In these days of rapid technological change and advancement, transforming businesses digitally comes with many advantages.
Some business owners may still think that digital transformation is an option instead of a necessity.
The fact is, growing your business online is an effective way to reach mass audiences, allowing more people to know and recognise your brand, especially young audiences.
Thye Hin Hoe Medical Store is a good example of digital transformation that allowed the business to successfully reach its young target audience and grow sales.
Before Digital Transformation
Thye Hin Hoe Medical Store is a traditional Chinese medicine store in Singapore with a 60-year of history.
It is located in a town where the population is mostly elderly.
This location caused the business to acquire a limited group of customers, and it was hard for the company to reach customers outside the town.
In order to expand their audience base and allow more young people to know about Chinese medicine, Thye Hin Hoe Medical Store decided to grow their business online by cooperating with students from Nanyang Technological University.
After Digital Transformation
Thye Hin Hoe Medical Store
The results after digital transformation have been positive.
The business has successfully reached young people and new potential customers outside of town because people can find Thye Hin Hoe Medical Store’s products online.
The online store not only sells products but also provides knowledge about Chinese medicine.
Information about Chinese medicine store and the company’s products is stated in great detail on the online store page.
It provides healthy food recipes, health tips, and videos showing how to cook a Thye Hin Hoe soup pack, which is good for your health.
Today, Thye Hin Hoe Medical Store still runs the physical store, but by expanding the business online, the store’s revenue has increased by approximately 10%.
This growth is strong evidence that digital transformation works well for businesses. It is an effective way to maximize your revenue and lower your costs.
SME DigitalFest Gives You the Solution!
Are you inspired by the success story of Thye Hin Hoe Medical Store?
Wish to be successful in digital transformation?
Join us at SME DigitalFest 2021 and learn all about ‘Leveraging Technology for Digitalization’.
This year, we are inviting speakers who have successfully employed digital transformation.
These speakers will share their digital transformation experiences without reservation, and you will walk away with knowledge and tips on how to utilize technology and online platforms to digitize your business.
Don’t miss out on SME DigitalFest, an interesting and informative event!
Register Now and get ready to transform your business digitally!
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an effective and long-term digital marketing strategy to attract consumers to your website.
SEO is constantly changing, and keeping up with the latest updates can be a challenge. However, it is still worth putting more effort into it instead of investing more in paid aids.
To achieve top-tier SEO performance, many metrics must be monitored, including traffic, backlinks, and social shares, just to name a few.
By referring to more SEO research and studies, I’m pleased to have summarised the latest search engine optimisation trends for you to anticipate for 2021 so that you can prepare an excellent SEO strategy that delivers results.
Here are the 10 SEO trends you should watch for in 2021.
A study conducted by Ahrefs stated that optimising search content resulted in a 677 per cent increase in organic traffic for one of its core landing pages in just six months. Search intent is all about ‘the why’ behind a search query. It is related to what the users want to learn, find, or buy.
Google aims to provide users with the most relevant results for their searches. Google’s success as a company is dependent on it succeeding in this endeavour.
Let’s look at Bing to see what happens when a search engine returns low-quality and irrelevant results. Bing is rarely used nowadays, which means that ad revenue is reduced.
Google tries so hard to provide relevant content to users based on their search. That is why we should focus on search intent in 2021 and continue with this practice.
Like content marketing specialist at Page One Power Andrew Dennis said, ‘SERP analysis will be an important practice not just in 2021, but moving forward as search intents change and Google continues to become more sophisticated to keep up’.
2. The EAT Concept
Google stated, once again, that content quality is critical for ranking success. But how can we define ‘good quality for Google? You can refer to the EAT principle: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
This principle was introduced by Google to help determine if a web page has useful quality content.
Expertise
If you offer a service or product that you have deep knowledge about, you could be classified as an expert in that field—especially if you demonstrate that your knowledge and support level is better than your competitor’s.
If you demonstrate that you have more expertise than others in the market, you’ll be picked out as an expert.
Authoritativeness
Authority or authoritativeness simply means that a person or website is trusted and reliable. When people search the internet, they’re looking for an authority who can provide them with answers they can trust and is the best person or channel to go to.
Google examines your brand, website, and content to see if it is not only expertly written content but also the leading authority or authoritative content available.
Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness is the measurement of your brand’s, website’s, or content’s credence. You can understand why Google will measure and has always measured trust in a website based on the backlinks it detects from other domains.
The higher the trust in the linked domain, the more trust it puts into the linked domain. But it also depends on the backlink quality. Bad backlinks may cause your trustworthiness to decrease. Therefore, it is important to ensure your content’s quality.
Three Ways to Ensure Quality Contents
Create Buyer Personas. They allow you to understand what kind of content your clients value.
Conduct Search Intent Research. When you research search intent, you can better understand the search trends and what customers have been looking for recently.
Use the information to create content that fits the format your users prefer.
In short, follow the EAT method when creating your content. Always back up your arguments with statistics, data, and facts and have an authoritative site link back to your website.
3. Long-Form Content Improves SERPs
According to the State of Content Marketing Report, long reads of 3,000 words or more receive three times more traffic and four times more shares than short reads. They also get 3.5 times more backlinks than articles that are 901 to 1,200 words.
Start focusing on long-form content to achieve higher search rankings. That said, your content must maintain its quality. The purpose is to draw users in with shareable information to keep them engaged.
Ensure your contents offer valuable information that allows people to continue reading and engaging with you. Tip sharing, guidelines for products or services, are data research are the best content categories to start with.
