety, you will not regret your investment.
And also, don’t have to rush in doing so!
Types of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has become more and more important as people start to spend a long time in front of screens.
It has become a crucial tool to reach customers in an effective way, targeting users of all kinds of devices from users of smartphones to tablets and computers.
In order to make sure that the way of marketing your business online is successful, for sure you have to engage the customers by making use of diverse types of digital marketing.
In today’s generation, having merely a website for your business is not sufficient enough to get you the qualified leads you needed.
You have to expose yourself visibly to other digital marketing platforms as much as possible, ranging from social media sites to search engines and many more.
Building a successful online business means that your business needs to stand out from the crowd because believe me, you can drown from all the other businesses that are doing the same thing as you.
In order to do that, you need to do a thorough study on your market, constant feedback and ideas, in-depth analysis of your business in order to build a complex digital strategy.
Of course, ideally, you should use a various mix of digital marketing so that you can reach your customers in various multiple channels.
The following are some of the most frequent ways of digital marketing that I collected, which can probably ensure a high success rate in your effort to promote your business online:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Online Advertising
- Landing Page Marketing
- Smartphone Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Viral Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When you think of several different ways of digital marketing, some people would immediately think of SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization.
- SEO is a way for you to get traffic on your website by letting the search engine rank your particular website on their first page.
- It is a process of getting free, organic and natural search engine results from the search engine using keywords.
All these popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and others are associated with online businesses, in one way or another.
Employing the right SEO method will allow your website to get traffic and as a result, there will be tons of customers waiting in line for your products or services.
For SEO, the goal is to optimize your content to make it appear on the search engine results page (SERP), right on the first page.
There are indeed several ways to make your website rank higher on the SERP, you can build multiple inbound and outbound links or generate content based on a specific keyword that is related to your business where people are able to search for it.
Maintaining SEO can be hard sometimes because you have to constantly follow the changes and keep in check with the latest search engine algorithms, to make sure that your strategy and methods used are still valid and suitable for the market.
It is hard and near impossible to stay competitive in the market without SEO.
SEO is essential and crucial for any website because these days, almost every business put up its content and products online on the search engine and it is only the matter of whether they are able to direct their customers to their website or not.
One more thing to break out, Sterrific do offer SEO services for your business in Malaysia, either you are just starting up or already ahead in the game but still need the help. It’s for everyone. So, what are you waiting for?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEO is not the only way or method that can drive traffic to your website. SEM, which stands for Search Engine Marketing is also another way to make your business grow in a marketplace.
The market is constantly growing and becoming more and more competitive every single day.
It is never wrong to advertise your business online, especially with the millions of other businesses out there eyeing for the same thing we wanted.
How effective is SEM?
- SEM is one of the most effective ways to market your products and increase the growth of your business at a much faster pace.
- This is because, with SEM, it is never possible to advertise your product or service into the top paid search results page, hence bringing incoming traffic from search engines.
- Search engines like Google usually put up their paid advertisements above the organic results on the SERP. These two search engine results appear the same, but only a slight difference in appearance.
- As an example, Google displays a small label, “Ad” next to the URL of the related paid search result.
- Paid search results that are frequently used are mostly Google Ads, followed by Bing Ads. These tools allow you to buy ad space for your business based on specific targeted keywords, demographics, location and many other data.
- SEM is pretty effective in marketing as you can set your own target audience and the search engine will only display your advertisement to that onlookers.
- Normally, you are charged for the SEM results each time somebody clicks on your ad, which is using the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model.
The Difference Between SEM and SEO
SEM versus SEO: What is the distinction?
| Search Engine Marketing (SEM) | Search Engine Optimization (SEO) |
| In general, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to a system where businesses have to pay for advertisements that will get to appear on the search engine results page (SERP), above the organic result itself. It is a practice of marketing your business by offering an opportunity for advertisers to put their ads on the first page of the search engine so that it will be more noticeable for the motivated customers. For instance, Google Ads provide a system where businesses can pay to them in order to show their ads in the search results. | For Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it is different from SEM because you do not need to pay any search engine ads to drive traffic or clicks to your website. Instead, they earn a free spot on the search engine results page (SERP) by having the most relevant keywords and content optimization on their website for a given keyword search. They get to rank higher on the search results page naturally and organically, without having to pay for advertisements. SEO is usually more effective and better for businesses in the long run, although it takes time. |
Both SEM and SEO play an effective part in your online marketing strategy, they both aim to help a brand or business to appear in the search results.
They can rank your website higher on the search engine results page (SERP) and most importantly, they are designed to increase traffic and visibility to your website.
SEM is a much easier, yet highly cost-effective option to rank and drive conversions to your website, whereas SEO is a much powerful way that drives evergreen traffic and organic search results.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Without any doubt, social media is the hype now in the digital world of the 21st century.
With that said, of course, it instantly becomes one of the most important tools for online marketing that you should probably be focusing on right now, especially if you want to operate a business-to-consumer business (B2C business).
Social media is not only used solely for marketing purposes, but it is also a channel for you to get in touch with your family and friends, be updated with the recent news going around, or stay connected with topics that interest you.
