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As more and more of the world’s commerce pivots online, digital marketing is increasingly encompassing “marketing.”
If you’re mostly selling your products/services on social media and are looking to expand, or even if you’re an established brand striving to solidify your online presence, we’ve done the leg work so you can make an intelligent decision on which digital marketing agency fits your goals and ambitions perfectly.
Read up on our shortlist of some of the best digital marketing firms in the country and learn about the plethora of services that can skyrocket your business.
Best Digital Marketing Agencies & Service Providers in the Philippines
Below are some of the Philippines’ world-class digital marketing consultants & companies that we (at Grit PH) have closely worked with in the past – and have seen tremendous results.
Avaris IO
Disclosure: Grit PH is powered by Avaris IO.
Specialization: Technical SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and Digital PR & Link Building.
Avaris IO has established itself as one of the most trusted SEO brands in the Philippines. Led by its CTO, Jason Acidre, a highly-respected name in the international SEO realm, the company has been known for intelligent yet simplified digital marketing strategies with a heightened focus on brand building and ROI.
They’ve been offering their expertise across the globe since 2011 and have worked with several Fortune/Inc. 500 companies as well as some of the highest-valued startups in the world.
Sytian Productions
Specialization: Web Design & Development, App Development, UX, and Ecommerce.
This company has been offering professional web design services here and abroad for over 15 years. As of January 2021, they’ve worked on a total of 1,353 projects for brands that include Cinderella, Jetti Petroleum, Inc., Cherry Mobile, and Sonya’s Garden.
Apart from website design and development, they also offer mobile app development and web design outsourcing. Get same-day website quotation by filling out their form, or contact them at (632) 7507-8065 / (0917) 632-6693.
Growth Rocket
Specialization: Digital Marketing, SEO, Web Development, Digital Advertising, Email Marketing, and Content Marketing
Growth Rocket is made up of a team of digital marketers, product managers, designers, and developers coming together to create high-impact, meaningful e-commerce experiences. This boutique digital agency is based in Los Angeles with a home in Manila.
Their suite of digital marketing services includes search engine management, content marketing, web development, paid advertising, CRM, and email marketing, among others.
Cell Conversion
Specialization: PPC, Display Advertising, Social Media Advertising, and Conversion Optimization
Cell Conversion is a full-service pay-per-click management services company based in the Philippines. They have a combined 20 years of experience managing Google Adwords, Bing, Facebook Ads, and other pay-per-click networks across the globe.
They also provide White Label PPC Management services for digital marketing agencies looking to outsource building, managing, and training an in-house paid search marketing team. Other services include Google Shopping, remarketing, display advertising, conversion optimization, and analytics and reporting.
What is Digital Marketing?
At its core, digital marketing pertains to any marketing initiative that utilizes online media and technologies to strategically guide consumers down the sales funnel. To achieve this, digital marketers distribute brand messages and content through platforms and communication channels such as search engines, social media, email, applications, and websites.
A well-thought-out digital marketing strategy is able to establish and track the role of each platform and channel, as well as different connected devices (phones, laptops, tablets, Internet of Things, etc.) in reaching their goals.
It’s no surprise that with 4.4 billion people using the internet, digital marketing has surpassed traditional marketing spend in 2019.
And with an increasing number of people opting to interact with businesses via online channels1, this trend only looks to grow as more emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning continue to develop.
Types of Digital Marketing Services
As you can imagine, the realm of digital marketing can be an intricate one, with different aspects intertwined to reach common goals. Below are some of the most prominent services businesses utilize to achieve those goals.
Technical SEO
In its most basic sense, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing websites and their pages to increase the quantity and quality of traffic resulting from a search engine’s organic results.
So essentially, if your website adopts good SEO practices when people from your area you service look for products and services that you provide, you should appear at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).
Ahrefs has an excellent analogy to help you understand how search engines like Google & YouTube work2. It likens search engines to libraries for the internet. Basically, instead of being a repository for books, they store copies of web pages. So when you type something in the search box, it looks through all the pages in its index as it looks to return the most relevant results.
It accomplishes this by using algorithms that factor in things like the words used in the query, relevance, and usability of web pages, along with the users’ information such as location and search history. And because these ranking factors tend to change periodically, SEO professionals who adjust to the changes accordingly, achieve better results.