4. Mobile SEO is the Next Big Trend
According to CNBC, nearly 73% of internet users will access the internet solely via mobile devices by 2025. In 2019, Google rolled out mobile-first indexing, where the search engine takes the mobile version of a website as the priority to evaluate search rankings.
Check your mobile-friendly score now with Google’s free mobile-friendly test. If your score is below 50%, it is time to have a discussion with your web development team about optimising it.
Ensuring that your content or website performs well on mobile devices should also remain a priority because that is where most searches are conducted, said Jeff Riddall, VP of product and customer success at Mintent.
5. Featured Snippets are Becoming More Prominent
Featured snippets were introduced by Google in 2017. They are a sort of shortcut to gaining prominence on Google. You may have noticed a box at the top of SERPs above the actual results when you type some keywords into the Google search bar. That’s a snippet.
Featured snippets present a chunk of information, often in the form of Q&A, brief bullet-points, or a how-to guide. There are also rich snippets such as images, star-based reviews, product prices, and similar information.
To create snippets, you may focus on question-based queries and relevant keywords. You can use the Google search function Google Autocomplete as reference and inspiration.
Snippets are unlike structured data. Google only creates featured snippets for your website if your content is relevant, quality, and trustworthy. Scoring a featured snippet is the best way to get on that coveted first page of results and steal significant traffic from your competitors.
6. Core Web Vitals & Page Experience Optimisations
Google has announced Core Web Vitals will become page experience ranking signals in 2021 in an update combined with existing UX-related signals.
The “page experience” signals combine Core Web Vitals with the following signals:
Mobile Friendly
Safe Browsing
HTTPS
No Intrusive Interstitials
Websites and businesses must prioritise for them in order to avoid falling behind their competitors. Google is focusing more on mobile-friendliness as people today spend much and much time on mobile devices. These are cybersecurity essentials for websites to ensure cyber safety for their searchers.
You may ask how relevant are images with search engine optimisations. As mentioned earlier in the Core Vitals section, page loading speed is one of the factors.
What is Image SEO?
Image SEO is all about improving your site’s images to ensure your website ranks higher on Google Image Search and the overall visibility and optimisation of a web page are improved, especially on page speed.
Ensure Google can understand your site images better by including correctly naming files, adding and optimising alt text, reducing file sizes and more.
Google is still not able to read all types of images, even though they have improved significantly in recent years with the use of AI and machine learning.
That is the reason why ALT text is important to get Google to understand what the image is about. Optimising images also improves your web page speed. It is also one of the core factors of the Core Vitals concept.
8. Get more from Local SEO
Local SEO is becoming increasingly important, and local results are among the most relevant for users looking for a solution. As a result, businesses can now take advantage of and benefit from local SEO.
72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within 5 miles.
– Amy Bishop, Clix Marketing
51% of people want Location-Based Coupons when searching.
– Aaron Levy, Elite SEM
In fact, nowadays, mobile search for “open + now + near me” has become a practice for searches with their mobile device. Kickstarting your local SEO will help your business explore more possibilities and reach the searchers easily.
9. Voice Search Optimisation
Studies from DBS interactive show that in 2020, more than 50% of all smartphone users engage with voice technology on their device. 41% of adults use voice search at least once per day.
Voice Search Optimisation is becoming a new trending SEO Strategy. Voice search enables users to get the answers easily from their smartphone without having to type out the search.
To optimise for voice search, go back to basics, consider your keywords. Identify what are the phrases that people use in everyday conversation. Longer, more natural-sounding phrasing performs better in voice searches. When people type, they tend to shorten their sentences.
For example, a person might voice search “What are the famous foods for a tourist to visit in Singapore?” but type the words, “famous food in Singapore”. See the difference?
10. Video Marketing Strategy
Videos are probably the most popular media form consumed by online users nowadays.
According to Wordstream, more than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube per day. 87% of digital marketers use video content to reach their audience.
The video marketing strategy is an essential strategy for most of the business to increase brand awareness, offer knowledge, and interact with potential customers. It’s recommended to implement the ABCD principle by Google to create a better performance video ad.
A good video ad is able to catch users’ attention within 3 seconds, connect with the audience, interact with them, and tell them the next steps.
Wish to know more about the ABCD principle to create the best video ads? Check out the article I wrote here.
Eh, so is SEO getting so important in 2021? With the Covid-19 pandemic, and everyone go online, many businesses say must try SEO in 2021.
If you still catch no ball what SEO is, or feel it is something too cheem, no worries, Exabytes offers Professional SEO Services for your website to rank high on Google.
Aiyo, don’t wait again. We’re here for you when it comes to SEO. Get in touch with us! Consultation is free.
Similar to SSL, Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a security protocol that is widely adopted for privacy and data security for online communication.
SSL is used for encrypting communication between web applications and servers. This action is commonly known as website loading. TLS is built for this and beyond.
So what is the primary difference between TLS and SSL? TLS is used in a wider range of data privacy protection such as email and voice over IP (VOIP).
A brief history of TLS and SSL
TLS’s predecessor, SSL was developed by Netscape in 1995. SSL version 1.0 and 2.0 contained many security flaws that required a complete redesign of the security protocol.
In 1996, Netscape once again released another SSL version, SSL 3.0, a more secure protocol compared to the two previous versions. It is also considered the beginning of TLS 1.0 as the protocol was built based on SSL.
In 1999, PCI Council suggested that SSL should depreciate and be replaced by TLS 1.0 as it is a significant upgrade from SSL 3.0.