There are a variety of social media platforms provided out there such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In and many more.
You just need to choose out of the many that will suit your way of promoting the best, and also the one that is the most relevant and suitable to the niche of your target audience.
Putting up your content on social media is a great way to engage your customers or viewers and place your brand as an authority among the niche of other brands.
Normally, people tend to put their social sharing buttons on their websites. For instance, at the end of every blog post or content page, so that their visitors can share them across their own networks.
Certain social media platforms offer their own solutions for paid and organic advertisements. For example, Facebook and Instagram have paid advertisements that any businesses can make use of.
Hashtag campaigns that have been going around, like a business that sells waffles can put a hashtag on their Instagram’s posts like,
“#thebestwafflesintheuniverse”.
This allows users to easily do keyword research for the best waffle shops in town for them.
Nowadays, there is also another way of online promoting which is influencer marketing, where people with authority are paid to do reviews and promote a business’s products or services.
Content Marketing
Another type of digital marketing used to promote a business online is content marketing. I think you get the idea of what it is already, the meaning is indeed already in the title, “content marketing”.
So, what is content marketing?
This type of marketing is the process of developing and distributing valuable, consistent and relevant content to the visitors in order to get their interest.
Content marketing can actually be categorized as, in fact, an indirect way of marketing as you create and post content that naturally attracts what the visitors usually find while browsing the web.
Content marketing can also be incorporated with other types of digital marketing such as SEO and SEM. For example, they can build content based on a few targeted keywords in order to attain the most favorable result.
The main goal of content marketing is literally to allow the readers to be able to interact with the content by reading, sharing and commenting on it.
You need to make sure that the content developed is good because good quality content might even persuade the customers about the business in any field in terms of their expertise, products or services.
Earning a customer’s trust is actually one of the most important aspects to achieving long-term goals in digital marketing. Shareable content can be published and posted in the form of blog posts, guest blogging or anything else in the same niche.
Content marketing which involves constructing and sharing online material such as social media posts or blog posts does not explicitly see as a way to promote, but more of a way to stimulate an interest in a certain product or service to a targeted audience online.
In every successful digital marketing campaign, content marketing is at the heart of it.
Beneath any successful brands, there is a wealth of valuable and powerful content that is able to engage all the customers together, either among the other customers or the brand itself.
It is also a way for them to get a better understanding of the business and develop some sort of connection with the particular brand.
Email Marketing
People are used to this type of online marketing strategy, even way before social media even exists. Email marketing is a different way to promote your business as you engage with the customers within their own inboxes.
But the real question here, is email marketing dead?
With all the hype about social media marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the rest of the niche, it sometimes seems as if email marketing is a long way past its prime time.
You are missing out on the real deal if you really think that email marketing is long gone. In fact, this type of marketing is still going strong towards this day and is probably one of the best strategies to use to market your business online.
This decades-old technology is still one of the most efficient ways of online marketing over all the other new channels.
Why is that?
The answer probably has something to do with how people are used to using email as a way to converse with customers and even among staffs, which maintains until today.
Email marketing is still very successful because it is an excellent way to maintain and build brand loyalty and upsell, especially to existing customers. There are several different ways of how email marketing can be done to reach out to customers.
You can send them thank you emails, order confirmation emails, subscription emails, emails notifications to update about products bought, including creating newsletter campaign.
If you have the intention to run a local business, it may also be a great solution to send an event invitation through emails, where the local audience gets to engage together.
Nowadays, we can’t deny that there are a lot of amazing tools out there that can be easily operated to create professional email campaigns, such as MailChimp for effective marketing automation and newsletter plugins which are usually used for content management sites like WordPress.
Online Advertising
Online advertising has been used as a digital marketing strategy by online marketers to promote the growth of a brand ever since the very first days of the web.
The most common form of advertising is probably the banners or ads that are displayed on other websites that belong to the same niche as your business.
There are many awesome tools and online platforms that allow you to automatically serve your own advertisements on other content sites.
Google AdSense is one of the famous tools to do online advertising.
These ads networks usually figure out the type or parameters of the sites that your ads will appear on by dictating keywords, location, user’s demographics and other useful data.
This type of advertising is effective in online businesses to find new customers and diversify their revenue streams.
Some bigger online magazines company usually have their own departments for advertising. It can also be a great decision to buy an ad space on their website for your business.
There are so many options available under online advertising, from Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) to display advertising, it is not possible that even small businesses can expand their sizes.
The following are several ways to promote an online business that falls under online advertising:
- Paid Search Advertising
- Paid Social Advertising
- Native Advertising
- Pre-Roll and Mid-Roll Advertising
- Display Advertising
Paid Search Advertising
If you run a business, there is a good chance that you have probably heard of paid search advertising. Or even when you are browsing through the web like Google, you may have noticed certain PPC ads being displayed.
These advertisements appear on the search engine results page (SERP), allowing relevant traffic to drive into your business’ website.
PPC advertising or pay-per-click advertising is one way of advertising where a business has to pay a fee once someone clicks on their ads.
