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Employ SEO and SEM to rake in more revenue for your business

If you’re involved in the business field, there’s a likelihood you’ve heard of SEO and SEM. These terminologies are commonly tossed around, but what do they mean exactly? Is there a difference between the two?

Although the distinction can be minimal, if you understand how to execute them effectively and correctly, they can lead the organisation to extremely high traffic and growth.

Let’s look at the difference between SEO and SEM and how they can be game-changers for your company. Ready for results? Let’s plunge into this integral part of marketing for your business.

An overview before we begin

Image Credits: Inc. Magazine

The average person will most definitely click on the top few links in a typical search on Google, right?

That’s why the first page on Google search is where you want your website to appear. These days, human attention is short, and it’s essential to be the first few to grab your target customers’ attention before your rivals do. Here’s where SEO and SEM come to play.

They’re ways to promote the company so that your potential customers can access them on search engines, such as Google or Bing. If your company has a website rival, SEO and SEM are essential for more traffic to be guided to your domain.

Let’s explore their primary purposes to grasp these promotional tools better.

SEO otherwise referred to as search engine optimisation, is a concept that lets you organically appear in search results. While SEM, known as search engine marketing, depends on paid strategies to get you ranked on search engines.

Here’s a more insightful look into both approaches.

The four parts of SEO

Technical SEO – This focuses on improving your website’s technical aspects and constructing it to provide a fantastic user experience. It’s also part of on-page SEO.
On-page SEO – Involves tweaking the web pages themselves so that search engines can understand your title tags, content, internal links, and URLs.
Content SEO – Your content needs to match what the searcher intends to find. This is one of Google’s most important factors for its rankings. Consider these: keyword strategy, site structure, and copywriting.
Off-page SEO – Connect your website to other trustworthy and high-authority webpages through hyperlinks, PR, or different strategies, and the search engines will push you up the ranks over time.

Now, moving on to SEM.

SEM and PPC

SEM includes PPC ads instead of organic growth. PPC is also better known as pay-per-click. In the form of embedded advertisements, Google or other search engines can showcase your website and display them to your prospective customers.

Not all campaigns, however, are expected to yield results. To make your advertising stand out so that you get the best bang for your buck, you will have to see what your rivals are doing and choose your keywords wisely.

SEO vs SEM

Image Credits: Matchcraft

With every click your SEM ad gets, you have to pay.
In the form of clicks, SEM usually has immediate effects, while SEO takes much longer.
SEM advertisements give you more control over how they appear. This doesn’t apply much for SEO.
SEM provides you with data specifics so that you can quickly tweak your advertising for instant results. When it comes to SEO, that’s a bit more challenging.
Over time, SEO visibility expands, so the impact snowballs as you progress. With SEM, exposure comes to a halt as soon as you disable your advertisements.

Is one better than the other?

There is no straightforward answer as it falls on how your organisation is structured and what priorities you have at hand. But here are a few pointers to note:

What is your objective? You want to go for SEM if it’s a short-term one.
How is your current SEO health? SEM can be a great backer if it is already substantial.
Go with SEM if you expect that your company would have a higher consumer lifetime value. SEO could be ideal if it’s the opposite.
Did you have your sales and profits assessed? See if making a profit from SEM is practical for you. Go with SEO if it’s not urgent.

When it comes to driving traffic, either SEO or SEM is useful for your company. But why not use both? Most of the time, having the financial capacity to combine them will allow you to reap the benefits of both.

Here are some of the benefits of implementing both strategies:

Do you recall how we mentioned data was available only for SEM but not for SEO? Well, now you can use SEM as a tester for your SEO strategy.
Through incorporating remarketing strategies within your SEM plan, you will make your SEO efforts go the distance to convert those who didn’t buy before into paying customers in the future.

Final thoughts

Now that you know what SEO and SEM are all about, you can use your new-found insights to refine your competition strategy and make the best of both worlds to conquer the organic and paid regions. All the best in ranking your company site at the top of search engines!