TLS 1.1 came out 7 years later in 2006 before it’s replaced by TLS 1.2 within 2 years. Later in 2018, TLS 1.3 was finalized and ready.
TLS 1.3 offers significant improvement over its predecessors, and many big tech companies are now pushing for its proliferation. Cloudflare, Microsoft and Google have all announced to deprecate both TLS 1.0 and 1.1, making TLS 1.3 the only support security layer.
On 1st July 2021, Exabytes will deprecate TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in all our shared environments. This includes your websites and email services that are hosted with us. This new protocol will significantly increase the security encryption between server and client, giving you better security.
This deprecation of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 will primarily affect non-browser software, APIs, and other internet infrastructure.
What do you need to do?
Exabytes servers will be updated to TLS 1.2. This change will affect clients that are using an email client such as Microsoft Outlook 2003 to send email through our servers with the latest TLS. The email sending function will not be able to work. One of the workarounds is to update your email client to a newer version, for example, Microsoft Outlook 2019 or Microsoft 365.
SSL Cert is different from protocols
It’s important to note that certificates are not dependent on protocols. SSL and TLS are protocols. They need a certificate installed on the server for the protocols to work.
Due to the change of naming on the protocols, some may refer to the cert as SSL/TLS Certificate. However, there is no need to change from SSL Certificate to TLS Certificate for your encryption to work. This is because the protocols are determined by your server configuration, not the certificates.
A TLS certificate is issued by a certificate authority to the person or business that owns a domain. The certificate contains important information about who owns the domain, along with the server’s public key, both of which are important for validating the server’s identity.
For now, you are likely to still see certificates referred to as SSL Certificates instead of TLS Certificates as it is a term more people are familiar with.
TLS vs SSL
There are three main components TLS protocol accomplishes: Encryption, Authentication, and Integrity.
Encryption is hiding the data being transferred from third parties to someone else. Authentication ensures that the parties exchanging information are who they claim to be. Integrity is verifying that the data has not been forged or tampered with before reaching the intended recipient.
TLS is more efficient when it comes to handling of protocols. It also has a stronger message authentication to prevent message forgery, especially against unauthorised people who try to change the original message. Although TLS and SSL are not interoperable, TLS does offer backward compatibility for older devices that are still using SSL.
In a nutshell, there is not much difference between SSL and TLS. Many will still continue to use the term SSL and TLS interchangeably. However, in terms of server configuration, there are some major architectural and functional differences, overall secure server, protocol vulnerabilities and outdated cipher.
If you are unsure about how depreciating TLS 1.0 & 1.2 might affect you, feel free to talk to our technical support or sales team for help.
How to promote affiliate products on your platforms effectively without sounding salesy and made your audience feel annoying?
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways for bloggers to turn their content into a source of passive income. By joining a high-paying affiliate program, and maximizing the efficiency of affiliate links, you will get more income from every click.
Affiliate marketing programs account for 15% of total online digital media revenue and are expected to grow by 10% annually through 2021.
So, how do you enter the world of affiliate marketing, create a successful blog and use affiliate links to generate stable income?
In this guide, you’ll learn how to use the high-converting strategy to promote affiliate products and increase website traffic – and of course, become successful in affiliate marketing.
1. Product Reviews
Product reviews are the most read posts on any website, online store or blog. When a potential buyer is interested in a product, he/she will search for reviews. This is very common.
Ask yourself. What do you do before making an online purchase?
For me, I read reviews before buying clothes, vacuum cleaners, digital tools, or web hosting plans.
Take this opportunity to write honest reviews about the affiliate products.
Your first focus should be on keyword research and creating a title that best matches the searcher’s intent prior to writing the review.
Also, don’t forget to include the affiliate link in your review as well.
2. Banners Placement
Many bloggers do not use affiliate banners on their websites. They don’t want visitors to browse other websites. Slogans of the affiliate program may also distract visitors from the actual purpose of the content.
In fact, it’s a good idea to place these clickable banner ads in multiple locations on your website:
The sidebar of your blog
The header and footer of the website
Embed blog content
In email marketing messages
To use the affiliate banners, first, check whether your respective affiliate program provides banners. Then, copy and paste the provided HTML links to the desired location on your website.
For example, here are some banner ads you can copy and paste into your website using the Exabytes affiliate plan:
Remember not to make your blog appear confusing. Your website design should not turn into an e-commerce store with various product displays.
3. Newsletters/Welcome Emails
As an affiliate marketer and blogger, building a loyal readership is essential to long-term success. Email marketing is a winning strategy that can be used to attract visitors to your website, distribute your content, and manage relationships with readers.
After readers subscribe to your blog, send them a series of automatic welcome emails. In the emails, share related content. You can place the affiliate links in the shared content. However, don’t spam them with links.
For example, in your 7-part welcome email series, don’t place too many affiliate links in a single email. Instead, place them evenly in each email.
First, win the trust of your readers by telling your unique story, and then provide them with the most helpful information. Your affiliate income should come second. By thinking this way, you will be truly motivated to provide content that is valuable to your readers.
4. “How-to” Tutorials
Most of us are a fan of the “how-to” blog post. For example, if you have a craft blog, technical blog, beauty blog, health blog or workout blog, it’s a good idea to create “how-to” guides. These blog posts get most of the traffic.
The “how-to” guides can be something like:
How to connect MI weight-scale with mobile app.
How to get a refund of payment from Shopee.
The advantages and disadvantages of WordPress.
Where to find the cheapest hosting plan.
