Ask any successful business owner and they’ll tell you that they have been running their business towards a main objective using a variety of strategies to promote their brand and grow their business whether it’s through traditional marketing techniques or by doing their marketing strategies online. 

When it comes to online though, there are a variety of platforms and strategies that are available for your business. These days, many businesses run social media marketing campaigns through Facebook or Instagram, while others utilize search engine marketing or Google and YouTube ads. Others prefer to go the more traditional route of search engine optimization, while others prefer to target specific clients through email marketing. Whatever your strategy or objectives may be, in this article, we’ll lay out the top reasons why, regardless of what stage your company is in the growth process, your business needs a digital marketing strategy to grow and succeed. 

• To make sure your business is in the right direction. 

Without a digital marketing strategy, companies often fail to define their strategic goals to gain new customers or to strengthen relationships with existing customers. You won’t be able to accomplish your goals without any goals in mind. Thus, you won’t achieve the success you desire. 

Ideally, you should outline what you’re trying to accomplish through digital marketing for your business. Be clear as to why you’re investing money and resources in it. By setting goals, you can map out your path.  

It is impossible to allocate capital and resources correctly without a goal. In addition to your appointed resources being directionless, all your money and efforts would be wasted.

• To stay one step ahead of your new and old competitors. 

A good marketing strategy can give you a competitive advantage.  Invest enough resources in digital marketing. By not doing so, you will lose ground to your competitors. However, you shouldn’t rely on just any random approach, instead, your strategies have to be clear. 

There is more to marketing than promoting your products and services or increasing your company’s exposure. Creating your brand also means defining what your business represents and why your target market would want to be your customers. A good full-service digital marketing agency can do this work for you. 

• To identify your target market.

On the online platform, we can’t satisfy all types of people. With that said however, there are still some individuals who are most likely to become a long-term customer. This is why having a digital marketing plan is important for your business.

By assessing your target market strategically, you will be able to know their desires and show them how your product or service will meet their needs, and solve their problems in the process.

If everything we mentioned seems to be necessary for your business and you don’t know where to begin – let a digital marketing agency such as iManila help get you ahead of the game. With 25 years of experience in the IT industry and as one of the leading Digital Marketing Agencies in the Philippines, iManila has the skills and the experience to help you with your digital marketing strategy! Contact us now to learn more!

Web hosting is the most underappreciated part of the World Wide Web. Some people might not realize it, but every website actually involves hosting so that users can access it. 

Websites are hosted on servers. Servers are powerful computers that store and process data, and web servers are those which store the files that make up websites and process requests to view these files.

Web hosting is an invisible yet essential element of the online experience. So, If you care about your website, it is important for you to make sure that your online site is in good hands. In this blog we’ll share with you some web hosting tips that you and your IT team should know.

There’s a huge gap between the different types of hosting. 

If you’ve spent any amount of time on a web host‘s website, you’ve probably seen terms like shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server, cloud hosting and WordPress hosting. They represent the different web hosting types, but not every web host provider offers them all. Plus, the hosting types differ from one another in significant ways. Take a look at some of the various servers below:

• Shared hosting

The cheapest form of web hosting is shared hosting. This hosting basically lets your website share a server and server resources with other websites. This level of hosting is really best suited for small sites that don’t need a huge amount of bandwidth. Since you are sharing resources with other sites, you should be prepared for the occasional slowdown should one of your site-mates start attracting a lot of visitors.

•  VPS hosting

VPS hosting is most likely a high-powered version of shared hosting, except that far fewer websites share a server’s resources, which are also a bit more segregated. In effect, VPS hosting is usually more expensive than shared hosting.

• Dedicated hosting

Compared to other hosting servers, dedicated hosting basically refers to an Internet hosting option in which a physical server (or servers) is focused on a single business customer. With this type of hosting, customers have complete control over the machine, so they can optimize it for their unique requirements, including performance and security.

• WordPress hosting

WordPress hosting lets you build a site in an environment that caters to the world’s most popular content management system. 

• Cloud hosting

Cloud servers are the newest type of hosting and the most popular among the websites today. With its latest developments, it lets you easily scale website power across multiple servers, though not every web hosting provider currently offers this as it is a new technology. 