The importance of creating customer avatars for your business

Creating customer avatars for your business should be part of your marketing plan. Remember that you want to nudge a lead or customer to the next level by smartly employing digital marketing.

Many start-ups deal with cold prospects in the beginning. To convert these cold prospects to fans and beyond, identifying your ideal customers’ profile is necessary.

This is where a customer avatar comes in handy. A customer avatar can also be referred to as a target audience for the laymen. We will use it interchangeably in this article.

Give life to your avatars with these components

To help you better understand your target audience, you want to give life to your avatars.

Tackling these components are useful – know their goals and values, the platforms they source for information, and their demographics. It’s also wise to think through the potential reasons why your avatars would reject your product or service.

There are many ways to gain the abovementioned information. You can conduct a study, schedule surveys, or have conversations with members of the public. But lest you think it’s do or die, that’s not true.

Go ahead and make the first cut while trusting your assumptions about your target audience. Once you have done enough research and gathered results, fine-tuning is all it takes to move forward.

Find your niche with the “but no one else would” trick

via GIPHY

Let’s zoom in on the finer details with the “but no one else would” trick. This trick will allow you to choose the right tools, platforms, and influencers to engage.

Take a look at these sentences:

My target audience would read [name of a book], but no one else would.
They would subscribe to [name of a magazine], but no one else would.
The company’s ideal customers would attend [name of a conference], but no one else would.

By answering the above, you will filter and narrow down on some hows and wheres of marketing. The main idea here is finding your niche, so it’s extremely targeted. You won’t want to be wasting any of your marketing dollars, right?

Use different customer avatars for various campaigns

Throughout the lifetime of your business, you will be running several marketing campaigns in a year. No one campaign should be precisely the same as the other.

If you’re simply using the same profile for each of your campaigns, you will quickly realise that it doesn’t work. To craft personalised content and offers, you need to establish who you’re marketing to.

Knowing your target audience will help you deal with the rest of your marketing components, including the type of content to produce, the social media sites to use, and what kind of advertisements you should buy.

You can create your customer avatar in just five easy steps. For the visual learners, this will help:

Here are some useful advice on how to build your brand on Instagram

Have you been thinking about managing your social media accounts for personal brand marketing? If you’re new and not sure what to do, it can be tough to start. Here are some tips from Lina Marican, Managing Director of Mutant Communications, on how to build your brand on Instagram.

#1: Define your brand purpose

To get started, one must know their brand purpose on Instagram. If you’re a consumer brand, then it’s obvious that your key purpose would be to use Instagram to engage your consumers and target audience.

Marican states that businesses can also use Instagram to work on their employer branding. This is especially relevant if the company is looking to attract younger talents in its future plans for hiring. This is probably a given since people in their 20s to early 30s are on Instagram most of the time.

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A post shared by Mutant Communications (@we.are.mutant) on Mar 24, 2020 at 3:03am PDT

Identifying your brand purpose is the first step to guide your content strategy going forward.

#2: Find your aesthetics and stick to it

As Instagram is mainly a visual platform, it’s important to find your brand’s artistic visual identity. Get it right from the start with a set of guidelines. The overall look and feel should help you tell a compelling story.

You know you’re on the right track when your target audience is able to associate your aesthetics to your brand as soon as they catch sight of your posts while scrolling through their Instagram feed.

It’s also essential that you research your target audience – their lifestyle and the other brands they are following – while aiming to meet in the middle.

#3: Share the right mix of content

Image Credits: Pinterest

“A lot of brands tend to get this wrong, actually,” said Marican.

Many brands get on Instagram eyeing it as an advertisement platform. They think that it’s a place to talk about products, services, deals, and promotions. While that may work, there are many Instagram users who seek to be entertained, educate themselves, be inspired, or to connect with the community.

With that said, brands should learn how to strike the right balance. It’s not just about blasting promotions all the time.