How to install Google Analytics on your WordPress correctly.
The whole idea is that you can’t just tell visitors to buy products. Instead, tell them the story or idea of using the product.
5. Twitter
Using affiliate links on Twitter will involve some word games. Since you only have 280 characters (the maximum length of text content of a Tweet) to convince someone to click on your affiliate link, you need to be creative.
You are encouraged to run A/B testing, to see which copywriting style brings the most affiliate link clicks.
You can also pair social media copies and links with images or videos to create more engaging content for your target audience.
However, most affiliate marketers use Twitter to generate traffic to their website and blog content. From there, they use other strategies, such as the ones mentioned earlier to entice users to click on the embedded affiliate link.
6. Facebook
Another place to promote affiliate products is through your profile or company page on Facebook.
Make sure you do not spam your followers’ Facebook feeds using affiliate link posts. Your goal is to convince someone to click on your affiliate link and make a purchase. So, it is wise to publish entertaining, educational and interesting content that includes affiliate links.
7. Tools and Resources page
Here is another good idea to promote affiliate products: create resource pages.
Basically, the goal is to let your visitors know which products you like. You can include your personal products and affiliate products. Even if you are not an affiliate of certain products, you can add these products to help your readers. All this is to add value to your visitors.
It can be something like:
favourite web-hosts
favourite website builders
social media tools
blogging tools
leads generation tools
8. Digital products or offers
Today, as everyone is going online, you could create and provide readers with exclusive digital products, such as e-books and online courses. Of course, these digital products provide an excellent opportunity to embed your affiliate link.
Make sure to include these links organically in your content. Your digital product shouldn’t be something like sales materials. Instead, it should be content that lets your readers learn about a specific topic.
For example, if you are offering an online course on starting a blog, in part 1 of your course, you could include an affiliate link to register with Exabytes as a hosting provider. This way, it is perfectly natural to place your affiliate link in your online course.
9. Youtube / Video Tutorials
Video tutorials are a powerful marketing tool, especially for affiliate marketers. In fact, posting videos on social media can gain new and quality customers.
As an affiliate marketer, you could create video content around various topics and include affiliate links in the process. There are 2 methods to embed affiliate links in your video content.
First, the easiest way to use a YouTube affiliate link is to include it in the video description. If you use this strategy, make sure to verbally and visually label the instructions in the video. Most YouTubers use phrases such as “click the link in the description below” to direct viewers to the right place.
The second strategy is to use YouTube cards. These cards will pop up at a preselected time and location in the YouTube video, usually with a call-to-action.
For best results, use both YouTube affiliate link strategies at the same time.
10. Compare different products and features
First, choose two products. If you use the product yourself, it can bring you more results. It will definitely help you write detailed comparison articles on your affiliate products.
Choose two products and compare them. Mention all the features of the products. Include negative information about the products.
For example, it’s rather expensive, without a clearly written return policy, etc. Include custom pictures. Add your personal opinion at the end. Adding affiliate links is a good way, but don’t overuse them.
If you add too many affiliate links (for example, more than 10) to an article, the effect will be worst already.
Comparing posts provides visitors with a clear idea. They will find out the pros and cons of using online tools or any product.
Key Takeaways to Promote Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketing requires effort to make it work. But don’t worry. Use the tips in this post, keep practice until you find the ways that are suit you the most, and you can proceed to boost your affiliate conversions.
First, find high-paying affiliate programs, get the links, place them in the most suitable location for your audience, and start monetizing your blog.
Soon, you will get enough affiliate commissions to help you bear other marketing and operating costs–all in autonomous mode.
In the new norm, businesses are always looking for new opportunities to make their business more sustainable and profitable. In fact, Global Trade & Export have grown rapidly since 2020.
Did you know that Malaysia’s gross export earnings this year are expected to rebound by 2.7%, according to the Ministry of Finance’s (MOF) Economic Outlook 2021 report?
The report mentioned that Malaysia’s gross export earnings are expected to rebound 2.7% in 2021 after a projected 5.3% decline in 2020, encouraged by the recovery in global trade and supply chains.
Are you facing the challenges below when growing your business to an overseas market?
Uncertainty on global trade and export
Lack of platform and strategy to increase exposure in the overseas market
Budget restriction on kickstarting or supporting an export business
Let me introduce a golden opportunity for all traders and exporters to tap into the power of the B2B Marketplace Platform and improve sales and awareness with digital marketing solution.
It will solve all business concerns such as budget restriction, uncertainty, lack of information, and more.
Up to RM20,000 Subsidy
Get up to RM20,000 subsidy through eTRADE Program to tap into the power of the world’s best B2B Marketplace Platform, Alibaba. Increase brand awareness and boost sales conversion in overseas countries through digital marketing campaigns.
Our team will assist you on the journey to success in global export. We have the expertise to guide you on how to effectively leverage the B2B Marketplace platform and achieve campaign goals based on a tailored digital marketing strategic plan.
What is an eTRADE 2.0 Program?
eTrade 2.0 program is a subsidy program that helps accelerate export and assist Malaysian SMEs to have a sustainable and valuable presence on cross-border eCommerce platforms.
Two (2) financial incentives will be provided to assist SME that are doing or keen on global trade: (1) Onboarding Scheme (2) Digital Marketing & Training Scheme
ONBOARDING Scheme
Digital Marketing & Training (DMT) Scheme
Incentives value (up to)
RM 5,000
RM20,000
Business / SME
For onboarding any cross-border eCommerce Platform or multiple platforms.
