Tag: ROI

Singapore – A survey by HubSpot and LinkedIn, conducted by Milieu Insight, reveals that more than eight in ten (84%) Singaporean companies are leveraging digital marketing for their advertising needs, yet 50% struggle with accurately measuring their return on investment.

The survey found that more than seven in ten (78%) companies using digital marketing have a strategy in place, while more than half (57%) of those without a digital marketing strategy plan to implement one in the near future.

However, the survey indicates that inadequate tracking capabilities may be limiting digital marketing’s effectiveness. Despite widespread adoption of local companies, only 17% of Singaporean respondents strongly believe that a strong digital marketing strategy leads to increased revenue, well below the regional average of 41%.

The report suggests that low adoption of essential tools like customer relationship management (CRM) platforms may be hindering effective tracking of marketing outcomes. Only 41% of Singaporean companies using digital marketing utilise CRM tools, the lowest rate among the surveyed countries.

Furthermore, beyond the low tool adoption, the survey found that 24% of Singaporean companies using digital marketing lack confidence in their team’s ability to effectively use these tools. Additionally, 49% believe their strategies failed to meet organisational goals in 2023, the highest rates among surveyed countries, indicating a potential skills gap in Singapore’s marketing sector.

Matt Tindale, head of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions for APAC, stated, “In Singapore, with the pace at which technology is advancing, there is an opportunity for marketers to enhance their skills. Upskilling and reskilling will not only help professionals adapt to changes but leverage new technology for increased productivity and enhanced outcomes. Findings from the survey indicate that while the majority of local companies are focusing on brand awareness, the real challenge is converting that awareness into actionable growth.”

“With the integration of AI into digital marketing strategies, as indicated by 60% of companies in our survey, Singapore is on the brink of a transformative era in digital marketing. Success requires the use of effective measurement frameworks and tools to support data-driven decisions, which are essential for maximising ROI. One example is LinkedIn’s Revenue Attribution Report, which connects CRM data to information from marketing touchpoints across the customer journey. These can help marketers better demonstrate the impact of their LinkedIn campaigns on key metrics such as pipeline generated, deal cycles, and revenue, ultimately helping them to make better business decisions,” Tindale added. 

Meanwhile, when assessing digital marketing impact, over half (52%) of Singaporean respondents prioritise brand awareness, in contrast to the regional preference for sales or revenue as the key success metric.

This trend towards digital marketing is on track to continue in 2024. According to the survey, digital marketing investments are set to continue in 2024, with over a third (35%) of Singaporean companies spending S$10,000 or more monthly. Most allocate 21% to 40% of their marketing budgets to digital channels. Notably, more than a third plan to maintain their current investment levels in 2024, the highest proportion among surveyed countries.

The survey also found that among Singaporean companies with digital marketing strategies, 62% consider social media the most crucial channel, followed by content marketing (50%) and search engine marketing (49%). Nearly half (42%) also rank social media among their top three critical channels for digital marketing activities. 

The dominance of social media in digital marketing is evident in budget allocation and tool usage. In Singapore, the survey found that social media marketing commands 23% of marketing budgets, and social media management platforms are the most widely used tools, employed by over 51% of respondents.

Kat Warboys, senior marketing director for APAC at HubSpot, said, “Social selling and commerce are becoming increasingly popular in Singapore, offering a highly effective platform for brands to reach, target, and engage on a personal level with their audience. Despite the growing popularity of social media platforms, brands should avoid being over-reliant on a single channel.”

Warboys continued, “More than half of global customers today leverage anywhere between three and five different channels throughout their buying journey. Success will increasingly be contingent on the ability of brands to establish a presence on the channels their customers and prospects reside on and to leverage CRM platforms to accurately measure the impact of their marketing efforts. This will be essential to actively engage and deliver frictionless experiences to audiences regardless of channel.” 

In addition to social media management platforms, Singaporean companies widely use CRM platforms (41%) and email marketing solutions (37%). Integrating these tools with a solid marketing strategy helps brands engage customers across various channels and consolidate data for better measurement and improved customer experiences.

Warboys added, “As the popularity of digital channels explode, the key to success will lie in ensuring customer data doesn’t reside in siloes across multiple platforms. Solutions could include the use of Conversion APIs that enables brands to accurately track and measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts on social media platforms. As a server-side tracking option, Conversion APIs can still deliver observable data that would otherwise have been restricted by privacy controls, something marketers need to consider as third-party cookies are phased out.”

“By adopting CRM solutions that can seamlessly integrate with such tools, marketers will be better positioned to make the most of information gathered throughout the customer journey. This unfettered information flow can empower marketers with the necessary insights to drive more targeted campaigns, automatically follow up on leads generated from social media, and clearly track ROI of every ad campaign,” she concluded.