“Take a look at maybe three different types of contents that you can put out,” advised Marican. Firstly, since you’re a brand, you do need promotional posts or product news. Secondly, think about conversational posts like contests, giveaways, and polls where you can have a two-way conversation with your audience. Thirdly, consider sharing posts. Look out for what’s out there in the industry and collaborate with other influencers and partners.

#4: Use the available tools to your advantage

Marican mentioned that her favourite tool is Instagram Live, where brands can use to live stream behind-the-scenes during events. There are also Instagram stories where companies can take advantage of to produce bite-sized content.

If you have shoppable content or an e-commerce store, use the shoppable tags on your posts so your audience can click through and buy your product instantly.

#5: Measure your success

For those who need to report to higher-ups, it’s important to know how to measure your success via analytics. Set up an Instagram business profile if you don’t already have one. The page analytics tool will help you to evaluate your performance, strategy, and give you an idea on how to grow your following.

With these data, you will also figure out the best time to share posts, how frequently you should post to get maximum engagement and know what works best with your target audience.

#6: Be smart when including hashtags

Image Credits: Digital Marketing Institute

Marican shares that maxing out on hashtags can make a person or brand look untargeted and unprofessional.

There are better ways to use hashtags. For example, branded hashtags. While looking at your own brand, come up with a hashtag that is concise and memorable. This also makes it easier for your followers to go back to search for previous content you’ve posted with a hashtag unique to your company.

The other type of hashtag is the trending or industry-specific ones. As there are tons of popular hashtags out there, brands should do their analysis and review the ones that get the most engagement.

Together with your branded hashtags, including a few trending or industry-specific ones will do the trick.

About Mutant Communications

Image Credits: Mutant Communications

Mutant Communications offers a range of services including public relations, content, and branding. If you think it’s better to engage professionals to handle the digital marketing side of your brand, Mutant Communications’ digital marketing experts can help.

Whether your objectives are to raise awareness of specific initiatives, drive consideration for products, generate leads or sales online, or nurture a loyal community of brand advocates, the team promises to be with you every step of the way.

They will work closely with you from start to finish to ensure the digital strategy is cohesive, maximizes returns, and complements your wider business goal.

These are some areas in digital marketing they can aid you in:

Lead Generation Campaigns
Content Creation and Design
Social Media Strategy
Social Media Copywriting
Digital & Social Ad Spend Strategy

Check out their case studies here.

If you’re keen to engage their services, email them via [email protected] or fill up this online form and the team will get back to you regarding your queries as soon as they can.

9 Things You Will Learn From The Google Digital Garage

The increasing demands of Digital Marketing in corporations, agencies, and small businesses paved way for the creation of digital marketing professionals. There is an increase interest in this field, which is fueled by competition. If you want to claim a coveted spot in the Digital Marketing scene, this Google Course is for you.

Simply go to learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage to create an account. Apart from that, here are some things you may want to know.

#1: GOOGLE DIGITAL GARAGE IS FREE

The best thing about Google Digital Garage is its non-profit nature. Everything from the courses down to the tests and certificates are FREE. Brush up your digital skills to grow your career, business, or self-esteem by setting up a learning account. Anyone can benefit from this, regardless of their educational background and skill level.

#2: GOOGLE DIGITAL GARAGE IS FOR EVERYONE

The Digital Garage has a user-friendly interface whereby the learner will go through hours of lecture and self-administered tests on his or her own pace. You can easily watch the video tutorials with subtitles and transcript. You may want to take it in a span of a week or two. No one will pressure you. An expert may refresh his or her learning, while a novice will expand his or her knowledge with this.

#3: YOU CAN SKIP PARTS YOUR WELL-VERSED IN

If you are well-versed in a particular topic, you may skip the tutorial videos and go directly to the short multiple choice test. You need to complete each lesson by completing the test perfectly. Otherwise, you will have to watch all the tutorial videos again. If you are confident enough, give it a shot!