For undertaking any digital marketing activities and/ or attending the eCommerce training programme.
Exabytes Service
Exabytes Alibaba Global Golden Supplier Plan
SEO Pack, Facebook Ads Service, Google Ads Service and LinkedIn Ads Service
*One (1) year subscription/ one (1) year activities for each company
Duration: 1 year
Who is eligible for eTRADE Programme 2.0?
Registered with SSM. Companies that are registered with Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia (SSM) – ROC / ROB / LLP
Made in Malaysia. Selling Malaysian made products or Malaysian brand (registered with Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia – MyIPO)
Malaysian Owned. At least 60% equity is owned by Malaysians.
Co-operatives. Co-operatives registered with Suruhanjaya Koperasi Malaysia (SSKM)
Malaysia SMEs
– Manufacturing. Annual Sales <50 mil OR <200 full-time employees
– Trading. Annual Sales < RM20 mil OR <75 full-time employees
MATRADE & ERAT. Must be registered with MATRADE, subscribe to MyExport and have done ERAT Score.Onboarding
6-Month Operation. Companies registered with SSM or Cooperatives registered with SKM must be in operation for NOT less than 6 months.
No eTRADE. Companies that have NOT participated in eTRADE Programme before (2014-2020).Digital Marketing Service
1-Year Operation. Companies registered with SSM OR Cooperatives registered with SKM must be operating NOT less than one (1) year.
eCommerce Ready. Companies that are already selling on cross-border eCommerce platform(s) for NOT less than one (1) year.
If you are interested in expanding your business to overseas countries, you should not miss out on this opportunity to tap into the power of the B2B Marketplace. Get in touch with Keith Leong or Raymond at [email protected]
Get professional advice from our Successful Client – Lion File.
Lion File had a mission to reach out internationally. Digitalisation has enabled them to reach potential clients efficiently, but find out how they kicked-started their exporting journey easily with Exabytes.
Every year for the past ten years, experts assess the digital marketing landscape and make recommendations on digital marketing trends that marketers should focus on in the future.
It is important that all businesses consider how they can harness the latest marketing trends so that they can apply the latest innovations. Google digital marketing evangelist Avinash Kaushik explained the benefits of this mindset:
“70% of the time we’ll be focusing on things we know that are at the heart of our business. 20% is where we try to push the boundaries. You step into known unknowns. And the last 10% is crazy experimental stuff.
Trying to figure out how to do uncomfortable things that we will fail more than we will. But with every success, you are building a competitive advantage.”
So, evaluating innovations can help you push the boundaries, but also improve your digital marketing activities. In this article, we bring you the top trends and key digital marketing activities that can be harnessed by businesses.
1. More Websites will use Chatbots
With the growth of online shopping and eCommerce, the use of chatbot’s ability to converse and interact with customers like real advisors makes it an efficient and effective solution.
Having an intelligent chatbot that can assist your customers 24/7 will increase conversions and customer satisfaction.
From a marketing standpoint, the use of chatbots, in addition to providing instant customer service, can be a direct source for collecting information and data from your customers.
Thus, the data recorded by your chatbot can help you list the most recurring problems that your customers raise in order to easily identify them.
More recently, the use of chatbots has grown creatively to drive customer engagement and website traffic. Indeed, it is becoming less and less rare to see a chatbot window open at the bottom right of your screen, when you are browsing, to show you current promotions.
The advantage is that this communication channel does not hinder your navigation since you do not leave the page you are viewing.
2. Development and Use of Intelligent Systems
Machine learning is disrupting traditional marketing. To move consumers through the different stages of the customer journey, Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning will handle decisions based on mountains of information.
These automation tools make it possible to personalize, track, manage and optimize thousands of buying strategies, targeting, and advertising messages which are simply impossible for a human to do.
AI makes it possible to analyze customer behavior in real-time based on socio-demographic criteria, purchase history, navigation, etc. to ultimately suggest placing a type of message, on an advertising medium at a given time.
AI will continue to grow in the area of programmatic advertising. The clever use of big data makes marketing more human: it is now possible to personalize banners and videos on a large scale.
Thus, the message adapts to audiences. In 2021, artificial intelligence will devour all data to allow predictive analytics to emerge.
3. Hyper-Targeted Advertising
Perfect knowledge of your target is the first step in developing tailor-made ads. In 2021, you need to rethink your advertising strategies and offer personalized content and messages. By targeting more specific audiences, you’ll get the most out of your offers.
This is common knowledge for marketers, segmentation and targeting the right customers is the key to getting conversions. By 2021, audiences and users will get more accurate, relevant, and useful ads based on their data.
4. Implementation of AR/VR
Augmented Reality(AR) & Virtual Reality (VR) are the latest improved and trending technologies used in business marketing strategies.
AR & VR enable many businesses to create immersive, virtual experiences for customers that begin from the product development stage to storytelling, and to creating content that is engaging and real life-like.
Virtual reality, for its part, allows, via a dedicated headset, to immerse yourself in an environment that completely replaces our reality. Thus, a museum like the Louvre has developed a VR experience allowing users to come face to face with the Mona Lisa.
National Geographic has gone further by simply developing an application dedicated to the Oculus Quest headset, putting you in the shoes of a photographer on an expedition to the four corners of the world.
Integrating AI background remover to create transparent background images, you can build unprecedented VR/AR experiences, create mind-blowing photo-editing interfaces, vector illustrations, making eCommerce product-customization simple and efficient.
5. Smart bidding in Google ads
In 2017, The Economist stated: “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data”.