Paid search advertising is the most popular form of PPC advertising where it involves positioning PPC ads on sites or search engines such as Google.
With paid search advertising, businesses have to bid on ad placement that will be displayed as a sponsored link on the SERP.
The ads will immediately appear on the top page on the results page based on their search query when they search for a certain keyword related to the business.
Your PPC ads campaign works effectively if you are paying less each time somebody clicks on your ads. Often, you will find that the fee is minimal because of the visit from the users worth more than how much you are paying per click.
This is why you have to make sure that your ads campaign stays relevant, so that the search engine will charge you less.
Paid Social Advertising
Paid social advertising has transformed the web of advertising. The adults and almost everyone from all over the world have turned to social networking as their favorite past time activity.
Advertisers are smart enough to change the game and incorporate advertising into social networks such as Facebook and Instagram.
Some may think that paid social ads are not as important, but believe me that social media marketing has largely contributed to maximizing your business’ visibility on the web.
This is because, consumers spend a lot of their time every day scrolling through social media sites, and even marketers cannot deny that their social marketing efforts have increased traffic to their website and gives more exposure to their business.
With paid social ads, advertisers have a lot of options and opportunities to further optimize their campaigns. They can choose the audience to target their ads, their objective, the type of ads they are promoting and many other data.
There are several different platforms that can be used to reach your marketing goals, and each one is different which serves different purposes and also, audience.
Besides Twitter advertising, YouTube advertising and many others, another one is known as Facebook advertising which probably has the largest and most engaged user base among all the other social media platforms with almost a billion daily active users on it.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is a type of advertising that is displayed without looking like an actual advertisement such as banners ads. They match the look, feel and function of the social media platform they appear on.
Have you ever seen the recommended posts that appear on your social media feeds, or maybe the recommended content on a web page?
Those are also known as native ads.
The advertisers that use this type of ads make money by helping other brands do it as well. These advertisers are paid to publish content like posts or videos that follow the source of virality for the initial publisher.
Certain brands will even go as far as to pay the advertisers to display their sponsored content to reach their massive audience through their website and social media.
A brand can increase their audience reach and help tell captivating stories to a better and bigger viewership. At the same time, the advertisers that they hired to craft content on their website, their editorial expertise will also be optimized.
The advertisers will work to maintain the brand’s original content but make it appear similar to the regular piece of content on the advertiser’s website. This won’t disrupt the viewer’s browsing experience as the posts does not seem like it is meant for promotional purposes.
This way, it will expose your work to a huge and engaged audience, also attracts new supporters to your brand. BuzzFeed is one example of an advertiser that makes use of native ads.
Pre-Roll and Mid-Roll Advertising
Television, films, radio, trailers at the movie theatres or anything you can see, listen and look at, someone has caved a way and make it possible to slip a piece of advertisement into it.
Advertisements are indeed the backbone of the marketing industry.
I am certain that you have noticed your social media feeds are gradually filled up with these annoying ads every day, and you are probably annoyed.
But guess what, with these so many ad options, it is an effective choice of marketing your business.
Forcing the audience to endure through a 30 to 60 seconds on YouTube probably isn’t the best way to attract new followers because this will just irritate them. But shortening the length of the video ads might work in not further test their patience.
People tend to watch more content on YouTube rather than the channels on television, so it might be a great solution to incorporate these ads for online marketing.
Pre-roll ads are pretty old-fashioned but it works in the digital video advertisement.
Running an advertisement before the actual desired video even play is a bit tricky, but the audience may still be willing to suffer through an advertisement since most of them are still interested and engaged to watch what they are about to view.
Video advertisement is key to any good marketing campaign, but you need to know where to put those ads so that it will be worth the bucks spent.
Display Advertising
Display advertising has become advanced and almost a controversial topic in the digital marketing world. Internet users are often tricked into clicking misleading advertisements, and these users’ poor computers were even infected with viruses along the process.
Display ads are one form of advertising that conveys a commercial message visually using images, videos, logos or other graphics and targeted at the right audience at the right time.
This provides an opportunity for brands to reach out to their respective communities who are always interacting with the world wide web with various interests and topics.
With the existence of amazing ad network tools that can configure the right data from users, advertisers now have the chance to achieve a way more effective targeting strategies and provide consumers with relevant ads.
Some ad networks that are available out there are like Google Display Network and Facebook’s Audience Network.
Landing Page Marketing
In general sense, landing pages are web pages that visitors first land on when they reach a certain website. So, homepages on websites are also frequently classified as landing pages.
Certain brands still however, create their own specific landing pages for their marketing campaigns. Google Analytics describes a landing page as the page where somebody will end up after clicking your ad.
Targeted landing pages can work wonderfully if incorporated with other types of digital marketing and increase traffic on your website significantly.
Online marketers link their landing pages with advertisements displayed as banners on the search engine results page or on other websites.
Hence, when a user of the Internet taps on the ad, they will immediately be directed to the brand’s landing page which is designed specifically for the digital marketing campaign.
