It is safe to say that in this age of social media titans and bleeding-edge technological advancement, digital marketing is quite possibly the one marketing effort that is worth its weight in money.
In tandem with this advent of online marketing, an increasing number of both big and small Singaporean companies have jumped onto the digital bandwagon for a profitable joy-ride.
Sadly, most of them have not done too well with digital marketing because of a tendency to blunder into it without ensuring that they can cope with its unique qualities.
Successfully harnessing the internet requires companies to restructure certain operations.
Failing to do so will result in a corporate conflagration that may create long-lasting damage to your brand and more importantly, to your profit margin.
That said, the headache now is that if you want to "go digital", what do you need to optimize and how do you do it?
Here are three of the most essential ways:
Allocate and Conquer
Like all marketing strategies, marketing successfully in the digital sphere means reserving the right amount of resources necessary.
The three main things to allocate are budget, human resource and time. As such, the general rule of thumb for successful digital marketing is that you must allocate approximately 30 to 40 per cent of each to stand a chance.
In terms of budget, you will need to set aside the cash for the appropriate tools such as graphic design software, copy-writing services, email software, and even analytical tools to track your performance.
Similarly, the appropriate amount of human resource needs to be allocated because it is impossible for an under-staffed team to handle it all.
Lastly, the amount of time spent should be enough for setting strong foundations. When employed, the necessary facilities will help a firm expand digital outreach and success exponentially.
While being a scrooge on any of these is not going to get you anywhere, digital marketing should not be resource-draining either.
If you are having trouble finding the money, time and manpower, the easiest way to circumvent this is to hire a virtual team.
By hiring your team on a project basis, you temporarily remove the need to purchase the tools and hire expensive full-time staff while freeing up your time to focus on other business endeavours.
However, be warned that you need to know exactly what you want before finding your team and be ready to spend at least USD$300 per service or risk soiling your brand image with shoddy work.
Integration and Synergy
Sales and marketing are perhaps two of the most important profit-making operations in a company mainly because they deal with outreach to your target market.
As such, one of the best benefits about online marketing is that it provides you with incredible access to your market through website to social media pages and even your promotions on deal sites.
Furthermore, the unlimited access to certain channels such as your website allow for immediate and permanent presence to your client base.
Both your sales and marketing teams must be ready to modify their processes to compensate for the additional operational requirements.
In terms of sales, digital marketing excels as a business development engine in terms of prospect generation and a sales multiplier.
With that in mind, there may be a need to reshuffle certain staff members and re-allocate work-load according to the need for post-sale follow-ups and subsequent account management.
In addition, your sales team must be educated on how this new channel can help them fulfil these roles.
All offline and online marketing activities and materials need to be well-integrated in terms of branding, design, copy-writing and strategy.
As creating this integration across all channels will increase the workload of your team, you need to make the necessary adjustments to enable them to fulfil their responsibilities within the same time frame.
Ideally, there should be at least one executive focused predominantly on handling digital marketing.
However, if you do not have the capability to do so, it is then necessary to shift the roles of your existing staff or to outsource certain functions to ensure that general marketing maintains a constant momentum.
Fine-Tuning Your Online Marketing
Let's say that you have made all the necessary preparations, and your staff is ready to meet the challenges and your budget is well-planned.
Now what?
Bosses should know that online marketing can be reviewed over the internet.
Tools like Google Analytics and Social Baker can be used to track and monitor responses to a digital marketing activities across an official website and all social media platforms.
In other words, companies now have full access to all the information they need to fine-tune your digital outreach.
However, this requires time and dedication.
Like all business endeavours, online marketing requires constant improvement and must not be treated like a secondary ad-hoc activity.
If needed, there are companies which provide digital marketing services too. Nonetheless, these services do not come cheap.
It is far more strategic to have the knowledge necessary to effectively use this information.
In fact, after helping hundreds of business owners achieve success in digital marketing, I believe that this knowledge is perhaps the most important factor to your triumph.
This is because even if you outsource this function to others, you are the one who makes the final decision and will still need to be able to make your own judgment.
Just as you will need to make your own decisions on what needs to be done before you embark on your digital marketing journey.
That said, these guidelines are what I have developed over my career helping hundreds of businesses and as a business owner myself.
Hopefully, after applying them to your business, you and your company will be more than ready to conquer your market with your digital marketing.
Pam Siow is the founder and CEO of the Internet Biz Owners Club. A master entrepreneur armed with hard-earned business knowledge and more than a little courage, Pam leads a rapidly expanding company of expert business coaches geared towards helping companies step into the future. More information at: InternetBizOwnersClub.com.