Since the advent of big data in the 2000s by the internet and giant social media companies such as Google and Facebook, data collection has become a more important task to uncover and gain insights for marketers.
Data collection helps marketers deliver highly personalized experiences to their target consumers that lead them to convert and gain profit from. It has never stopped since and is even faster now that there are more devices that amplify this movement.
Personalization at scale can help advertisers reach specific internet users at the right place and at the right time. Many digital agencies use this data in tools or applications such as automated campaigns on Google Ads.
The multiplication of this data also allows more advanced A / B test strategies and therefore better performance. The growth of programmatic advertising only reinforces this trend of mass personalization.
6. Instant Messaging Apps
Instant messaging applications are used worldwide, every day. They are also gradually entering the corporate world and soon, it will be a complete norm to communicate with prospective customers via applications like WhatsApp, Messenger, and instant messaging applications.
For whatever purpose, whether it is to find prospective customers or providing information, contacting people directly provides a more personal experience and strengthens the conversation exchange.
7. Increase in Video Content
With the explosion of TikTok that democratized short videos, this content format is fast becoming the cornerstone of brands’ content marketing strategy.
This generation wants to consume content as quickly as possible and short videos are good and fun ways to grab the attention of viewers while getting the message across without taking much of their time. Other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and even Youtube understood this trend and released platforms of their own.
Instagram relies so heavily on this engaging format that it uses it as a gateway to e-commerce. Indeed, the social network allows influencers posting short videos in Reels, to add clickable links on displayed products so that viewers can buy them.
8. More Promotions Through Influencers
Influencer Marketing has continued to take up space throughout 2020 and even more this year. Influencers are increasingly popular on social networks and are becoming a real channel of communication. Now a business in its own right, influencing is one of the most effective ways to correctly target a specific audience!
Choosing an influencer to promote their services or products has become a hub of digital marketing. An influencer has a most often targeted community, which allows you to have a direct impact on a large mass of personalities. Someone they trust introduces a product, and they feel like trying it out.
By choosing an ambassador, you will be able to organize contests offering one of your services or products. Often, the contest conditions state that in order to enter, users must follow your account. You grow your own community by building it only with a targeted audience.
9. Content Marketing
As mentioned, video content is on-trend and popular these days. However, other marketing contents like audio podcasts and blogs are still as important. Thus, this year, content marketing will try to push its limits even further.
Whether it is content that needs to be watched, read, or listened to, the best way to nurture your community is to create content that they can relate to and interact with.
A survey, a contest with prizes to be won, or open questions, all this does not go unnoticed and your community will love to give its opinion especially if you take it into account afterwards.
10. Next Generation SEO
For many years, the goal of SEO has been to get your website or advertisement at the top of the search results. From 2021, the primary focus will be the same, but to be ahead of zero-click searches.
The “zero position” refers to optimized snippets from Google pages, and this is where the digital marketing and SEO trends of 2021 are prioritizing. Position zero is shown differently from other search results.
It is separate from the other results and sits in a small area at the very top of the page which displays the most relevant information that answers the queries made by the user.
Since it aims to answer the user inquiry immediately without the user having the need to click anything, it is called a “zero-click search”.
The Bottom Line
As the world goes through times of turbulence, marketing takes hold and aims to be more human and closer to consumers.
Part of having a good business strategy is looking to the future and evaluating the latest technologies that can reach their customers. Today’s technology has turned the world into a big village in terms of communication.
Information sharing is easier and accessible than ever before that it enables us to raise product awareness easily and effectively promote services.
But what always matters is finding the solution that best meets your needs, and not just going for the new and the shiny.
Every day, we check emails, post our latest updates to various social media platforms. Some of us even manage our personal blog or website. Have you ever wondered what is behind all these online activities? When you post or upload something online, where does the data go?
The answer is Data Centre.
But, what is a Data Centre?
A data centre is a facility composed of networked computers and storage. Companies, big or small, use the facility to organize, process, store and distribute large amounts of data.
Enterprises usually rely heavily on the applications, services, and data contained in the data centre, making it the focus and key asset of their daily operations.
Data Centre Tier Ratings: How to choose the right tier?
When looking for a data centre, it’s important to understand these ratings because they can provide you with uptime guidance, and uptime determines how long the data centre can be fully operational.
Uptime Institute‘s rating began in the mid-1990s. This is a white paper, “Classification Defines Site Infrastructure Performance”. The purpose is to outline the standards for data centre design and investment.
Since then, these ratings have been helping data centres achieve high-quality levels to ensure uptime.
Data centers can be divided into 4 tiers. Each tier has increasing requirements.
Tier 1 Data Centre
Small businesses usually take advantage of the requirements of Tier 1 data centers, which have the following characteristics:
99.671% Uptime
Zero redundancy
28.8 hours of annual downtime
If you are a small business, tier 1 may be ideal for you. This is a cost-effective solution.
Although tier 4 data centres do not have the functions of large centres, they have generators or backup cooling systems.
Tier 2 Data Centre
The benefits offered by Tier 2 facilities include:
99.749% Uptime
Partial redundancy in power and cooling
22 hours of annual downtime
Tier 2 data centres are for small and medium enterprise customers. It is more efficient than the level II system. Secondary providers can also handle more customers.
Companies whose network traffic matches small businesses are best suited for this level. In most cases, it is much cheaper than Tier 3.
