AN INTRO TO DIGITAL MARKETING

Your first question might be, "What exactly is 'digital' marketing?" To put it simply, any action you take online to promote or discuss your business is digital, or online, marketing.

The difficulty enters when you consider the sheer number of tools, methods, ideas, and insights available within the digital space – a number we can only expect will increase as more platforms, be they copycats or truly unique solutions, become available.

Which brings us to a more important question, "Where do I start?" With new solutions seemingly popping up every quarter, promising the best results at lower costs than everyone else, choosing a starting point can feel like the hardest thing. The best thing you can do for your business is to understand the purpose of each essential (read: impactful) tool available and when your customer uses it on his or her journey.

So, you understand what you need, but what's next? At PurpleAsia, we look at four cornerstones when we start working with a new client:

FIRST, YOUR BRAND.

Give it a critical eye. Do you know what your mission is, and do your actions reflect it? Who are your customers; how well do you know them? Who are your competitors, and what makes you stand out? What about your visual appearance – is it consistent across every touchpoint? Take your time to research and answer these questions, making changes where necessary. Once your brand is set, and you have a good picture of the landscape, you can add or build anything on top.

NUMBER TWO, YOUR WEBSITE.

You probably already have your website in place. It's structured with important information about your product or services, it, hopefully, includes high-quality branded images and links to social media. If you haven't already, now is the time to invest in search engine optimisation (SEO). It's an ongoing process which a dedicated in-house team member can take care of, or you can recruit a company or freelancer. Whatever you decide, one thing is for sure, you will want to optimise your site for search engines continuously.

NUMBER THREE, PRESENCE.

You have your brand and website, and now you want to drive traffic to your site, so your customers can get to know you better and start building a relationship with you so you can ultimately sell your product or service. You can drive traffic organically, or you can push your content to your target audience. The primary channels for organic traffic are search engines (see point no. 2, this is why you want to optimise your site), social media (more than driving traffic to your site, profiles and communication help build relationships and increase loyalty), e-newsletters (the content you share keeps your brand top-of-mind and brings your customers closer to your brand), and podcasts (familiarity with and love for this channel is growing in Vietnam and, therefore, absolutely worth investigating.

For paid channels, again, you can choose any of those mentioned above and invest some budget toward reaching your audience. The key is to test the audience reach with a small portion of your budget on each channel to understand how the audience will react to your ads, and once you get desired results, invest more.

More to this point, despite the numerous channels available to drive traffic to your site, understanding which channel to use and when means understanding which touchpoints your audience engage with and at which stage.

How can you do that? The most efficient way is to come up with some scenarios pinpointing how each Persona in your audience conducts his or her day.

For example, let's pretend your brand sells brown shoes and let's consider a potential buyer's day: "Huy wakes up in the morning and remembers that in two days he has to attend a conference. He does not know where to buy a good-looking pair of formal shoes, so while he is having breakfast, he goes to Google and enters keywords "formal black shoes for man tp. HCMC". He gets three types of results right way, Google Shopping (organic), three ads from different shoe brands (paid), and a list of brands that sell shoes (organic). So, he clicks on the image of the shoe he likes from the Google Shopping results to learn more about the product. Suddenly, he notices it's time to go to work; he puts his phone in his pocket and heads off to work. Some time later, Huy sits down for lunch and decides to see what's happening with his Facebook friends. He opens the Facebook app and scrolls through his feed when he suddenly sees a sponsored ad showing him exactly the shoes he looked at that morning. Huy is relieved because he'd completely forgot about the conference and the shoes…"

So, you see, in this scenario, the shoe brand utilised a few touchpoints to make sure the potential buyer saw their product: Google Search organic and paid ads, Google Shopping, and Facebook Advertising. Any of these touchpoints, if Huy clicks on them, will bring him directly to the brand's website, where, if he's convinced, he will buy the product.

Ultimately, you have to define what channels your audience is most likely to use during their journey so you can be sure they get their eyes on your and hopefully click through to your site.

NUMBER FOUR, CUSTOMER CARE.

Are you surprised?

While it may seem like this has nothing to do with marketing, the truth is, regardless of where your customer is in his or her journey, customer care is an area you can't afford to overlook. It represents your brand and business, and, in many cases, helps a potential buyer further along in their journey. Also, customer care has become entirely integrated into the digital space; you want it to be aligned with your brand guidelines and run as smoothly as possible.

Where should customer care be present?:

• Website's Contact Page should be easily identifiable.
• Google Search should be included in SEO optimisation:

• meta descriptions should be optimised for customer care (contact page) and visible directly in the search.
• Google My Business feature is active, providing customers with a physical location as well as contact details.

• Social Media is overseen by a trained and dedicated person who knows how to efficiently respond to customers. In many cases, responses also drive traffic to your site, e.g. "learn more about our product".
• Newsletter includes a content block with standardised customer care information for each email.

So, there you have it, the four areas you'll want to look at when you're ready to ask yourself "Where do I start with digital marketing?" Alone, none of these areas will do much for your business, and if you change one of them, the others will need to be changed as well. However, when all four cornerstones work together, the results will speak for themselves.

If you have any questions or see you could use some support with your digital marketing, let us know! Email us here info@purpleasia.com, give us a call, +84 28 62 777 050, or fill in the form on our site: https://purpleasia.com/contact/ and we'll get back to you shortly.