When you’re able to show search engines that your content is the best result for what users are looking for, you’re ranked higher on the SERPs.
Content Marketing
To start, let’s touch on what content refers to in this regard – this refers to the media you use to communicate messages about your products and services to your target audience.
This includes things like blog and social media posts, vlogs and other videos, podcasts, white papers, image-based content, and other media that offer information and brand messaging.
The ultimate goal of which is to convince consumers about the value of your products and services to the point that they want to become your customers.
Essentially, content marketers create, curate, and distribute quality content (usually defined as relevant, accurate, and optimized for search) to cater to what your audience wants. Among the benefits of content marketing is the ability to:
- Attract a defined target audience
- Inform them about the business and its products
- Engage and educate
- Generate leads
- Turn the audience into customers, and ultimately, fans and advocates
Social Media Marketing
There are over 4.48 billion social media users globally3, making it an incredibly valuable space for digital marketers. And that’s before considering that these users spend on average two hours and 25 minutes a day on different social media platforms.
As such, social media marketing is considered one of the most important arms of digital marketing. So why exactly is this? Let’s start with the many things it can do for you:
- Community/relationship building, while helping entice discussion
- Brand awareness and discovery (especially if you’re using social ads)
- Source of brand news and information
- Increase site traffic through referral clicks
- Drive leads and sales
- Establish expertise in your field while providing value to your audience with relevant and engaging posts
If you’ve used any of the myriads of social platforms available, you understand how brands have used it to reach your audience. Facebook’s network, for example, has some aggressive tracking and targeting practices that span most of the internet.
How many times have you searched for something (either on search engines or within other apps) and come across the same (or something similar) thing on your feeds?
This practice allows brands you’ve never even heard of reach highly qualified leads – those that have already expressed interest in their products. While you might have the mental fortitude to stray away from being politically swayed by social media, consumerism is much tougher to resist when it’s always displayed in front of you.
Beyond that, and as was originally designed to, social media is an excellent space to engage consumers.
People have become so acclimatized to communicating with businesses through social media that it’s become their preferred communication channel. It’s also made it easier to discuss shared interests with kindred spirits, making it a great source for organic discussions.
These, among many other possibilities, are offered by social media marketing, making it integral to any business’ marketing strategy.
Digital PR and Link Building
Essentially, digital PR is used to earn backlinks to support your SEO strategy. To do this, you need to create linkable assets (also called link baits) and promote these to relevant media and publications in order to encourage them to write about your content and link to it.
As pointed out by Semrush, it’s important to note that digital PR success is reliant on coming up with ideas that journalists and publishers want to cover whilst also creating assets that get linked to as a way to add editorial value to an article.
To sum it up, here are the benefits of digital PR and link building:
- Ability to earn authority links from respected publications
- Competitive advantage with links that can’t be replicated by your competitors
- Earn links that get clicked and drive referral traffic
- Catch the eyes of your target audience, thereby building brand awareness
- Establish yourself as an industry expert, helping build trust
- Drive social engagement
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that’s purely based on sending emails and developing relationships with prospects and customers. An effective email marketing strategy converts prospects into customers and turns first-time buyers into recurring customers.
So after pointing out the benefits of social media marketing, you might ask, why email? While it may seem like an outdated communication channel to some, the numbers tell a different story.
At least 99% of consumers check their email on a daily basis4. According to OptinMonster, that can’t be said of any other communication channel. Additionally, email converts better, with consumers who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than those who do not receive email offers.
As well, email marketing has an ROI of 4,400%. So while channels like Facebook may have more bells and whistles, the average order value of an email is at least three times higher than that of social media.
Copywriting
In its most basic sense, copywriting in digital marketing hasn’t changed much from its original definition of being the activity of writing the text of advertisements or publicity material.
It’s just that in the digital realm, instead of the written text on billboards and magazines, it’s the caption of the Facebook ad, the text on the landing page, or the description of a YouTube video.
It’s critical not to overlook this aspect of digital marketing because while people like to say that nobody likes to read anymore, the copy still plays a big role in persuading people to click on a link, subscribe to services, or buy products.
Paid Advertising (search, display, & social)
There are plenty of applications for these types of advertising, but we’ll only be covering the major ones to give you the gist of how it works and how it can benefit your business.