#4: YOUR MOBILE DEVICES ARE POWERFUL

Whether you admit it or not, one of the first things that you do on a daily basis is to check your phone for notifications. More people are inclined to using their mobile devices on a daily basis. That being said, you need to turn your website or page into a mobile-friendly space. Check whether your website or page is mobile-friendly through the Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. This tool shall take you a minute or less to assess whether your website or page is good to go. Go to search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly to find out more.

#5: YOU CAN TAKE MORE THAN ONE MODULE AT A TIME

Because Circuit Break entails that we are the masters of our own schedule, you may take as many modules as you want. You can begin with some topics you like and move on to another module. It is up to you to finish the first module when you are ready. A progress indicator on your course landing page will help you track your progress.

#6: THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEO AND SEM

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. The former focuses on organic results. While, the latter encompasses both organic results and paid tactics. SEM involves paid advertisements in order to be displayed in a page. Both processes aim to increase the visibility of a brand in search engines.

#7: KEYWORDS ARE IMPORTANT

Keywords are the words and phrases that people type in search engines such as Google. The goal is to ensure that your page’s keywords are relevant to what people are searching for. This increases the chances of them stumbling across your content. You may use tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner or Bing’s Keyword Research Tool.

#8: YOU CAN GET ALERTED WHEN YOUR WEBSITE IS SEARCHED

Google Alerts is a notification service powered by Google. Alerts sends emails to the user when it finds new results that match the user’s search term. For instance, I dedicated a notification to the term “Miss Psychobabble” to track when people are searching for my Psychology blog. I receive emails from Google whenever readers are searching through newspaper articles, web pages, podcasts, or other scientific research that match my term.

#9: CAN GOOGLE CERTIFICATE HELP YOU GET THE JOB

As I said, the completion of a module entails you to get a certificate. I, for one, finished my Digital Marketing course of 107 lessons and several multiple choice tests. A Google certificate can help you land the job by increasing your skills. It is attractive to see Google in one’s C.V.

Image Credits: unsplash.com

It can help you flourish in a field if you learn all the courses properly. Work on yourself by expanding the knowledge and applying it in the future. Learn the best ways to sell resume or brand – digitally at least.

5 Deals You Never Knew Existed

If you compare extensively across different websites to search for the best bargains or are not afraid to ask the auntie at your local mom and pop shop for a discount, this post is totally for you. For those who have always been too shy to haggle for discounts, this article will benefit you even more. Introducing 99%SME, a dedicated eMarketplace where our local small and medium businesses (SMEs) offer special deals that promise fantastic savings. Without further ado, here are 5 deals you never knew existed.

1. Salted Egg Fish Skin from Crusty’s Singapore

NOW $6.00 (U.P. $8.50) Save 29%!

2. Pineapple Tart Cushion Food Plush from Nom & Co

NOW $27.90 (U.P. $34.90) Save 20%!

3. Natural Felted Soap from Simply for Love

NOW $9.90 (U.P. $15) Save 34%!

4. Baseus Wireless Portable Power Bank from GXM Pte Ltd

NOW $19.90 (U.P. $29.90) Save 33%!

5. Pearl Boba Milk Tea Ambient Light from Toy Galleria

NOW $23.92 (U.P. $29.90) Save 20%

99%SME for Small and Medium Businesses

Are you an SME with amazing deals and products like some of the businesses featured above?

Don’t let your deals go unnoticed anymore! Jump on the bandwagon now and reach a wider audience effortlessly by selling online with 99%SME. 99%SME is a campaign started by DBS and Singtel in 2015 to help small and medium businesses to go digital. It has since gained tremendous traction and helping Singapore SME go places. The fantastic news for you is that 99%SME is totally free to join and advertise!

Getting Started on 99%SME – 3 Steps is All It Takes

To get started on creating your online store that comes with your own branding, all it takes it just 3 easy steps. Simply follow this step-by-step instruction and you are on your way.

Enter your business details
Upload your products
Select payment and shipping options

Selling online is as easy as 1-2-3.

Click here to join as a seller on 99%SME now!