There are several elements that you can make use of to create an effective landing page, such as a clean and user-friendly design, eye-catching headlines and visible call-to-action buttons.
Below here is an example of a well-built landing page with all the necessary elements mentioned.
Smartphone Marketing
People are always on their smartphones these days, which is why this type of marketing is quite important in online marketing strategies. This method is even more useful if your target audience is among the younger ones.
There are in fact many ways and prospects that can be done to reach out to them through their smartphones.
How to do it?
Besides providing them with free mobile applications for iOS and Android devices, you can also send text messages to your followers.
The application can increase visibility and awareness for your brand with some specific actions or performance. For example, a notification can come through the user’s smartphone if new content on the website is available.
There are several messaging platforms available out there that use automatic marketing bots that allow you to communicate with new customers in a human-centered way, such as WhatsApp Messenger and Telegram.
Smartphone marketing also means that the type of marketing will appeal to smartphone or mobile users. If it is done properly, I am sure that smartphone marketing can make your online business comes a long way.
You are already trailing behind if you do not implement some sort of mobile marketing strategy, because I would tell you that I think smartphone is the future of marketing.
In the age we live in right now, your business needs this type of marketing strategy, maybe for the same reasons you might need wi-fi access and computer.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another type of digital marketing that is acquired through a process of earning commissions from other affiliate networks.
The idea behind it is that you will earn your commission when you successfully promote other people’s products. You find the kind of product that you like, try to sell it and when you did, you will earn a piece of profit for each sale.
This type of marketing also makes it possible to lessen your workload in marketing by outsourcing it to external service providers. It is a well-known tactic to generate a significant amount of online revenue and drive sales to your brand.
In fact, this is actually extremely beneficial to both the brand and the affiliate marketers. Even smaller businesses can make use of these affiliate programs since it is one of the popular types of online marketing.
Affiliate marketing works by transferring their products’ marketing strategy to another party, which can leverage certain individuals’ abilities in online marketing for a more effective marketing strategy in the future, but at the same time providing profits to the contributors.
Viral Marketing
In a broader sense, viral marketing basically puts together all the other types of digital marketing that are mentioned above.
It is a business strategy that makes use of a variety of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blog posts, newsletter and many more to promote a certain product.
The key element of viral marketing is literally crafting your own content in the forms of videos, memes, posts or any other kind of content that can spread across the web like a virus.
In order to ensure that your viral marketing campaign is successful, of course you have to spread your content across multiple channels.
So, the consumers on the Internet are able to spread information about a brand or product to other people on the social networks and among themselves, much the same as how a virus spreads from one person to another.
The Ultimate Guidelines: Digital Marketing Made Easy
Why Malaysians Should Start Focusing on Digital Marketing?
A digital marketing strategy is not all about getting on the first page of Google, or getting more followers on social networks. To brief, digital marketing is a way to translate your business goals and marketing objectives into tactics.
With the world of technology and Internet currently evolving, of course the ways of marketing are becoming advanced as well. Everywhere, marketers take advantage of promoting their brand digitally.
And yes sure, digital marketing is also considered as marketing. The same as the old-fashioned way to promote your products or services, but the only difference now is that this technique utilizes the Internet.
For a modern entrepreneur like you, it will be a waste if you don’t take advantage of this digital marketing strategy.
Like my great, great grand-uncle, a lot of other people here in Malaysia wants to do this awesome digital marketing campaign, but here’s the thing, they don’t have any idea how. They don’t even know where to start and what they should prepare.
So, here is the walkthrough to the basic guidelines in digital marketing to get you started. It is a heart-to-heart talk, better turn your gear up!
#1 Step: Set your goals!
Okay, to get started, having set your goals are important in making the first step to anything important at all.
This is so that, you won’t be wandering around places and know exactly where you are heading towards, including planning ahead your online marketing campaign.
There is no exception, having a set of goals is a must for digital marketing as well.
Remember, setting your goals specifically can keep your attention laser-focused from the start.
This is to get a clear image of what you are stepping your feet into. Here are a few common goals to get you started.
Reach
Reach includes raising awareness of your brand or products on other sites through online media. This will drive great presence to your web. You have to target your reach and objective so that you have something to motivate and look forward to in the future.
For instance, you can try targeting the number of visitors for your website at the end of the year.
Do all that it takes to reach ‘em!
This step requires measurement and planning. So, of course you have to calculate your clicks, cost or budget, rankings, organic traffic and such.
There are several ways to aid you in doing this, like using SEO keyword research, optimization strategy report, AdWords and Google Display, as well as Facebook Ads.
Some examples of Facebook advertising that you can create are promoted lead ads, awareness ads, lookalike ads and more.
You can also create a marketing campaign to influence and reach out to your audience.
Engage
After doing a little bit of planning, of course you have to widen your base and try to get more in touch with your prospects. You need to improve your engagement and relevancy with them in order to build a long-term connection.
This is not only for the benefits of their brand, but also yours in a long run. You can build various marketing strategies such as content marketing.