Domain and hosting are not the same thing. 

Right from the start, you need to find a dependable and trustworthy registrar. Domain names don’t have to be registered at the same company.

Ultimately, domain name is the most expensive and irreplaceable asset, as it is your online identity, while hosting services are just there to accommodate the website. Most web-hosting providers would prefer to have your domain registered with them, as it is their other profitable revenue stream. However, it won’t be that convenient if the web hosting company decides to go down together with your domain. At the same time,if you are able to manage your domain and hosting across separate vendors or providers – then by all means do. The bottomline is you should always purchase your domain and hosting from a company that can provide you the proper support you need – including reminders to tell you that your domain is due for renewal! 

Know your hosting’s bandwidth and disk space. 

Bandwidth and data transfer are frequently used interchangeably to define the amount of data that your website serves to visitors, but the terms, technically, do not have the same definitions. Bandwidth represents the total amount of data that can be transferred at one time, while data transfer is the throughput or the actual amount of information that can be used over a given period of time.

Most websites won’t go past their bandwidth quota by high traffic alone, but if you have some files for download on your website, remember that it can possibly happen.

Don’t fall for “unlimited” storage! 

​​Web hosts will entice you to sign up for their web hosting plans with the promise of unlimited storage or monthly data transfers. Unlimited Storage seems like a great offer doesn’t it? RULE OF THUMB: Don’t believe it because it’s not an honest deal. Unfortunately many web hosting companies will tell you this with the knowledge that you probably won’t read the entire details of the server that you purchased. 

If you have ever studied the Terms of Service or Service Level Agreement of your web hosting service thoroughly, you will surely see a section about its CPU/Server Usage. We’re almost sure that there’s a limit stated there (as there is always a limit for everything in life!) in which case your hosting is not “unlimited”. 

This only means that if your website uses more than a certain amount of storage, it violates the Terms of Service and will be subject to termination. Of course, it is necessary for just about every hosting service to have something like that in their Terms of Service to protect resources on their servers from improper usages. However, many web-hosting providers are using the CPU/Server Usage to get around their Unlimited Storage promises. Bottom line is to make sure to read the Terms of Service thoroughly to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth. 

With 25 years of experience in the IT industry and as one of the first Internet Service Providers in the Philippines – and a Tech Company at heart, iManila has the skills and the experience to help you with your online presence whether it be through website or email hosting, website design and development, applications development, technical support or digital marketing. We have a variety of hosting packages that are available to suit your needs. For more information, you can check out our Shared Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Business Cloud Hosting, WordPress Hosting and Dedicated Hosting services. Contact us and we can help you identify the best hosting package for your business needs.

Having a visually striking and aesthetically pleasing website is always a must when creating one for your business. While having strong messaging in your website can help conversions, it is often the visual and functional aspect of it that convinces viewers to stay a little bit longer scrolling through your pages. This is where a great website design comes into play, as a website’s design helps it to be more appealing and functional to its viewers. For new website owners who may not know where to start, we have rounded up important key factors to consider when designing a website. 

Design with an audience in mind

Your target audience will be the ones who will get to experience your website first hand. This is why it is important to think on their terms. Here is where you think about their pain points, what they are looking for to address those, questions and queries they might have, and an idea of their buying habits. These are just some of the information you can consider that can help you define your audience better and help give you a clearer picture of what your website should look like. 

Balance of form and function

Having the best looking website is always a must, but if it sacrifices speed of loading time and ease of navigation, then the design would be pointless. Add just the right amount of visuals to keep loading time short and play with options when it comes to the color scheme and layout to match your brand’s personality and help you stand out from your competition. 

Good design must also be very functional and since this is a website with many different pages, it must be easily navigatable by first-time users. Ensure that the most relevant information would be seen easily by viewers. Keep in mind that since the average viewer has a limited attention span, that they should be able to see the most important parts of the site. This is where hierarchy comes into play because adding all information in one place can be very confusing for website visitors. 

Create call-to-action buttons

One of the most important aspects of navigation in your website is a clear and distinguishable call-to-action. This is the best way to turn website visitors into actual leads and to potentially make a sale. Placing the call-to-action buttons in key locations in your website can be the push that your visitors need to make that purchase. Call-to-action buttons can range anywhere from: sign up, learn more, buy now, get a quote, contact us and more. 

