3 Reasons to Work With a Digital Marketing Agency

So, you’ve decided to try digital marketing to grow your business? Great! The next step is to decide whether to hire an agency to run your marketing campaigns or handle everything in-house. There are many factors to consider before making a decision and benefits and disadvantages to both options. Ultimately, only you can decide what’s best after weighing all the pros and cons. You might think that as an agency we are a little bit biased, but we would like to give you three good reasons why you should consider hiring a digital marketing agency:

1) Improved Return On Investment

When you work with a digital marketing agency, you may incur additional costs but it may be a worthwhile investment when you factor in the time that they can help you save. Hiring an in-house team costs time and money, not to mention the fact that you will then need to train and supervise your staff or hire an expert who will do that for you. It goes without saying that you would need strong digital marketing knowledge in order to hire the right people and get the best out of them.

When you hire an agency, you won’t have to spend weeks (or sometimes months) gathering information, researching and learning before you start seeing an improvement in your Return On Investment (ROI). A good marketing agency will help you calculate and understand the marketing ROI of your campaigns as well as helping you to focus your efforts on the right channels, which means you can start seeing benefits from your marketing efforts almost right away. When you look at it that way, working with a digital marketing agency may be a good investment for you to make given the situation.

2) Greater Efficiency and Cost Reduction

Digital marketing is a broad term that encompasses a variety of different fields, including social media, SEO, content marketing and online advertising. All of these elements play a part in the success of your business on the internet and they all offer different benefits to your company.

For example, social media marketing allows you to connect with a wider audience while increasing your brand’s visibility. Blogging, on the other hand, helps to improve your rankings in search engines while ensuring that you can be an authoritative voice in your industry.

As you can imagine, these different fields require different areas of expertise, which is going to be difficult to come by or very expensive with an in-house team, especially if you’re a small business. Imagine if you had to hire one person to do all of these jobs. The work can pile up very quickly and it may not be the most scalable solution for most businesses. If you choose to work with a digital marketing agency, you will have access to a team of experts who are skilled in every field of digital marketing. This will ensure that you get the best quality of work at potentially a fraction of what it would cost to hire an entire in-house marketing team.

Another benefit of digital agencies is that they typically have access to a variety of software, such as marketing automation, competitor research and SEO tools. This offers tremendous value, since agencies are effectively able to split the costs between multiple clients. If you were to acquire all the necessary tools in-house, the subscription fees alone could end up costing you more than paying for an agency!

3) Establishing a Future Direction for the Brand

In the early stages of establishing a company, it is essential that you create a clear identity for your company, which can then be used as a core concept of your marketing campaigns. This can be a time-consuming process, as it’s highly difficult to come up with an idea that works. For this reason alone, it’s often a good idea to get some outside help.

Your partner agency can conduct thorough market research to determine which direction you should take your brand in. They can analyse the market trends through sophisticated Business Intelligence tools and use social listening to find out what your target groups are most interested in. This will make it much easier for you to build a connection with your audience, which will lay a solid foundation for your brand to go in the future.

As you can see, working with a digital marketing agency will ensure that you get the best quality work while saving you a considerable amount of time and effort. If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency in Bangkok, Glow Digital is your best option. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help

 

Covid-19 in Thailand: 5 Marketing Tactics Your Business Can Use Right Now

Covid-19 in Thailand: 5 Marketing Tactics Your Business Can Use Right Now

As the coronavirus (Covid-19) situation has put cities across Thailand on partial lockdown, businesses of all types are feeling its impact. Although right now, the idea of marketing your business may seem counterintuitive, there are still plenty of ways to provide value for your audience and generate sales during this period. 

Here are a few free or low-cost tactics that businesses of all size can use right now for customer acquisition and retention.

1. Offer Home Delivery

Although the restaurant industry has been heavily affected by the Covid crisis, many are still allowed to offer take-away and home delivery (here in Bangkok at least). If you run a restaurant and haven’t already partnered with home delivery services, now is the time to do so. Make sure to let your followers know on social media that you’re open for takeaway or delivery and offer relevant and interesting promotions such as % discounts or free home delivery. 

There is no reason why this wouldn’t work for retail businesses too. In fact, if you’re not already selling online, now is the time to not just think about it but to take fast action. Don’t have a website? Add a shop to your Facebook page or sell through a marketplace such as Shopee or Lazada. 

If you have the budget for it, you could even run a campaign to donate all or a part of the profits to support your staff who have had their hours cut due to the Covid situation. Customers love to support ethical businesses who care about their employees, and a simple gesture like this could go a long way in terms of building relationships and improving customer loyalty.

This will work well for: restaurants, grocery stores and retailers.

2. Take Your Business Into the Digital Age

Now is the time to really think about digital transformation. Distance learning, for example, enables many teachers to continue working from home and for students to carry on learning with minimal disruption.

Think about how you could apply the distance learning concept to your own business. Are you a yoga teacher or a fitness instructor? Create an online course or a podcast. After all, with people unable to leave home, they will be looking for alternative ways to exercise, stay healthy and keep themselves occupied. 

You could even offer one to one personal coaching or host live sessions for your followers on Facebook or instagram. Share your best knowledge and overdeliver on value to build and strengthen relationships. The investment you make now could return many times over, and could help you find new income streams for many years to come.

This will work well for: yoga teachers, personal trainers, business coaches, language teachers, digital marketers, life coaches, photographers.

3. Offer Discount Vouchers

Businesses based out of a physical location have been hit especially hard after entire cities have been put on lockdown. However, just because you’ve had to close up shop doesn’t mean you have to stop selling your services.