Australia – A recent study conducted by global research and advisory firm Forrester Research notes that content management system (CMS) company Storyblok was able to provide its customers with high return on investment (ROI) once they modernise their content operation. 

The ROI was recorded as high as 582%, over a three-year period and paid for itself in less than six months.

According to the research, the characteristics and outcomes of Storyblok’s clients were combined in a composite organisation that is industry-agnostic with at least 5,000 employees, composed of 250 developers and 250 content creators, and annual revenue of $800 million.

It also noted that before investing in Storyblok’s CMS, the interviewee’s organisations were using a mix of traditional CMSs or a custom built monolithic environment which required a lot of maintenance. The overall time to make updates to customer-facing content on any channel took far too long to keep up with the constant flood of content changes.

For Dominik Angerer, co-founder and CEO of Storyblok, their system’s capabilities around a composable architecture, visual editing, collaboration, workflows, and omnichannel publishing allows customers to make creating and managing content more enjoyable for all teams, plus allowing audiences to enjoy better digital experiences.

He also added that the fact that this modern approach to content management also enabled cost savings and business benefits shows that now is the time for businesses to future-proof their content operations.

“The amazing customer ratings and stories we have heard have always been a great indicator that businesses get a significant return on investment from managing their content with Storyblok. At a time when more businesses are scrutinising traditional CMS platforms and exploring how a composable, headless CMS setup helps them with content operations and creating content at scale, we believe this Forrester study proves that Storyblok is a smart CMS investment,” he said.

Singapore – GrowthOps, an APAC-based growth and technology consultancy, has announced a partnership with growth management platform Insider to boost e-commerce multi-channel personalized offering for clients seeking to improve their return of investment (ROI).

The partnership will enable GrowthOps’ multidisciplinary teams to leverage Insider’s AI-powered growth management platform, giving e-commerce clients a deep and holistic understanding of their online audiences, across different channels and platforms.

This, in turn, allows clients to be able to anticipate audience behavior and deliver personalized online experiences for their customers, addressing their needs more fully, while reducing the cost of customer acquisition, activation and retention.

For David Isaac, Chief Growth Officer at GrowthOps, the needs of top-quartile CMO and CPOs have become increasingly complex, with their roles expanding to include growth and technology. He added that competitive businesses need a sustainable solution that de-risks innovation for product-led growth.

“Together, we will enable our C-suite clients to deliver compelling customer experiences by integrating customer behavior and engagement data from product, marketing, and technology platforms, such as Insider. GrowthOps is built from the ground-up to support APAC businesses to lead in their category with new digital platforms, across more channels,” Isaac said.

Meanwhile, Patrick Steinbrenner, Managing Director for APAC at Insider, commented, “GrowthOps’ expertise as a growth consultancy enables clients to scale with enterprise-grade execution and support. Combined with Insider’s AI-powered platform capabilities, they will take their targeted marketing to the next level, enhanced with precision and personalization.”

The unique combination delivers relevant, memorable, and loyalty-inducing customer experiences, enabling CMOs and C-suite professionals to meet ever-changing customer demands. GrowthOps maintains multidisciplinary teams in-house to deliver the scale, synergy, and agility clients need to perform at the top of their industries.

With marketing budgets being cut because of the coronavirus pandemic and an uptick in consumers shifting to online purchases, SEO – a cost-effective, long-term results method of getting your message, products, and services out there – matters more than ever.

But if you think traffic is all your SEO strategy should deliver, then you’re underutilizing it. Set up correctly, SEO can become your most efficient digital marketing channel in 2021. It can be leveraged to achieve your most important business goals, including increased revenue, improved brand sentiment, a bigger market share, and higher marketing ROI.

Working in healthcare? Financial services? Manufacturing? Don’t click away just yet. SEO is no longer just for big-name retailers. For organizations in digitally-immature sectors, SEO can help them stand out and move into the lead via a greater digital reach, improved brand perception, and more highly-qualified leads. Even if your organization is not investing in its discoverability online, you can bet your competitors will be. And with the average click rate for the top position on Google getting nearly 30% of all clicks, this is not a race you can afford to lose.

In short, 2021 is the year that SEO should be on everyone’s agenda. Read on to discover how to prepare for SEO success in 2021.

1. SEO requires a more holistic approach

Many organizations are waking up to the fact that when it comes to their SEO strategy, not everyone is on the same page. The key point of contention? Who in the organization actually owns this business-critical function. Some elements are managed by the IT department, some by web teams, while other parts fall under marketing’s remit.

Global enterprises with dispersed workforces are most at risk, but even smaller organizations can fall into this trap. For example, a member of the marketing team might identify a good SEO opportunity for their organization’s website but be unable to implement it because responsibility for SEO lies with the web development team. An analytics expert might spot some intriguing content gaps that your organization could plug and reap the traffic rewards from, but be unable to draft compelling, high-quality content for that purpose without help from the content team. Especially in larger organizations, it’s generally not as simple as shooting across a quick email to get an update made.  

