This is the number 1 question on everybody’s mind whether you’re a small, medium or large business owner. There is no direct answer to this as it depends on whether do you have a clearly defined marketing objective, your personal belief in going digital and how many channels you would like to penetrate. The most common situation we face is that stakeholders do not have a clearly defined marketing objective, roadmap and mismatched budget.

Before the age of Facebook and Google, only businesses with very deep pockets can do marketing. The cost of marketing in newspapers, TV and billboards costs hundreds and thousands of dollars each time. Small businesses were stuck with giving out flyers at MRT Stations, Bus Interchanges and Letter Boxes.

Today, we see many brand new startup and young entrepreneurs overtaking long-running family businesses and taking up their market share tremendously. This is made possible thanks to digital marketing. Digital marketing cost only a fraction of traditional marketing and you can even target the right audience and not spend blindly.

So, is Digital Marketing expensive?

This really depends on the nature of business. One is more inbound and the other is more outbound. But both are equally important in the consumer journey. This being said, we’d recommend one over the other depending on your nature of business and defined marketing objectives. Depending on your marketing budget, we will be able to manage and prioritise the different platforms at different points of the marketing journey.

Setup a zoom meeting. Reviews and testimonials on websites don’t really mean much as it is difficult to verify if they are real or not in this age.

Speak with them. See if they can understand your needs and able to guide your through a roadmap and define your marketing objectives. A good digital marketing company will not say “Yes” to everything. They will know when to say “No”. Look at the credentials of the person managing the company accounts. 

Overall, there’s alot more pros than cons as agency marketers are experts in their field. If you think you want to DIY but unsure or may not be able to afford to outsource fully to a company, try outsourcing only certain components instead.

However, if budget is still an issue, then engage an agency for a one off in-depth consultation or for a market research report and take it from there. A detailed market research report (using the Enterprise Singapore market research standard as a baseline) will cost roughly between $1,500 – $4,000 depending on its depth.