Tier 3 Data Centre
Large enterprises use tier 3 data center specifications and have the following characteristics:
99.982% uptime (Tier 3 uptime)
N+1 fault-tolerant
72-hour power outage protection
1.6 hours of annual downtime
Companies that use Tier 3 providers are usually growing companies or companies that are larger than the average small and medium-sized enterprise. Most data center companies ranked by the Uptime Institute have a Class 3 ranking.
The tier 3 also has lower charges than the tier 4. If you have a budget constraint, you can choose tier 3 and expand to higher levels in the future.
Tier 4 Data Centre
Tier 4 data centre certification usually provides services for enterprise companies using the following guarantees and benefits:
99.995% uptime per year
Zero single points of failure
2N+1 fully redundant infrastructure
96-hour power outage protection
26.3 minutes of annual downtime
Tier 4 is considered enterprise-level services. If you need to host mission-critical servers, tier 4 data centers are for you. The tier 4 data centre can ensure the safety of your business, including taking care of mechanical failure.
It offers complete fault tolerance so that your business will not be slowed down by any issues.
Tier 4 colocation is definitely the most expensive option. This is why this level is dominated by international brands with consistently high levels of traffic or processing demand.
Exabytes Tier 3 Data Center
Exabytes Malaysia Data Center has multiple backbones from Tier III ISPs which allow global reach and fantastic QOS. It is the only IP transit service in Malaysia that provides SLAs.
Connected with good latency to major destinations worldwide and an estimate of 0.01% packet loss rate across the network. At present, we are in the progress of upgrading our facilities to the highest level, Tier IV.
The various environmental aspects of the data center including power, cooling, fire suppression and security are looked after by a central management system. The Exabytes Malaysia Data Center NOC monitors this system 24x7x365.
Payment gateway atau gerbang pembayaran ialah sebuah penyedia perkhidmatan yang memudahkan transaksi pembayaran yang dibuat di laman e-Dagang anda ke akaun bank anda. Payment gateway membolehkan anda menerima pembayaran kad kredit/debit atau perbankan internet. Payment Gateway adalah popular dalam kalangan pemilik e-Dagang. Hal ini kerana, payment gateway dapat memudahkan transaksi perniagaan tanpa mengira jenis bank yang digunakan pelanggan.
Contoh jenis bayaran yang diterima sekiranya anda menggunakan payment gateway:
Kad Kredit/Debit
FPX Online Banking
eWallet
Cara Kerja Payment Gateway
Melalui kaedah pembayaran ini, pelanggan secara automatik akan diarahkan ke halaman pembayaran untuk bayaran. Jumlah order/pesanan akan dikira secara automatik semasa pembayaran. Pelanggan hanya perlu memasukkan butir kelayakan akaun mereka seperti butiran kad, nama pengguna atau kata laluan perbankan internet. Pelanggan juga perlu membenarkan pengecasan ke atas akaun mereka.
Payment gateway merupakan ‘orang tengah’ dalam proses ini, dimana tugasnya adalah untuk mengesahkan pembayaran dengan bank yang terlibat. Setelah pembayaran disahkan, pesanan (order) secara automatik akan ditanda sebagai ‘berbayar’ . Payment gateway memerlukan tempoh untuk duit bayaran diproses sebelum duit masuk ke akaun anda, juga dikenali sebagai ‘settlement working days’ . Kebiasaanya, jika mahu tempoh settlement yang cepat, anda perlu membayar caj servis yang tinggi.
Senarai Payment Gateway
Plan e-commerce dari Exabytes didatangkan lengkap dengan payment gateway. Berikut merupakan payment gateway yang tersedia dalam laman e-Dagang dari Exabytes:
PayPal
iPay88
eGHL
senangPay
Razer Merchant Services (sebelum ini dikenali sebagai MOLPay)
MPay Internet Payment Gateway (MPG)
2Checkout
Midtrans
revPay
Billplz
Boost
Maybank2u Pay
Enable Alipay
Sekiranya anda merupakan sebuah PKS Bumiputera yang ingin merealisasikan laman e-Dagang milik anda sendiri, anda boleh menyertai program #SamaSamaDigital dan dapatkan geran bernilai RM10,000 untuk digitalkan perniagaan anda. Klik sini untuk maklumat lanjut.
Sometimes a small decision can lead to a huge positive impact. ISLEE Fashion learned this first hand.
ISLEE is a clothing brand that we believe is a familiar brand amongst Penangites. An early adopter of inbound marketing, this retail shop is able to confidently rely on a steady flow of traffic and leads generated by their eCommerce website.
However, one additional source of traffic and leads in which they wanted to capitalize on was online advertising via Facebook.
It is through this that they identified and attracted highly targeted searchers looking for the types of products they offer.
Please share a little of your brand story – ISLEE Fashion.
ISLEE Fashion Sdn Bhd is an independent Malaysian chain with headquarters in Penang, started by two sisters. We stock a range of cool, urban clothing for young women, with new collections coming in regularly. We are a well-known bespoke tailor where we custom-designed garments for each customer.
With over 30 years of experience in the fashion and retail industry, we have gathered the expertise to complement and grow the business. ISLEE is a Perfect Fit driven fashion boutique.
The Perfect Fit idea was conceptualized due to our undying passion for transforming women in the way they dress as well as the excitement of providing customers with a personal touch by fulfilling customers’ demand through custom fitting and advice.
In addition to the fabulous apparel line, we at ISLEE also feature other accessories, such as handbags, waistband and intimate wear for women, so they can get everything under one roof.
ISLEE is the illustration of a modern boutique that could perfectly maximize the comfortability of customers. We currently have 7 exclusive concept stores in Malaysia bearing the brand ISLEE.