It’s clear that coming out of 2020, many organizations are still struggling to unite key SEO stakeholders behind an organic search strategy that positively impacts wider business outcomes. With so many players – and siloes – involved, SEO strategies risk becoming confused, resource-intensive, and at worst, ineffective.

What you need to do ahead of 2021. This siloed approach to SEO will never deliver the results your organization needs. Rather than an unorganized mix of employees who occasionally optimize your site for certain SEO elements – perhaps on an ad hoc basis – a proactive, cross-functional SEO team with clear SEO roles, responsibilities, and processes must be carved out. The more closely key SEO stakeholders work together, the more likely it is they will have the information and resources they need to run a highly-effective SEO strategy.

Start by identifying who should be part of your cross-functional team. This list should include anyone who works with your website in a way that influences or impacts SEO. Though this list will look different for every organization it might include:

  • SEO specialists 
  • PPC specialists 
  • Content writers and strategists
  • Marketers
  • Web developers
  • Analytics specialists 
  • Sales
  • IT
  • PR

If your organization outsources its marketing or SEO efforts, you should also list any external vendors you’re using.

Tip: Transparency, clear task allocation, and status updates are essential for any SEO strategy to succeed. Invite all your key stakeholders to use real-time project management software or a specialized SEO dashboard to effortlessly stay on top of what’s completed, what still needs to be done, by who, and when.

Once you have defined your 2021 SEO taskforce, it’s time to get them all on the same page and working towards your broader business goals. Which brings us to trend number two.

2. SEO reporting needs to prove ROI

It’s not enough to claim that organic search ‘drives traffic’ to your website anymore – SEO cannot operate separately from your business goals. To prove that SEO positively impacts your bottom line and get C-level buy-in and funding for your organic search initiatives (especially in a time when marketing budgets are under scrutiny), you organization needs to definitively link SEO to producing a competitive advantage online.  

The best way to do this is with data. Organizations need access to robust SEO reporting to make their case, especially when it comes to presenting organic search performance to the C-suite. While they may not have time to dive into the minutiae of every SEO campaign, it’s vital that decision makers are able to quickly and easily understand how the company’s SEO strategy impacts top-line company targets: revenue, brand recognition, and share of voice. With organizations regularly relying on multiple tools, including web analytics platforms, content optimization tools, keyword finders, broken link crawlers, and so on – with diverging and complex data – to report on their SEO activity, it can be challenging for decision makers to get a clear, cohesive picture of how SEO delivers more than just extra clicks.  

“It’s very common that the CMOs we speak to get SEO reports that have traffic increases, position increases, and that have click-through rate improvement, which are all great metrics for marketers, but it doesn’t speak to the bottom line or how it’s impacting goals for their business,” says Diane Kulseth, Senior SEO Consultant at Siteimprove.

What you need to do ahead of 2021. SEO stakeholders across an organization should prioritize working with a ‘single source of truth’ to move their SEO campaigns forward with confidence. That typically means working from a single, comprehensive SEO platform. Platforms built around the specific needs of enterprise organizations, like Siteimprove SEO, are useful for keeping track of all the moving parts of your SEO strategy across disparate teams – but that’s not all. Their intuitive dashboard overviews and metrics also help decision makers to effortlessly connect the SEO dots between content, traffic, and ROI.

3. The user experience is about to matter a lot more

Anyone who works with websites know that Google and other search engines constantly review and revise the algorithms that determine search engine result pages rankings. In 2021, this will reach a whole new level with the rolling out of Google’s new user-centric Core Web Vitals.

This algorithm change will officially make the user experience a major ranking signal for websites. Normally, it only provides limited transparency into how its algorithms operate, but in this case, Google has published extensive new guidance on how to measure page experience from the user’s perspective, including a supporting set of metrics that can be used to benchmark websites.

What you need to do ahead of 2021. Organizations need to prepare for this change now by evaluating their existing page performance and making the adjustments required for their content to rank according to the new algorithm. Luckily, good SEO and a positive user experience tend to go hand-in-hand. Examples of the intersectionality between SEO and the user experience include:

  • Fast page-loading times
  • Mobile-friendly content
  • Providing a secure visitor page experience
  • Improving web page usability

4. PPC and SEO must work together

While marketing and advertising spend is shrinking in the current environment – a trend that is likely to continue into 2021, organic search remains a cost-effective way to fill the gap. After all, you don’t need to pay every time someone clicks on your organic content, but you do pay for clicks with PPC – and depending on your chosen keywords, that can be costly. The moment you stop paying for ads, your traffic will dry up, whereas the benefits of well-ranking organic search results can last for years. Even more persuasively, good SEO can actually improve your PPC results – helping you get more value out of your paid search campaigns by identifying and eliminating inefficiencies and wasted spend. Let’s find out how.