Link your social media pages

In building brand awareness today, it is not enough to just utilize one channel. Make the most out of the website by also linking your other social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Websites are more informational so giving the visitors a chance to visit your other channels through social media platforms, allowing for two-way interaction between businesses and customers. Doing so is a great way to create another channel of communication with your users and consumers. The key is to create as many touchpoints with your customers and leave a lasting impression. 

Keep it SEO-friendly

It is not enough to just have a website. Having one that is SEO friendly is a huge step in being more visible to your visitors. Search engines like Google place a huge value on how SEO friendly a website is when it comes to how it ranks websites on its search engine results pages. 

Things like ensuring your website text has the right and relevant keywords you are targeting, adding alt text to images, and aligning your meta titles and descriptions according to best practice all point towards good SEO. Related to SEO is building great quality content, so building your website with good and direct-to-the-point content in mind would be most ideal in getting the most out of the traffic. 

At the end of the day, websites are there to generate web traffic for your business and turn them into customers. Having great web design is just one of the ways that you can help achieve this goal. What better way to start than by having experts create a compelling and unique website design for your business. 

With 25 years of experience in the industry, iManila is committed to providing our clients with innovative digital solutions. We are a full-service website development and digital marketing agency ready to help you with your web design, hosting, and digital marketing needs. See what iManila can do for your business today!

From the various methods of attracting customers online, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to generate online sales. For it to work efficiently, however, it has to be implemented correctly.

Whether you’re planning to hire a digital agency or simply want to make an SEO strategy work by yourself, being aware of the current trends is needed to help you gain brand awareness. Below are the most popular SEO trends you can use in 2021.

• Mobile SEO

As smartphones develop and become easier to use throughout the years, more and more people do most of their searching through a mobile device. For this reason, making your website as mobile-friendly as possible is important if you want to attract customers online.

To know how effective your mobile site is, you can try performing Google’s free mobile-friendly test on your website. Once done, all you need to do is to check the report on your Google Search Console.

• Voice search

Another trend that is also popular nowadays is the voice search technology that Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa provide. According to Google reports, at least  27% of the entire global population has used voice search on their mobile phones.

Additionally, ComScore, a media analytics company in America, has also stated that more than half of smartphone users are now engaging with voice search technology this 2021.

Since voice search optimization is constantly growing, we recommend optimizing voice search and researching various keywords that people use in everyday conversation. Also keep in mind that voice searches tend to do better with longer, more natural-sounding phrasing.

• Video advertisements

According to WordStream, a popular online advertising website, YouTube is currently ranked the second most popular search engine after Google with over 1 billion users. For this reason, this is a great way to market your brand to make web traffic efficiently.

To optimize your video content for search engines, all you need to do is optimize your video channel name and description. With that said, make sure that the description is not overloaded with keywords and directly tell viewers what your channel is all about.

• Featured snippets

If you aren’t familiar with this trend, featured snippets are basically the brief content that is shown in Google for any given search. Not only is this beneficial to potential clients, but also to your website as well.

To get the featured results, you can either provide an answer to a specific question or make bullet points for your content.

• Internal linking

Internal Linking has been an essential part of SEO for decades. This method basically helps  users find the pages they need when scrolling your website. To make it more easy to use, we recommend following these linking techniques:

• Content hubs: This is a one-pillar page that curates the best of your content in one place. It also gives your customers what they want which helps with brand engagement. 
• Faceted navigation: This refers to the filters utilized by sites that allow shoppers to narrow a product set by color, style, or other attributes.
• Linkpacks: This contains a pack of links at the bottom of your product pages that link to similar products. 
• Related hyperlinks: This is usually located in your blogs which links to other similar content.

Importance of SEO in digital marketing industry

SEO is getting more complex as we know it, so it is important to be up to date with the current trends. Luckily, here at iManila, we create various SEO strategies that can support your business objectives – whether that means driving awareness, generating leads, or increasing sales.

With 25 years of experience in the industry, iManila is committed to providing our clients with innovative digital solutions. We are a full-service website development and digital marketing agency ready to help you with your web design, hosting, and digital marketing needs. Inquire now and message us today!