What is Digital Marketing? And what it means to hire a freelance Digital Marketing Consultant in Singapore
How do you hire a freelance digital marketing consultant in Singapore? It’s a question that many small business owners ask and the first place they go is to Google and search for “freelance digital marketers Singapore”. Have you ever wondered what those marketers offer or how you can find one for your business? It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the number of options available when searching for digital marketers. With all of the marketing agencies, freelancers, and consultants out there, it’s difficult to know who to trust.
As a Registered Management Consultant, I am recognised by Enterprise Singapore to possess adequate knowledge, competence, and professional and ethical conduct to provide consultancy services in accordance with TR 43:2015 (developed by the Singapore Standards Council, Enterprise Singapore, and the Consultant Quality Management Working Group). With the title of Registered Management Consultant comes certain responsibilities and obligations for all in the management consulting profession which include promoting high standards of professional and ethical conduct, adherence to professional standards, and commitment to continuous professional improvement.
Before starting work, as your digital marketer, we will begin by assessing the health of your business’s digital assets, among others. This allows us to establish a solid starting point, determine the appropriate actions to be carried out, determine the right digital marketing strategy, and make a budget as close to reality as possible. To carry out the initial audit accurately, we will tribute the process to two large factors:
Internal Audit
We will start by looking back on past digital marketing campaigns that the client has already carried out. This allows us to determine which ones have been successful and which ones have not. The types of campaigns carried out will be studied, including the position chosen to display the ads, the market segmentation that has been done, bounce rate, and conversion rate, among others.
External Audit
We determine and review what the competition is doing with their digital marketing spend. The will include analyzing all the types of ads and campaigns used according to the sector, sales funnels used, segmentation, keywords, etc – taking into account all their sources of traffic that drive traffic to their digital sales funnel. At this point, we will need to analyze if our competitors receive:
- Organic traffic (SEO)
- Traffic from social networks (SMM)
- Referral traffic (other websites)
- Other Factors
1. Designing the Digital Marketing Strategy
With the data points established, we will have what we need to start shaping the right strategy. The idea is to achieve the objectives that the client is looking for
* A very common misconception is to think that crafting a successful advertising campaign is very easy. For example, think that it is only to enter Facebook, click on the corresponding button and start receiving calls. If you think this, try running a campaign and you will see how quickly you lose money.
When planning a cohesive marketing strategy, the following factors must be taken into account:
- What is the potential audience size of the client?
- What goals does the client have with their campaigns? Are they realistic with their end goals?
- What is the best way to adjust their ads to optimize the sales funnel?
- How much money is the client willing to invest? And how much money would it *really* take to invest to get results?
- On which social networks and advertising platforms are we going to create these campaigns on?
- What will the ad creatives look like? Video, image, will we use psychological triggers?
This information is crucial to creating a successful digital marketing campaign. The idea is to find a way to entice the consumer, even without him realizing that he is being courted after. The goal is to create a slightly intrusive type of advertising, which will be precisely the one that yields the best results.
2. Designing the Organic Strategies on Social Networks
In the event that there is no sales funnel present, we will have to design a sales funnel strategy to be able to optimize your inbound traffic. As the objective is always for conversion, it is important to design the experience around this.
3. Advertising on Social Media
Every social network has its own set of peculiarities and tricks that can help a campaign position itself above what the competition offers to achieve its objectives. Our goal is to see how we can dominate the social network in which we are going to launch the advertising campaign. The truth is that most advertising platforms are usually quite similar – but have certain characteristics that can change their fundamentals completely.
You will also need to know how to use targeting tools to properly target your campaigns. These little points of differentiation will allow us to create a campaign that generates the most amount of impact on the potential client and to finally take the plunge in your offerings. For example, we can implement a retargeting strategy designed to offer an omnichannel experience and visibility to your project. Someone visits you through Google, then enters the funnel of the remarketing campaign and finds an ad for your company on Facebook or YouTube. Sounds good?