What you can do right now is to reward customer loyalty by offering discount vouchers that your customers can use towards future purchases. For example, if you’re a physical therapist you could offer a coupon for x% off purchases valid for the next 12 months. Encourage people to buy more coupons by increasing the discount amount. For example:

Buy 1 coupon, get 30% off
Buy 2 coupons, get 40% off
Buy 3 coupons, get 50% off and so on.

This shows your customers that you haven’t forgotten about them, and many people will be happy to support their local business in these uncertain economic times.

This will work well for: beauty clinics, spas, massage shops, nail bars, physical therapists.

4. Run a Competition

This is another variation of the discount coupon strategy that would work especially well for any business that uses lead generation for customer acquisition.

For example, you could run a giveaway competition on social media. Let’s say you’re a beauty clinic. You could run a competition with a chance to come in for a free beauty treatment anytime within the next 3 months.

You can collect leads (contest entries) via a Facebook lead form, a landing page or even a Messenger chatbot. The only information you need to collect is name, phone number and email address. Make sure to tell everyone entering the competition when and where you will be announcing the winners – on your Facebook page, for example. 

The other thing you should do is give everyone who enters a price immediately. For instance, you could offer a 30% discount valid for the next 6 months when customers come in and use your services. This will help you build a pipeline and give your potential customers a good reason to come in and purchase from you as soon as possible.

The other huge benefit is that you can use the personal data you have collected, such as the customer email address, to stay in contact, send relevant updates about your business and make sure you stay on top of mind.

5. Create Amazing Content

Just because business is slow, it doesn’t mean that you should stop working. In fact, now is the time to take even more action.

Think about how you could use your time in the most effective way possible. Does your website need a refresh? Maybe it’s been a while since you’ve updated your blog? Think about the needs of your target market and start creating relevant content for your audience.

What problems do your current customers struggle with? Try to identify your customer pain points and use them to engage your future customers by becoming their go-to source for helpful advice.

Video content is a fantastic way to hook your audience on social media. Video allows you to break down your content into easily digestible snippets and give your brand a voice. People also love sharing videos, which makes it easy to spread your message even further.

All you need to get started with video is a decent quality smartphone and access to some kind of editing software. Plenty of cheap and even free options exist for both Windows and Mac users. The one that I would recommend is Filmora for its ease of use and a powerful range of features but, of course, there are many others as well.

The most important thing is to take action, and remember, what you do (or fail to do) right now is going to have an enormous impact on your business in the coming weeks and months.

About Glow Digital

Successful marketing is all about connecting with your customers and building lasting relationships to ensure brand loyalty. In today’s hyperconnected world that means having the right message to amplify on the right platform in order to make your company stand out from the noise.

Glow Digital Marketing Meeting 07

That’s what Glow Digital does best. We’re passionate about telling your brand’s story on social media and turning brand awareness into sales.

10 Fascinating TikTok statistics in 2020​

10 Fascinating TikTok statistics in 2020

tiktok in numbers infographic

Since its launch in 2017 the video-sharing social networking app TikTok has taken the world by storm, becoming the fastest growing social media platform in the world.

What is TikTok?

In 2016 the Chinese company ByteDance launched a short video app called Douyin. Powered by its library of built-in video editing tools, it quickly became the #1 user-generated content app, enjoying enormous popularity among young adults in China.

In 2017 ByteDance bought the popular lip-sync platform Musical.ly in a deal valued at up to US $1 billion. The following year Musical.ly was rebranded as TikTok – an international version of Douyin. The video sharing format was an instant hit among global audiences and by October 2018 TikTok had become the #1 most downloaded app in the US.

TikTok is all about short-format video. Most videos on TikTok are only 15 seconds long or less, although it’s possible to make videos of up to 60 seconds. The videos, accompanied by a wide mixture of effects and filters, can range from various hashtag challenges to dancing, memes, slow-mo, duets, cosplay and so on. Examples of hashtags include #raindropchallenge, which has been watched over 1 billion times to date.

The platform takes advantage of cutting-edge machine learning to interpret individual preferences and deliver content to its users accordingly.

Here are some fascinating statistics about TikTok:

1. There are 800 million monthly active users.

To put this in context, Instagram has about 1 billion active monthly users.

2. It’s the 2nd most popular app in the world.

TikTok was the 2nd most downloaded app in 2019 with 738 million downloads.
It was the #1 most downloaded app in App store and the second most downloaded app on Google Play behind WhatsApp

3. It’s very popular in Thailand.

Thailand is one of TikTok’s key markets in Southeast Asia. It has already been downloaded here more than 10 million times.

4. It’s also popular among Thai celebrities.

Many Thai celebrities and influencers have embraced the platform. Noteable Thai personalities on TikTok include the singer Ratchanok Suwannaket (8.8M followers) and YouTuber Kaykai (5.3M followers).

5. In 2019, over 1 billion videos were watched on TikTok every day.

This is roughly equal to 68 billion hours spent on the app.

6. TikTok is fuelled by teenagers.

41% TikTok users are aged between 16 and 24.

7. But its popularity among adults is growing.

In 2020 TikTok’s US adult users more than doubled year on year.

8. The average TikTok user spends 52 minutes per day on the platform.

This is almost 2x the time an average Instagram user spends scrolling through their feed.

9. Most TikTok users visit the app multiple times daily.

90% of of TikTok users visit the app more than once per day.

10. It’s available globally.

TikTok is available in 155 countries. It is also available in 75 different languages.