Gwen Teng
Mar 8, 20234 min
With the rise of digital marketing, online advertising has become an essential aspect of many businesses.
Digital Marketing, also known as Internet Advertising or Online Advertising, has a goal to reach a large audience, increase brand awareness, attract potential customers, and reach a targeted audience.
Digital marketing has become an essential aspect of business in Singapore, and there is a wide range of strategies that businesses can use to reach their target audience.
Whether it's through SEO, PPC advertising, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, or affiliate marketing, businesses have a range of tools at their disposal to reach their customers and drive sales.
However, most are overused and oversaturated over the year of the internet boom, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when most businesses moved online, making it much more competitive and expensive to advertise on traditional social media platforms with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
So which are the potential unpolished diamonds we have online that a small business can still consider exploring in 2023 to be ahead of the pack? Here are some ideas:
Display Advertising
Display advertising is a form of advertising that involves users of websites, social media, or other digital mediums to take action. Display ads contain text, images, and video advertisements to attract audiences to a website and click through to a landing page.
Display advertising is used to increase brand awareness and reach a large audience. One of the traditional forms of display advertising is Banner Ads, which appear at the top of a website in different shapes and sizes.
Most brands use both video and image for display advertising and are recommended over plain texts, as long as they are efficient in communicating the message to your target audience.
Remarketing Advertising
Remarketing advertising, also known as retargeting, is creating ad campaigns for users who have already seen a website. These ad campaigns can take the form of Video Ads, Search Engine Ads, and Dynamic Ads.
They are designed to target users who have already interacted with a website's video or image, causing them to see related ads in-app or on YouTube.
To improve remarketing advertising campaigns, businesses can create creative ads, target specific audiences, create new formats, re-engage visitors, use dynamic ads, and use different types of remarketing ads.
Almost all reputable social media platforms allow you to use remarketing to reach your target audience; they include Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
Email Advertising
One of the most underrated forms of digital marketing, email advertising involves promoting products or services through email by sending emails to prospects and customers.
Email advertising is an effective way to improve a brand, reach a target audience, and drive traffic to a website. It has much lower CPC since you are reaching to a filtered group of audience that most probably have expressed interest in your products or services in the past.
It is important to personalize emails, have clear text, and optimize for mobile devices as more than 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices. To learn more about how to go about making the most out of your emails, take a look at our Postgraduate Diploma in Digital Marketing where the latest technologies and platforms are taught in our Trending Technologies for Marketers module.
Affiliate Marketing
Although seldom seen or mentioned among brands directly, affiliate marketing has been around even before small businesses can DIY their own advertising campaigns and is a type of performance-based marketing where a business rewards affiliates for each customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.
In Singapore, affiliate marketing is a popular digital marketing strategy as businesses look to reach a wider audience through partnerships with other websites and bloggers. This is done by offering affiliates a commission for each sale generated through their marketing efforts.
Content Marketing
The popular buzz word in early 2020, content marketing is the process of creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content with the goal of attracting and retaining a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, driving profitable customer action.
In Singapore, content marketing has slowly become a popular digital marketing strategy for bigger brands as businesses look to attract and retain customers through educational and entertaining content on platforms like blog posts, infographics, videos, eBooks, and more.
It is, however, labour and resources intensive, and has often been shunned by smaller businesses who do not have the resources to do so effectively. It requires a 360 approach online to be effective and is rather tame if only done on one or two platforms.
Digital marketing has become an essential aspect of business in Singapore, and there is definitely a wide range of strategies that businesses can use to reach their target audience now with the ready-acceptance use of smartphones.
This is evident with the recent boom in the adoption of the new metaverse platform Bondee, a virtual avatar social app created by Singapore-based tech firm Metadream and launched earlier in the year 2023.
Consumers, especially Generation Z and Alpha, are always on the lookout for the newest and latest tech with a FOMO mentality, making businesses always needing to keep up in order to effectively reach them.
The key to success in digital marketing is to find the right strategy that works best for your business and to continuously test and refine your approach to get the best results.
One key lesson for all marketers is to not be afraid to ask for help or take up a digital marketing course to keep yourself updated for everyone is still learning in this evolving digital age.