You can have a calendar with all 12-months of your scope and work planning filled in. This is another strategic way to remain efficient towards your job scope until the end of the year. So, you don’t feel like you are slacking too much in the middle of the year!
Strategize your content properly and try to stay in that lane.
Besides that, you can also plan and make use of social media campaigns to promote your content and engage with your audience at a much larger scale. Make videos, or any kind of interesting content that will probably interest your audience the most.
You have to set this thing in your mindset, you have to believe that this campaign will succeed, but also work hard for it.
Figure out what are the up-to-date methods right now to get your brand going out and about in the market.
Find out what will attract the audience the most.
Content marketing also varies from providing subscriptions to newsletters, having a good landing page and many more that will contribute to great leads to your brand.
If you are just starting up your business, you need to build a long-term engagement with your buyers. This not only will build brand love, but it will develop a sense of loyalty in the customers.
After all, having a well-built and strong customer-base is important in maintaining the credibility of your business.
You can measure this happening by discovering if there are repeating orders or purchases, it is even better if they are sharing the content within their social media sites!
Convert
Now, you probably have set goals of your engagement with the audience but, another important thing now is you have to gain sufficient profit for your business.
Increasing your profit is probably one of the most essential goals to do in your business strategy. When you have enough leads and engagement, you need to try to convert those into profit.
Turn your prospects into actual customers.
It is important for your prospects to take their steps to become your customers.
Some actions that you can view them do are buying or ordering your products, subscribe to your brand’s newsletter, or even signing themselves up on your website, that is if you have one!
The Golden Rules: SMART Goals
“Am I really clear about my main objective for my business in Malaysia at the moment?”
“What will I be doing in a year time for my brand?”
“Do I know what I want to achieve for my business?”
In case if thoughts like these still cross your mind, then you might need to consider looking up these golden SMART goals.
You need to somehow set goals if you want to succeed. Without one, you will just lack direction and focus. When you are just starting up, things can go downhill real fast. But to get these set up, you need to know how to apply it.
One of the ways is by designing powerful and SMART goals. Many people have different variations of what SMART stands for, but the key is that goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic or Relevant
- Time-Bound
1. Specific
Your goals need to be specific, meaning that it needs to be well-defined and not vague.
Clear goals are helpful because it is not too generalized and you have no problem translating it to get where you want to end up.
Define it precisely so that you get sufficient direction to what and where you’re heading to.
2. Measurable
Provide goals that include elements like dates, amount, rates or percentage so that you can have a sense of accomplishment for your goals.
It will also measure your degree of success more accurately.
For instance, the company, Fashion Valet, might have a goal to reduce their expenses on certain things, but to what degree?
How will you know when you have achieved that, perhaps you reduced it by 2% last month but you don’t even keep track of it.
Be concise, or you might even miss out on your own success!
3. Attainable
Make sure that the goals you set are achievable, which means that it is something you definitely can achieve if you put your sweat and tears into it.
If you set goals that are almost impossible to achieve, you will only erode your own confidence and demotivate yourself.
But, also try to not make them too easy.
When you set goals that challenging yet realistic, you strike the balance you need. These goals can bring you the greatest personal accomplishment.
4. Realistic
The goals you make obviously have to stay realistic and relevant to the direction you are taking in your career life.
When you do this, you will find yourself remain focus and motivated to get what you actually want to pursue in the first place.
In order to move forward in achieving your goals, of course you have to get ahead and still be able to do what you want.
Don’t be inconsistent and scatter away from your initial objective, or you will only fritter your time and possibly, your whole life away.
5. Time-Bound
Anything that you want to achieve must have a deadline.
Your goals should have a deadline, so that you will be much quicker in getting your success.
Believe me, when you are working within a deadline, you will feel some sort of urgency and you will get a lot more works done than you think you could.
Besides, you can also know when to celebrate your success when the time comes.
#2 Step: Do your market research!
Market research is indeed an important component in your business strategy because you need to gather information and learn about your customers or target market.
This involves collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about your market, products or services, the competitors you will face, and your industry as a whole.
In today’s marketing, it is no longer something that you can blandly care about or just-do-it stuff, it requires a little more effort and you need more than your goals and pocket money or increasing profits.
It needs robust market research.
Probably not only one but, a vigorous and countless amount of market research. So, that’s a heads up for you marketers out there.
Don’t panic yet! It may sound a tad bit complicated, but it is actually simple. Market research is something important and essential, especially for online marketing in Malaysia.
Why do you need market research?
You have to recognize your potential customers, their characteristics, needs, interests, spending habits, problems, location, and including the needs of your business’ target market. This way, you will be able to find out more about your prospects, who they are, and where to find them.
Then, boom, a perfect marketing strategy is developed.
Market research involves two types of information:
- Primary data
This research is based on something you gather yourself or hire someone else to collect the information for you
- Secondary data
This type of data is research that is already organized and compiled for you.
It is usually something that includes reports or studies made by trade organizations, government agencies and other businesses that exist within your industry.
Also, most of the research you collect will most likely be secondary data.
Market research is advantageous in plenty of ways.
