Singapore boasts over 85% internet penetration, and this is great news for business owners. With more people now online, businesses have a new marketing frontier to expand their reach and boost sales. However, this new business landscape is also highly competitive and businesses have to refine their marketing strategies.
Marketing strategies continue evolving in this emerging business landscape. With so much content available to the target customer, marketers have to innovate to attract the attention of potential customers.
But it takes more than attracting this potential customer to your website. You have to guide them until they make a purchase and follow them up to turn them into loyal customers. This new marketing methodology is known as inbound marketing.
If you run an online business in Singapore, you need to adapt your digital marketing strategy to the fast-changing marketing landscape. This is the technique the best digital marketing agency in Singapore recommends for you. Using advertisements or banners is no longer effective as your target audience might view these as intrusive or annoying. This is where inbound marketing comes in handy. Read on to get more insight into this highly effective marketing strategy.
Outbound Vs. Inbound Marketing
If you love watching television or listening to the radio, you’ll agree that many Singapore businesses invest in marketing advertising. There are hundreds of adverts promoting brands, products or services.
On the digital platforms, you’ll also find banners, embedded videos and other such intrusive marketing techniques. These are part of outbound marketing/traditional marketing. With so much advertising content around, it was only a matter of time before internet users tired and started looking for better ways to connect with brands.
Outbound marketing pushes the message to the mass audience whether the audience needs it or not. It’s interruptive and annoying to most people and this reduces its effectiveness. From TV, radio ads, billboards, trade show booths, cold emails, press releases to cold calls, outbound marketing has lost its allure.
On the other hand, inbound marketing involves attracting your target customers through high-quality content and experiences until they make a purchase and become loyal customers. It’s not a one-off process but an involved process where the marketer nurtures a potential lead from the first moment of contact through the purchase journey and even afterwards.
Inbound marketing is non-intrusive and involves targeted marketing. This approach revolves around the belief that people value relevant, personalised content. It works with the consent of the target customer, unlike the intrusive outbound tactics.
Inbound Marketing in Detail
The strategy involves accompanying a lead from the moment they contact you, for example, by watching your video to the moment they become loyal customers. For this to work, you can break the strategy into stages as seen below:
- Attracting traffic: You invest in techniques that attract potential customers to your website. Techniques to use here include content marketing (blogs, social media) keyword optimisation and other search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics.
- Conversion: When a user comes to your website or interacts with your content, you want more details from them to turn them into a lead. Techniques to use here include powerful call-to-action (CTA), landing pages, emails or forms.
- Closing: At this stage, you work hard to turn your leads into customers. This is a critical stage, and you can use techniques such as lead scoring, CRM integrations, lead nurturing workflows and other lead nurturing tactics. Automated marketing plays a key role at this stage.
- Delighting: At this point, you want to turn your customers into brand ambassadors or promoters. You can use newsletters, social media engagement, personalised products, surveys, user-generated content, product offers and more. You have to track and monitor your customers to know them better. Leverage data for better customer insight to improve engagement.
Advantages of Inbound Marketing
If you want to optimise your Singapore business marketing strategy, an inbound marketing campaign should top your priorities. Some of the benefits you get by adopting this innovative marketing method include:
- Reduced costs of marketing
- Increasing visibility and brand awareness
- Building trust and credibility
- Quality leads and relevant traffic
- Inbound marketing is sustainable as you can reuse the content generated for future campaigns
- Opportunity for long-lasting relationships with customers
- You learn more from your customers and evolve
- Multiple opportunities for customer data collection
- This is a versatile marketing strategy for B2B sector and other types of businesses
- Long-term investment as you own the content generated and can build strong distribution channels in the process.
Final Thoughts
If you’re struggling to gain traction for your online business in Singapore, it’s time to embrace inbound marketing. It’s all about creating better relationships with potential customers from the first contact. You have the opportunity to create high-quality content as you nurture the lead.This positions your brand as an authority. Ultimately, inbound marketing is a win-win for both the customer and the marketer.