Pay Per Click is a form of paid digital advertising placed on social media platforms, search engines, and virtually any platform that offers it. The great thing about these ads is that they can be targeted to groups of users based on things like demographics, interests, and other data gathered by the platform.
These ads appear in a user’s feed, where advertisers can pay through two bid strategies: CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions). The goal of these ads is to lead users who click to the advertiser’s website or app where they can complete a valuable action like subscribing to a service or purchasing a product.
So if you’ve ever been freaked out by how Facebook can read your mind, it’s not that profound as that. Everything you do on their platform (and really, across the internet) provides them with valuable data they can use to target users. As a business, this is great for expanding the reach and getting qualified leads.
Another good thing about these ads is that there are plenty of advertising formats you can choose from (responsive text ads, video ads, image ads, and many others).
On search, every time there is an ad spot on a SERP (search engine result page), an auction takes place for the keyword instantaneously. Factors such as bid amount and quality of the ad decide who will appear in the top position.
These auctions begin when someone searches for something on a search engine, so with the billions of searches happening every second, you can just imagine the potential in this practice.
Web Design & Development
After you’ve put a lot of effort into leveraging the digital marketing strategies, you wouldn’t want to lose potential customers by having a poorly designed website.
Once you get their foot through the door, you need to be able to communicate what you’re all about and what value you can add to their lives. This means that visitors need to be able to find what they’re looking for as easily as possible.
To understand this concept better, let’s take a look at the key components of an effective web design.
UX
This mainly boils down to creating a user-friendly experience. So if visitors find it hard to find what they’re looking for, you need to improve your navigation. And while it may be tempting to use flashy imagery, it could lead to slow loading times, which then lead to frustration and higher bounce rates (amount of visitors leaving after they get to a site).
Additionally, your website should consider the entire UX from start to finish (from where they came from before they found your site, to the landing pages, to whatever it is they choose to do while on your website.
Consistent branding
Your websites should look and feel like all your other communication channels. From your social pages and emails to your ads and content – your website should feel just as familiar in order to build trust.
These also include visual elements like logo, colors, typography, imagery, and overall messaging and tone.
Learn More: Branding Tips: How to Develop a Strong Brand Identity for your Business
Conversion rate optimization
CRO is the number of visitors who perform the desired action. This could be subscribing to your email and services, downloading content, or purchasing a product. An effective web design has a clean layout, appropriately placed text, and CTAs, which help improve conversion rates, and ultimately boost sales.
Analytics
Digital marketing analytics is the translation of customer behavior into actionable business data5. With the breadth of available analytics tools, marketers can dive deep into all the online channels potential customers might interact with and identify new revenue opportunities and improve existing campaigns.
When you arm your business with a creative and fluid data-driven foundation, you’re able to conceptualize profitable and scalable digital marketing strategies.
It’s important to note that each channel will have its respective metrics that you’ll need to keep track of and analyze. For example, when it comes to websites, you’ll be looking at things like:
- Traffic and where those visitors are coming from (search, social, referral links, etc.)
- Session – The series of activities taken by a visitor on your website. This includes things like page views, calls-to-action, and events.
- Bounce rate – The percentage of people who visited your site but didn’t take any action or look at any other pages.
For email, this includes:
- Open rate – The percentage of opened emails in proportion to the total number of emails sent.
- Opens by device – This shows you what device your subscribers are opening your emails with.
- Click-through rate – The percentage of total clicks on email links or CTAs.
It’s important to note that with each communication channel you’re going to track and measure, you don’t always need to look at every number. You need to have an understanding of which metrics you’ll use to measure your key performance indicators.
This is aligned with your marketing goals and objectives and helps you not only monitor performance but also improve it as you go along the way.
Mobile App Development
Not everyone will have the resources or even the need for their own app. But having one affords you the opportunity to be ever-present with your audience. This is mainly done with push notifications that allow you to constantly inform and remind customers about new products and services at any time.
And on a more comprehensive note, mobile apps are able to function on several levels. For example, apart from having quick access to your customers, you can simplify things like the checkout process, promote events, and provide easy access to support and information.
Mobile apps stand as a great way to consolidate your efforts into one channel with a one-time primary cost investment.
