What are the digital marketing challenges that business owners face? Digital marketing (DM) has become the backbone of business today, and there’s no denial of it. Continents across the globe are reinforcing their resources to thrive in the modern digital marketing arena.
Singapore, being one of the growing marketing hubs in the global market, is being faced with the need for talented digital marketers more than ever.
Over four million Singaporean consumers are converting into online shoppers, which calls for a robust digital marketing platform to handle such a massive virtual market.
This, in turn, is increasing business and job opportunities in Singapore while posing considerable challenges.
Today, we’re going to describe to you the top nine digital marketing challenges in Singapore’s digital marketing that experts are trying to address and resolve.
Top nine digital marketing challenges
1. Traffic and Leads Generation
In digital marketing, generating optimum traffic and leads is a never-ending demand.
- Generating more traffic indicates that more potential customers are checking the products and services on a website and other online platforms.
- Generating leads ensures that the customers are going to buy those products and services.
Simply, it’s about growing sales through online platforms while striving to sustain the competitive market.
It’s such a hard job that even digital marketing agencies sometimes struggle with it. Today, numerous business and social media apps have become the touchpoints for lead and traffic generation.
This makes marketers wonder which app services to go with for comprehensive and fruitful promotion of their products and services.
However, the best digital marketing agency in Singapore can bring you results no matter how difficult or complex the job gets.
2. Digital Marketing Budget
Arranging enough investment for running a digital marketing business is a globally recognized challenge. Naturally, Singapore isn’t beyond this hardship.
In Singapore, small and medium businesses are facing problems in acquiring the right budget for their DM processes. These businesses are struggling to come up with accurate marketing expenses, which hold them back from expanding.
One of the most obvious reasons behind not being able to tackle the DM budget is inaccurate ROI (return on investment) through marketing activities.
Since other businesses sponsor most big-budget marketing campaigns, there remains an obligation for profit return. Singaporean digital marketers are struggling in this sector may be due to not focusing on inbound marketing strategies.
Inbound marketing is profitable in the long run, which they should pay attention to and upskill themselves in this aspect.
3. Tracking Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI is what we’ve touched on in the earlier section, which Singapore marketers are struggling to track down. It’s true that mastering accuracy in ROI is tough luck, and many companies in the U.S., UK, Australia, etc., are also trying hard to overcome this challenge.
ROI or return on investment makes sure your products and services are reaching out to the right audience while they’re getting the right message about it. If this is not the case, your ROI isn’t looking promising, which might upset the investors.
If the investors aren’t satisfied with the return on the invested marketing campaigns, they won’t make any further or larger investments. Hence, the company’s marketing projects may suddenly come to a standstill.
They must keep in mind that comprehensive ROI also helps in budgeting optimized digital marketing campaigns, advertisements, events, training, etc.
4. Skill Development of Marketing Team
Currently, the Singapore market is evolving through the challenge of training their potential manpower on digital marketing. This challenge involves training on market changes, marketing concepts, upgraded tools, budgets, etc.
Apart from these, bringing out the full potential of human resources is also a pressing matter for digital marketing organizations in Singapore. Sometimes, employers and managers are short of a marketing team of fully trained and experienced people. However, there are quite a few digital marketing agencies in Singapore, which ensure a consummate digital marketing experience to swiftly deliver your digital marketing tasks with the utmost expertise and no-error assurance.
While that’s true, it’s also necessary to utilize those few people while educating them to pull off any ambitious marketing campaign at hand. What these organizations need to implement is a standard of ‘zero mistake tolerance’ within their teams to achieve their goals with perfection.
If budgeting is a rock-solid challenge for marketers in Singapore, lacking skilled people is a bigger issue, given that a fat budget won’t help run the show for a long time in the market without a skilled workforce.
5. Promoting to Global Audience
Within Asian territories, promoting products and services through websites and social media might be easier for Singapore digital marketers. However, when it’s time to enter the international market, things are trickier.
Singapore marketers consider the global audience a substantial challenge where promotional activities become difficult due to various barriers. These include cultural background, lifestyle, language, buyer persona, and so on.