What was your purchase with Exabytes and how was the result?
Initially, we signed up for Facebook ads plan with Exabytes in April 2020. After the digital consultant from Exabytes arranged for a meeting with my team and I, he saw a lot of opportunities for improved results.
The digital team significantly restructured Facebook campaigns and redistributed marketing.
We can see that Exabytes’ digital team continued its optimisation process to make sure that the campaigns were on the right track. In the first month, we saw a small incremental improvement, and we understand that success wouldn’t exactly happen overnight.
However, those small incremental gains began to add up. Over a three-month period, the cumulative results were excellent
Ad response rates increased by 40%, attracting better, more targeted traffic.
eCommerce website conversion was boosted by an impressive 80%.
How did you hear about Exabytes?
I have to admit that previously I didn’t know Exabytes offers digital marketing solutions until I saw your Facebook advertisement while browsing and searching for a suitable digital agency to help bring up our online business during the MCO 1.0.
Initially, my team and I wanted to engage with a company that has great experience. After we went through several meetings with Keith and his digital team, my team and I were confident with their proposal so we decided to give Exabytes a shot. Because why not?
In the first three-month, we were happy with the results and the service provided by Keith and his team, we then appointed them as our Digital marketing agency for our next 3 Facebook ads campaigns.
Until today 2021, we are still using Exabytes’ digital services.
Overall, my team and I are super happy with our digitalisation journey with Exabytes. We will definitely recommend Exabytes to our friends and anyone looking for digital solutions.
Summary
We would like to thank SISLEE Fashion for trusting Exabytes’ digital marketing solution and we are honoured to have had the opportunity to work with you.
We are happy to hear that digitalisation has brought ISLEE’s online sales to greater heights.
If you are interested in how our digital team can offer you the best-suited and customised digital marketing solution, click here for more about Facebook Ads and our digital consultant will be in touch.
Why do we need to upgrade our web hosting to virtual private server (VPS)? The answer is simple, if your website is running slow, website traffic increases, you need custom applications for your website, website down due to other tenants in the server or even security concerns raised from your website.
These are the common five reasons why people are upgrading their web hosting to a vps. Let us look at all the indications in detail.
Website running slow
According to Google, website loading with less than 3 seconds would be considered slow. Imagine you are driving in slow traffic, does it excites you? No right, same goes to your website.
The more content you add to your website, the slower it will load. Also taking into account all the plugins and widget that you will use for your website to enhance user experience, but on the flipside it will slow down your website.
Try to optimize your website to load as fast as it can. Find out if there is anything taking up your website resources that causes your website loading slow. Since we are optimising our website loading speed for Google, what are the better tools than using Google PageSpeed insight tools itself to perform the check.
Another way to increase your website loading speed is to upgrade to VPS instead of continuing with your current web hosting. Upgrading to VPS will give you better server resources for your website to have more capacity to operate.
Website traffic increased
As your business grows, so does the traffic to your website.
Having a high surge in traffic to your shared hosting website might cause your website to go down, not available or loading slow. Especially businesses that do seasonal promotion, during promotion period website tends to get more traffic, this sudden website traffic spike usually is not able to be handled by a normal shared hosting environment.
Each VPS gets a set amount of resources, so you won’t run into bottlenecks due to traffic spikes on your website. Bear in mind that traffic spike in other shared hosting neighbors will cause the same problem to your website too.
Need for custom application
Having a template to build a website is fast and easy but that may not be the case for most of the business who need customisation on their web application or eCommerce.
Share hosting has the limitation for you to create your own custom application or even install any of your applications. That is where you need a VPS.
A VPS lets you test and try out different scenarios/staging environments so you know what works best for your application.
Also, VPS allows you to create a sandbox. A sandbox is a virtual environment that many companies use to build, test, and deploy software before going to production. Need to identify bugs? Fix them? Test patches? Then create a sandbox on VPS, test and/or simulate whatever is needed. And once you’re done, you can easily go back to default.
Security concern
In VPS, a website is hosted in its own “virtual” space, you don’t have to concern yourself with what your neighbors are doing, compared to a shared hosting environment.
A VPS is far more secure because it provides you root access, which gives you the ability to implement advanced security measures in your server environment. Your neighbors don’t have any access to your resources or files that are kept behind a secure partition.
VPS Hosting and Dedicated Server Hosting also often come with a dedicated IP address, making it far less likely that your website is confused for another while offering benefits for security on e-commerce payments.
Small business owners or organizations can benefit greatly from this type of secure accessibility.
Website regularly down
Website downtime is costly to your business, especially during a promotion period.
With a VPS, you have defined memory and bandwidth allocations all within your virtual environment. If your website grows in popularity, your visitors won’t get frustrated over a website not being available due to traffic spikes as mentioned above. Because your VPS is able to handle all the incoming traffic with its allocated server resources, keeping your business operating as usual.
Besides traffic, security issues are another common reason that will cause your website to go down. If you are on VPS, you have more control over shared hosting, you can choose to install or update your own software, make backups, customise your application, setup security features to avoid malware attacks and so on.
Remember, it’s your private server, so you can run whatever application you choose, whenever you like.
Conclusion
These are the signs that your website is telling you that there is a problem waiting to be fixed.
If your online business is experiencing both highs and lows, and you need the option to respond quickly while adding power to match the demand, a VPS is the perfect choice for you.
Do you rather lose a customer due to a bad experience on your website? Or you rather spend a little investment and upgrade to VPS to better serve your growing website?