Ecommerce Development & Marketing
E-commerce marketing starts from the very moment your portal goes live6. From there, every email you send out and every social media button you add to your website factors into monetization.
As you might surmise, e-commerce marketing’s goal is to drive your target customers towards your website. To achieve this, you’ll need a combination of the above strategies.
By now, you probably have a good enough idea of how the different digital marketing strategies factor into a successful e-commerce venture. What you might not know about are the different e-commerce development services. For that, we’ve narrowed down the choices to the top three ecommerce platforms in the market.
WooCommerce
This open-sourced solution launched in 2011 allows a business to run an online store with all the functionality of WordPress as its plugin. And being open-source means that the business has total control over the customization and can create web pages however they please.
Additionally, a WordPress plugin means you’re equipped with universality over the most popular content management system (CMS).
You can sell virtually anything on WooCommerce – from physical products to digital downloads, and even web-based services. It is used by close to 2 million websites – a testament to its quality.
Shopify
This all-in-one e-commerce platform allows you to create an online store, manage your products, and handle orders within a single dashboard. The ease of use also features over 170 template options and the ability to create your own templates using Shopify’s liquid template engine feature.
Magento
This one’s for corporate-level businesses. With its top-level features, Magento is perfect for web developers and larger online stores. It includes third-party API (Application Programming Interface) integration and allows out-of-the-box functionality. It also offers extensive SEO features such as canonical tag management and sitemaps.
Additionally, it has an open-source version that’s capable enough to run an online store with high-level UI. It powers some 250,000 sites, with users that include Coca-Cola, Ford, and Budweiser.
Digital Marketing in the Philippines FAQs
As more and more people spend an increasing amount of time online, almost all types of businesses would benefit from digital marketing services. The more relevant question here is “what services does your business need?”
Even if you operate a neighborhood hardware store, for example, it would still be a huge benefit for you to have an informative social media page, which could then be listed by Google when people in your area search for “hardware store near me.”
And while online sellers, for example, might survive doing things on their own, should they wish to expand their venture, they’ll be needing to go beyond social media marketing to do so.
Larger businesses, in a similar vein, would need a combination of the digital marketing services discussed above in order to achieve, and even surpass, their goals.
As a business owner, there are plenty of things occupying your mind and grappling for your attention. So while you might learn a few things with the many available resources online, hiring experts to do what it is they do will almost certainly be better than the output of even the fastest learners.
For example, you might be able to set up your website with sound SEO practices. But with the SEO landscape being a constantly changing one, you might not notice that your website is no longer performing as it once did after a month or two.
Ultimately, hiring a digital marketing service provider will allow you to do what you do best, while also helping you get a step closer to your goals.
Depending on your project brief and how long you’re willing to carry on a campaign, starting rates range from P50,000 – P250,000 (US$1,000 – $5,000) per month. Meanwhile, more extensive campaigns could set you back P500,000+ (US$10,000) from the get-go.
It’s not easy choosing a provider. It’s even harder when you have limited resources. Here’s a quick guide to choosing the right one for you:
1. Identify your company’s marketing needs
This begins by identifying your goals. Do you want more people to find out about your business? Do you want to capture more qualified leads? Do you want to keep existing customers?
Once you’ve identified what it is you want to achieve, you can begin to narrow down your list of providers to choose from. This will also save you valuable resources, saving you from firms offering services you don’t really need.
2. Perform research
Perform due diligence when it comes to the digital marketing agencies on your list. Check out their past projects and client list. For example, if they boast of being an expert when it comes to SEO, do their clients rank high on SERPs?
Whenever possible, get in touch with their clients to find out if they were able to deliver on their promises. As well, ask around if there’s someone they highly recommend. You can even look at brands’ campaigns and find out who executed them.
Additionally, you need to be asking the right questions when interviewing agencies. Some of the more pertinent questions will be:
– Can I see some campaign examples?
– Who will be completing the work?
– How long do you keep clients on average? (The longer, the better)
– What results can you promise me?
– How will results and ROI be measured?
Digital marketing is a crucial part of how business is done today. Don’t scrimp on the research.
Ready to take the next step in growing your brand’s online footprint and revenue?
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Interested to know who the top digital marketing agencies are, then read this post. It is very informative. The post is also detailed but easy to understand. Definitely a must read.