The Singapore market clearly identifies these problems, and it’s something they must learn to get away with soon. Otherwise, other countries might take over and saturate the market with similar products and services before they set foot there.
6. Analytics of Marketing Campaign
Data analytics helps a business know the potential areas of business expansion. The more comprehensive the data is, the easier it is for marketers to plan effective campaigns for it.
Various stats and infographics (pie charts, Gantt charts, bars, etc.) in analytics can help businesses know things about customers, including purchase power, device preference, social media engagement, geographic & demographic data, etc.
In Singapore’s case, the scenario is rapidly changing in terms of customer origins. We’re seeing a crossover between Singaporean and international customers. This means the locals are opting for global online shopping, whereas international customers are taking an interest in the Singapore market.
This poses a very intricate challenge for the Singapore digital market as they must use analytics to determine genuine customers from both market dimensions.
Besides, they must allocate appropriate tools and budgets to tackle the prospect of an online shopping spree in the coming years through effective digital marketing strategies.
7. Adapting to Cutting-Edge Technologies
Adapting to cutting-edge technologies is vital for any business that’s trying to ace digital marketing. There are endless tools to feed your DM data requirements, like SEO, website crawling, data mining, email marketing, real-time social media data, and many more.
Singapore is currently encountering the hurdle of choosing the right technology to meet such data-driven requirements. Encouragingly, they’re striving for the right feedback about using the appropriate tech services to up their game in the digital market.
The feedback they’re currently getting from various sources is inconsistent and, in most cases, arbitrary. Although there are myriad recommendations on tech gadgets and software, nonetheless, they hardly resonate with the standard requirements of technological advancement.
8. Preferring Real-Time Marketing
Customers in Singapore who were buying from stores and shopping malls earlier are now obsessed with shopping online. This fast transformation of purchasing nature has compelled Singaporean marketers to resort to real-time marketing.
Due to this new type of demand at hand, marketers are eyeing having an integrated marketing system that will satisfy the customer needs as a whole, with online customership in the majority.
In doing so, the Singaporean digital market will require more viable payment gateways, reliable products, and services, agile cyber security, customer awareness, etc.
Apparently, they’ll need to settle these issues quickly, so they can establish a reliable digital market for the natives as well as international buyers.
9. Procuring Governmental Support
Any promising business needs financial and infrastructural support from investors and government authorities. This type of support can push the business further down the road.
However, when it comes to the complex world of the internet, networking, data analytics, and virtual marketing, government support becomes a crucial part of the ongoing process.
In Singapore, small and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) are pleading with their government to receive various support to uplift the digital marketing industry.
The main support areas the marketers are reckoning are:
- Finance
- Digitalization Infrastructure
- Technical support in business development through expert consultancy
The SMEs are serious about the above support since they’ve realized how digitalization can help their businesses grow and succeed.
In relation to that demand, the Singaporean government has recently introduced PSG (Productivity Solutions Grant) with up to 70% grants for SMEs. While this is hopeful, however, they need full-fledged support in the other areas to widen their market too.
Final Thoughts
These top major digital marketing challenges often faces by current business owners. It’s seen in recent progressive reports that more digital marketing organizations are making their way into the competition every day. While this is, by and large, the current picture, it’s no wonder that both private and public sectors in Singapore are shouldering such a massive challenge.
The nine challenges of digital marketing in Singapore that we’ve shared above are in every way interconnected. The budget, ROI, analytics, global audience, etc., impact each other while working on any one of them.
Lastly, since a majority of businesses are racing toward digital transformation, the Singaporean government and investors should provide timely support.
I’m a tech enthusiast, entrepreneur, digital marketer and professional blogger equipped with skills in Digital Marketing, SEO, SEM, SMM, and lead generation. My objective is to simplify technology for you through detailed guides and reviews. I discovered WordPress while setting up my first business site and instantly became enamored. When not crafting websites, making content, or helping clients enhance their online ventures, I usually take care of my health and spend time with family, and explore the world. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or read my complete biography.