- Promote your products to the target market and deliver the message behind each product or services effectively
- Sorting out types of prospects or customers that you should be targeting to market your business
- Steer away from channels that do not work and end up wasting your money
How to do market research?
- Develop buyer persona
A buyer persona or target market is a semi-fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customers who will most likely make purchases with you.
This is actually data collected based on market research and information from your existing or past customers.
Remember, when creating your business’ buyer persona, consider to include the customer’s demographics, motivations, behavior patterns, and goals.
By doing this, you will be able to put a name and face on your customers. Therefore, making it easier for your business to reach out and engage with them.
- Analyze your leads
Several tools and sites allow you to keep track of your leads. You can identify your target market through this since this data can be transformed into patterns.
With this pattern, you can get further insight and study more about your target audience, like their age, gender, socioeconomic status, interests and so on.
Definition of the term, ‘lead’ may differ from different parties depending on the organization. What has come across definitions is that, a lead also has the potential to become a future client.
- Determine your competitors
This involves doing competitor research to help you identify and inspect your rivals.
This also allows you to get a better look at your business as a whole and the digital marketing strategy you want to apply.
Doing a competitive analysis is an essential tactic in business strategies, beneficial to find out what the rivals are doing or even, what kind of threat they would possibly bring to your financial well-being.
As the saying goes, “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”.
#3 Step: Choose the right products or services!
Now that you have set your goals, and do a study on your market, as well as competitor research, another important thing about starting your own business is without a doubt, you need to have something to sell or offer.
It can be either a product or service, which is up to you!
Or else, you can just sell products or services that are provided by other people, working as their agent or affiliate.
Countless and numerous goods and items out there are available for you to sell online, from cosmetics to technological devices.
However, you need to be careful of certain things because, there are a few exceptions when it comes to this. You might want to keep an arm’s length on illegal products as these items are indeed, very wrong to be sold online.
It can be dangerous and harmful items like inappropriate drugs or medicines, and weapons or explosives that can lead to unfavorable causes.
#4 Step: Build a website that serves a purpose!
Let’s imagine something here, it starts like this, you are shopping in a mall.
Many shops, and many different products being sold around.
But as you walk around, you stopped in front of this one shop in particular. That shop sells something that you were looking for all over, something you like and will get for yourself.
And, the shop is also beautiful and it attracts you.
That is dead-on how a website should be. Especially for your business.
If you run your own business and you don’t have an online website yet, you should probably consider having one.
Why should you do it?
The truth is that, it is actually very affordable and you can’t really afford not to have one for, let’s say, your bakery business.
Your bakery business website can be helpful to generate more customers, and even clients. This can happen throughout all aspects of the customers’ needs and wants, such as when the prospective customer:
- Carries out broad research on the Internet for what type of business suits their interest and help to solve their problems, and then discover your business that sells baked goods.
- Wants to look up more information about your bakery business because it is in their interest to do so, and might even learn a thing or two about your business.
- Obtain your business’ contact information to reach out to you about an order for their birthday party because the chocolate cookie they ate last time from your shop was scrumptious.
Gone are the days when you can only rely on word-of-mouth or those chunky Yellow Pages books with all the other businesses listed on it.
These “traditional methods” are still effective to a certain extent, but you can’t deny that creating a business website can help you attract new customers.
Let’s admit it, you probably often use the Internet to find out more information about various businesses or a particular business that comes to your interest. I can’t hear a thing so, don’t tell me I’m wrong!
A website created to serve your business should be like a physical store in a mall, but this time, it’s virtual. It should be a convenient place or site where customers can have a look at your products or services and browse through them from the comfort of their home.
This online website for your business serves to display the products or services you have, which at some point, will be able to attract customers.
Aside from that, a website you build will present your business as a whole and spread its credibility. More often than not, existing customers or new ones will actually look up the business they are searching for to look at its credibility.
Many types of websites are available out there that you can opt for, such as landing page, e-commerce store, or sites with merely content about your business. There are so many platforms to build your website nowadays, such as WordPress and Wix.
These sites allow you to have total control on every aspect of your website, which includes adding various plugins that feature different settings, functionality and features to your online business site!
To help you get that website you’ve been wanting for your business, Sterrific also provide you web design services, so go hit them up. Don’t wait for too long!
#5 Step: Be a part of social networking!
Where’s one place that you can definitely find most people from all varying ages hang out at? An easy answer for that is definitely, social media. If you know that already, then you should know that social media is a no-brainer when it comes to digital marketing.
With the population of people in the world that’s reaching 8 billion worldwide, it is impossible to deny that the majority of them are hooked on this new tool called, the Internet. It connects people together, no matter from whichever part on planet Earth you are.
With that said, is it a wonder if every marketer starts going social to grow their business?
It is a place where most human beings spend hours of their time at. Therefore, social media should be included in your digital marketing campaign to promote your business.
So many social media platforms are available out there which you can definitely take full advantage of. There are so many to choose from, you can find out which one is the best to advertise your business to the fullest!