Tip: SEO results can be harder to quantify than those from PPC and undoubtedly take longer to show ROI. So, it’s important that your SEO and paid search teams work together closely to produce a mix of quick search wins and long-term results. This should be straightforward if you’ve assigned roles and responsibilities across a cross-functional SEO team as described in step one.

What you need to do ahead of 2021. Repurpose the data from your existing PPC and SEO campaigns to plug the budget gaps in your paid search strategy. If you have a keyphrase that’s performing particularly well in a PPC campaign, you should consider using that same keyphrase in your SEO campaign to try to dominate the organic search results as well. This is a good way of growing brand awareness and trust, since users will see your brand twice in their search results. If they don’t click on your ads, the presence of your brand name at the top of the search results page will help position your organization top-of-mind.

When your search strategy is suffering from keyword overlaps, for instance, when you’ve allocated PPC spend to phrases where you’re already ranking well organically, it makes sense to lessen your spend in that area and redistribute your budget, ideally to areas where your organic search campaigns are performing poorly. This approach is even more compelling when you know that organic desktop listings still produce 20 x more clicks than PPC ads.  

Enterprise SEO tools help you organize for success   

As much as SEO is increasingly indispensable, it’s set to become even more challenging for organizations to execute successfully. In 2021, SEO teams will be expected to create larger numbers of high-quality content, keep up with search engine algorithm changes, conduct keyword research, perform technical site audits, and present clear evidence of ROI for their SEO campaigns – not to mention managing day-to-day SEO tasks – all on an even tighter budget with fewer resources, to socially-distanced, dispersed stakeholders. It’s going to be a really tough job.

Fortunately, there’s a simpler way to automate workflows, unite stakeholders, and prepare your organization for SEO success in 2021: investing in an enterprise SEO tool. Whether your organization manages its SEO in-house or partners with an agency, using an enterprise SEO solution will help you get more from your SEO campaigns by adding helpful automation, insights, and reporting capabilities into the mix. Remember, whatever initial investment an SEO tool requires in terms of budget and onboarding, it will swiftly make up for in productivity gains. According to Forrester’s ROI of SEO report, marketers that adopt an SEO platform report an average reduction of 28 hours per month spent on key SEO tasks. That’s 28 hours that can be better spent on formulating more successful SEO plans! Yet further research reveals that just one in three organizations are currently using one.

The author is Georgia James, content writer for Siteimprove. Siteimprove is a SaaS solution that helps organizations achieve their digital potential by empowering teams with actionable insights to deliver a superior website experience and drive growth.

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Sydney, Australia – About 91% of marketers in Australia and New Zealand are prioritizing the use of marketing data to improve ROI and marketing efficiency, said a joint study by marketing intelligence platform Salesforce Datorama and marketing research agency The Leading Edge.

The study examined 285 marketers across ANZ on how they integrate marketing data to measure impact and business growth, and almost all of the respondents – 93% – have shifted their priorities to focus on marketing-led growth.

“Marketers are seeing their role evolve as they are responsible for propelling business-wide outcomes. As they become increasingly accountable for operationalizing growth mandates across the entire organization, they need to embrace a data-driven culture and modernize their approach to marketing measurement,” said Jay Wilder, senior director of product marketing at Salesforce Datorama.

The study also showed the biggest barriers that marketers face in driving growth around data, where data mismanagement, lack of a unified view of performance, and lack of real-time insights came out as the top three.

Although 86% of ANZ marketers see the importance of a complete view of cross-channel marketing, they face a number of roadblocks when it comes to integrating their data for that holistic view. According to the study, 69% of marketers still integrate data manually to an extent with the same percentage of marketers revealing that they spend a week or more on harmonizing data from disparate channels.

Aside from such challenges, the study revealed that there is room for improvement when it comes to data analysis and optimization, as 73% of marketers do not have access to real-time insights. 

Furthermore, nearly half, or 47% of marketers, experience misalignment across teams on measurement, with reporting sharing and collaborating on data analysis remaining a challenge for 36%. 

Marketers are making progress as they move forward in their data journey and shift priorities to focus on business growth. The study showed that there 61% of marketers receive growing support from senior leaders for a stronger uptake of data-driven marketing. Meanwhile, 62% are in firms that have been making investments in marketing analytics technology, while the same percentage have been achieving alignment on the KPIs that matter the most.

“A successful growth marketing strategy requires the strategic alignment of people, processes, and technologies. Bringing together an understanding of key growth priorities and challenges, leadership support, investment, and an aligned measurement strategy will drive ANZ,” said Wilder.