How to create a digital marketing strategy for your business

With the growth of e-commerce and internet usage worldwide, businesses are increasingly going online and establishing a digital presence. However, this is insufficient if no one knows about your business or purchases from you. Most businesses require people to be aware of their brand and products, increase traffic to the website, and improve conversions. All these are made possible through digital marketing strategies.

This article will guide you about the digital marketing industry in the Philippines, the different types of strategies, and the best practices you can implement in your business.

Digital marketing in the Philippines

The e-commerce sector in the Philippines is flourishing, with its expected worth reaching US$150 billion by 2025, acording to an analysis by Franklin Templeton. The 2022 Hootsuite and We Are Social report revealed that the Philippines has over 76 million internet users. Inadverdently, this will lead to increased online transactions and internet usage. 

The digital marketing industry is also booming in the Philippines, providing business owners with potential opportunities to expand their customer base and boost brand awareness online. According to Statista, ad spending grows at an annual rate of 9.7% in the Philippines. These numbers suggest the need for businesses to implement digital marketing plans to increase awareness and conversions for their brands.

Digital marketing typically comprises two main methods: organic and paid. 

Organic marketing

Organic marketing is an unpaid digital marketing campaign employed to drive website traffic and increase brand awareness among customers from the search engine over time. It involves using optimized content to build your customer base without paying money for advertising. Organic marketing is a cost-effective way of growing your customer base and attracting them to your website, resulting in lead generation. Organic advertising techniques include unpaid social media posts, search engine optimization (SEO), blog posts, guest posts, email marketing, and link generation. 

Best practices in organic marketing

The following best practices can be adopted in creating organic marketing strategies to increase brand awareness and build your customer base:

• Target audience: Identify your target audience and analyze the current audience to see where you get the majority of organic traffic from. Identify the modes through which this organic traffic is generated. If the current audience is your targeted audience, you can continue creating similar content to keep generating that organic traffic. If not, change and optimize your content further outreach to your target audience to generate more traffic.

• Relevant content: Build relevant and informative content on the channel where your target audience spends their time online. Research relevant keywords and build your content around them such that your website appears when customers look for this information. Optimize your content so that it ranks higher on search engine results. Implement search engine optimization by incorporating keywords into the content and using metadata and deep analytics to optimize your search reach. One of the ways to find and create powerful pieces of content is through the Skyscraper Technique. 

• Omnichannel marketing: For example, develop your social media presence and be active in engaging with the customers. You can also establish an email  marketing strategy to draw more traffic to your website, alert customers of new promotions or gain more insights on their shopping experience. Omnichannel organic marketing helps you build an integrated online digital marketing approach so you can expand your customer reach.

• Mobile-friendly: Make your content mobile-friendly as it is an important practice in digital marketing for startups and established businesses.

ROI: Measure your real return on investment by using relevant software to evaluate your marketing strategy and improve it, if required, to increase your ROI.

Paid advertising

Paid advertising is a type of e-commerce digital marketing that involves paid methods to reach and engage customers through website ads, banners, and videos. Popular channels to whom you can pay for advertising your brands include Google, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and TikTok. These paid advertising strategies often follow the pay for impressions and clicks or pay-per-click basis. 

Best practices in paid advertising

The following best practices are essential to incorporate into your paid advertising strategies if you want to start digital marketing:

• Review and reevaluate your budget and current ads to see if they generate enough website traffic.

• Look out for new paid advertising channels which you can utilize. 

• Keep reviewing the new features in your current ad channels to optimize your advertising strategies further.

• Incorporate emerging trends in search, for example, voice search.