You have to know which social media platform fits your style the best, which represents your buyer persona and helps you achieve your marketing goals. Try to make yourself answer the following questions, if you want to choose the right platform for your business:
- How are your ideal prospects or customers like?
- What kind of platform fits your style?
- What are the marketing goals you want to achieve for your business?
#6 Step: Set your budget!
It is quite a necessity to allocate a certain amount of money to have any marketing strategy, which includes digital marketing. The budget usually depends on your marketing goals, what you want to achieve, and also what is the nature of your business.
Bigger marketing goals may require a higher budget, so be prepared for that! If you are just running a small business, which doesn’t really require that many revenues, then you’re lucky because you don’t need to set your budget too high.
What’s even better is if you can allocate your budget for social media advertising as well. Set a certain amount of revenues to advertising your business across platforms, such as on Instagram or Facebook, or both.
For instance, the social media platform, Facebook provides alternatives like Facebook ads to promote and market your products or services. Another one is Google ads and boost post on Instagram. But yes, make sure you have the budget required.
#7 Step: Build traffic!
Imagine actual traffic on the road. Look at how packed all the vehicles and cars and, motorcycles. It’s hectic. Too much going on, too many people going to the same place.
That’s how you want your website to be, people need to be crazy about it.
By all means, traffic on a website is just defined as the number of website users who visit a website.
Web traffic is usually measured by visits or sessions. It is an effective way of measuring the efficacy of a website, looking at how many visitors are stopping by your online business site.
Two major types of website traffic are listed below:
- Paid traffic
This type of traffic is actually any customers or visitors that drop by your website after you have paid for advertising promotions. It merely refers to users who visit your website through paid advertising on the Internet.
There are many platforms nowadays that offer paid traffic services, such as search engines and social media platforms, but the most popular ones used for digital marketing in Malaysia are probably Facebook ads and Google ads.
Pay Per Click advertising is one of the most common forms of paid traffic, which makes use of Google Ad Words.
Those are some famous platforms used to generate paid traffic to websites, but believe me, there are a lot of other sources that can be utilized to drive paid traffic.
What are the benefits of paid traffic?
- Choosing exactly how much you’re allocating in order to best direct paid traffic to your online website.
- Set precisely an everyday maximum amount you’d prefer to spend on certain types of advertising, such as Pay Per Click ads.
- A keyword optimization tool is available to carefully lead your targeted traffic to your website.
Facebook Advertising
Facebook ads are much the same as billboards. I need your imagination here again.
Here how it goes, imagine you are in the middle of the ever-so-busy New York City. It is impossible if you didn’t see any billboards there, in fact, there’s just way too many of them.
Some successfully grab your attention, some are just meh.
In this case, it’s similar to Facebook advertising. They’re like billboards, but it exists on your Facebook newsfeed.
You can target and focus on your content that directly or indirectly fits their interests and preferences. Facebook ads are actually becoming almost a staple part of every digital marketing strategy, especially here in Malaysia.
Google Advertising
If you’re considering to spend any amount of money at all to advertise your business and reach your target market, then at least spend it in the right place. Google ads are definitely something that will make it worth spending your precious bucks.
Why did I say that?
Well, seeing that it is somewhere which has over 246 million unique visitors, 3.5 billion daily interactions, and an estimated 700% return on investment, is that not enough evidence to change your mind?
Google ads act like Yellow Pages, and it contains every solution that you might be looking for.
Let’s put Pay Per Click ads into action again. This ad makes you run the campaign with the right traffic drive, because it depends on the search query. It is most likely for the right Internet user to pay a visit to your website, if it matches the upright intent.
- Organic traffic
Here’s a story.
One day, there is this one particular Internet user, I’m naming her Sally. She does what others would usually do on the web. Browsing and surfing a million webs on the net, achieving her dream to be a skilled surfer on the Pacific Ocean.
Jokes aside, replace Pacific Ocean with the Internet instead.
To ease her boredom, she just searches for whatever comes to her interest at the time, and then Sally came across your website on the Google search results page.
And, that’s precisely how it works, you scored organic traffic!
In a broader sense, organic traffic usually refers to users or visitors who found your website through an online search on the search engine itself. One of the best ways to increase your website’s organic search traffic is by employing Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
A way you can achieve SEO is by creating multiple content or a blog that will make your website appear relevant to the users. With a website that has high relevance and authority, it may lead your website to a higher ranking for various search keywords.
This organic search, is also known as unpaid search traffic. In contrast with paid leads, organic searches are naturally generated and not affected by commercial relationships between any search provider, ISP or any other party hosting search results.
#8 Step: Create a visually appealing design!
Good graphic designs are very powerful, especially in digital marketing.
What it does is not only represent a brand or reflect the culture in a company, but also it acts to deliver your brand message to the target audience.
Did you know that the attention span of a normal human being barely last for 7 seconds? It is probably shorter than that of a fruit fly. This is why you need to properly make use of that treasured 7 seconds attention span to your advantage.
As human beings can only maintain their focus for more specifically, 6.8 seconds, good graphic designs are needed. Having relevant and thoughtful content on your website is one thing, but having an attractive presentation is another element to take into consideration for.