4. Interpretation of Results and Decision Making
Anyone would think that once the campaign has been launched, we just have to sit back and wait for results; but in reality, We’re just getting started! We can tell you that there is no such thing as a perfect campaign, much less one that can work well from the first moment. It will always be necessary to initiate some A/B testing throughout the lifecycle of the campaign to further refine and optimize our initial strategy. Social networks, and other advertising tools such as Google Ads, are very complete in terms of the data we can collect. This is what is known as metrics and knowing what these numbers tell us is paramount.
We must know how to interpret these results and see if we’re on the right track, and the changes we have to tweak that will allow us to achieve maximum success. We must take into account data such as the number of visits the website receives, impressions, reach, bounce rate, clicks, CPM, frequency, CTR, ROAS, CPA, etc.
We will also consider some criteria referring to specific resources, such as a video (the number of “shares”, of “likes” or “dislinks”), of a newsletter (how many people actually sign up for your mailing list), in e-commerce (purchases made). Our job here is to analyze and interpret these data and informing the stakeholders how the campaign is doing. These reports will be divided into two parts:
Internal Digital Marketing Reports
This refers to reports that only the digital marketer sees, and that we will use to draw our own conclusions. Normally we optimize these campaigns on a daily basis and we need to make snap judgments. That is why these internal reports go very well when making these decisions valuable.
External Digital Marketing Reports
On the other hand, external reports are those that are followed to present the results to the stakeholders – reflected in a summarized way so that they can be understood more easily. Depending on what you are looking for, or the KPIs you are looking to achieve, we will deliver our reporting focusing on only a few key metrics.
5. Digital Marketing Strategy Optimization
With the reports on the table, it will be time to make some big decisions. With this data, we can determine which are the most appropriate values and how to interpret them accordingly. As much as a campaign goes well, it is possible to refine some criteria to continually improve the results, while at the same time, reducing the cost per customer acquisition.
Thanks to these reports, we will be able to know:
- How you can increase your budget while improving performance?
- Whether is there room to improve ad creatives?
- If it is possible to rush more in the segmentation, or if the scope of the campaign could be extended to new sectors
- If we can expand to other online platforms and channels to see if we can replicate the success of the earlier campaign.
- If it is also possible to correct a failed strategy if all the data points are present.
In short, the more data points the marketer obtains, the easier it will be to interpret which are the key areas of improvement and we can exploit our findings in order to scale the business and thus obtain out of every dollar spent.
Do I need a full-time in-house digital marketer or outsource to a freelance digital marketing consultant for my company?
Big question! If you have a website and you want to create a lead generation system for obtaining leads on a recurring basis, you should think about onboarding either a digital marketer or getting someone in-house responsible for the digital side of your business. Surely it can also go very well for you to hire a freelance digital marketer in Singapore to help you design a ‘big-picture’ digital marketing strategy for your project.
Although online advertising can give you a lot of visibility and get you many clients, it could prove to be quite costly. You must also take into account other more organic sources of traffic such as:
- Content Marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation to consistently get potential customer traffic
- Social Media Marketing Strategy
The combination of these paid and organic traffic sources, when working in tandem, makes digital marketing, very powerful and makes it easier for you to generate new customers and sales. Without the right approach, the results will never be optimal. That is why if you are thinking of carrying out an omnichannel strategy; if you want to advertise with Google Ads, and Facebook Ads, in addition to designing a system that continually generates leads, you should consider getting a specialist on board.
At the end of the day, there is no one-size-fits-all formula for digital marketing. If you’re planning to hire a digital marketer, you need to find someone who can provide strategies that are customized to your business. By doing your homework and asking the right questions, you can ensure that you’re hiring someone who’s right for your company. Let’s talk.
How can I help?
Myron is an experienced Digital Marketing consultant based in Singapore with over 10 years of experience providing search engine optimization, pay-per-click management, social media, and website development services; with experience managing medium-sized to enterprise-level digital marketing campaigns for clients across the country. Do you have a question or are you interested in working with me? Just fill out the form field below.