Great designs have the power to captivate people’s minds. It is a creative process that is able to transform information and ideas through visual materials, like images. Even people with the shortest attention span can’t miss out on that wonderful masterpiece!
Good graphic design is important in digital marketing because:
- Helps establish and transform your brand identity and, products or services in the most unique way.
- Expands awareness and retention towards your brand.
- Manage to catch people’s attention and also, set you apart from the rest of the competitors.
- Increases the actual value of your business, make it seems larger than it actually is.
- Reaches and engages with more audience in the market and possibly turning visitors into buyers and customers.
#9 Step: Incorporate catchy copywriting!
Copywriting?
What in the world is that?
There is actually a fine line between copywriting and content writing. The thing is, copywriting is a way of writing that is used to persuade the audience in buying your products, sign up on your website and even turn on the subscription for your business’ newsletters!
Copywriting involves calls to action elements, with the use of appealing and catchy taglines or ad copy in promotional material. It literally exists everywhere, in advertisements, brochures, social media postings, websites and even, emails.
They are usually incorporated into a brand’s logo or comes together in any sort of graphic designs and visual elements.
Copywriting is also the act of writing copy that is able to essentially sell your products or services, and convince the audience to take some sort of action.
It is convenient!
Instead of having to hire a salesman to reach all of your prospects and customers one at a time, a copywriter is able to contact all of them at once, through perhaps billboards, blog posts, newsletters, ads on the television, sales letter, and more.
In many ways, it is safe to say that without any use of copywriting in digital marketing, your online campaign probably won’t work out as well, or going nowhere else.
Especially here in Malaysia where the citizens can get very impatient sometimes.
So, copywriting is a good way to catch their attention in a short span of time.
And, good news, Sterrific is more than happy to offer their copywriting services, to ensure you get the best digital services in Malaysia for your marketing campaign!
#10 Step: Keep track of your market!
This part of the marketing strategy might not seem as “fun” and much of a creative process compared to other execution stages of your digital marketing campaign, but it sure is something we can’t just forget about.
Tracking your market is a crucial piece in the puzzle.
It is vital to understand what will work, and what won’t for your business in order to avoid wasting time and money on something invaluable.
How strong is your memory?
Do you still remember when we talk about your goals and budget?
If you do, yes here comes the part where you need to make sure that you are achieving your goals within the right budget.
So, start keeping track and analyze your market!
You need it to maximize your results as much as you can, so that you can reap the maximum amount of benefits. To simply put it out there, you need to know where to properly spend your money.
Don’t let that ka ching- ka ching just go to waste. It’s bad.
At the initial stage of your marketing plan, you might find yourself throwing everything you have against the wall, to determine which one would stick best. But if you find out that you’re gaining nothing and less than zero profit, then you should probably start re-strategizing.
Let’s say, you are throwing your budget on these three marketing options which are SEO, ads on the billboards, and Google Ad Words.
But, only two of them are working for your business. Then, it is a good solution to either get rid of the least profitable one or just spend your money on the other two most profitable marketing revenues.
Digital marketing tracking is one way of analyzing your data.
Here are several ways to do it:
- Total number of website visits
- Amount of time spent on site
- Number of interactions per visit
- Total conversions achieved
- Bounce rate
#11 Step: Bring it to a test!
Phewh, we came a long way. This is the last final part, the testing part.
Sounds exciting, well maybe not that exciting but at least we are reaching the end of the tunnel.
If you manage to stick around, congratulations. Now here is what you have to do.
This part is basically all about testing out your marketing strategies that you have planned out to the real world, but not fully getting into it yet.
How does that work?
Of course, everything that you have laid out must be executed, and in this case, as perfectly as possible.
To do this, it needs practice. So yes, a test is a must.
You don’t want your business to fail the second after you just started it. That is probably the worst nightmare that a business person can possibly get into, especially for the ones who are just starting up. It could bring their spirits down even from the start.
You have to put everything to a test first, so that you know if it will work out or not.
Indeed, there are several ways to test your digital marketing campaign. It generally depends on the goals and objectives that you have set.
Here are some tips to help you test your marketing campaign, and optimize the best results:
- Do a split test on your content marketing to figure out the bigger wins
- Test out your pricing for your goods and services
- Utilize social media networks to run your campaigns
- Take the test again and re-evaluate!
… And That’s It, Now You Are Set.
There you go, a complete basic list and guide in digital marketing for literally anyone, who is already in the business or the SMEs in Malaysia. Everyone can make use of this to do their digital marketing campaigns!
Just remember one thing, in the business world, not everything is going to be all sunshine and rainbows. The same goes for your journey of doing the digital marketing game. It’s a long game.
Don’t expect to get the rewards and achieve the goals you wanted within days, regardless of how awesome you think your marketing strategies are.
For sure, there are many other options you can do for yourself to get the best possible outcome for your business, such as enrolling in any digital marketing course in Malaysia.
Or else, just follow our guide for digital marketing 2019 above.
Best of luck, lovelies! xx
