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LeapOut Gets Media Spotlight on Award-Winning TV & Radio Show Pilipinas, Ngayon Na

Tony Chua January 11, 2024

Marvin, LeapOut President and CEO, imparted digital marketing insights on the radio program on the topic Thriving Businesses: Ride the Digital Wave. Marvin Ortiz, LeapOut Co-Founder and CEO, had the honor of guesting in a radio program Pilipinas, Ngayon Na on January 8, 2024, aired on DWIZ 882 and Aliw TV 23 and hosted by Undersecretary (USec.) Robert Rivera and Lady Elyza. Marvin’s guesting highlighted the power of digital marketing and e-commerce to the hosts, who, like many ordinary Filipinos, are still not well-versed but are enthusiastic about this thriving sector. Helping Businesses Leap Into Digital At the start of the program, USec. Rivera stressed the importance of keeping abreast with developments taking place on the Internet. “We know that AI and digital are all over. That’s why communication time has been cut considerably. With the touch of a finger, you can video chat anywhere in the world and talk to anyone.” USec Rivera also admitted that many businesses in the Philippines are struggling to compete because they still opt to use traditional methods. However, he emphasized that to be competitive in today’s world, they need to keep up with the fast-changing business practices such as establishing an online business presence. Taking off from this backgrounder by USec Rivera, Marvin introduced LeapOut and its mission. He said that the company aims to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and even micro-enterprises “to leap into its digital transformation.” The company equips companies with capabilities to break into and then grow and succeed in the digital realm. “We are a digital marketing agency that helps businesses maximize their business presence online — especially legacy businesses — to spot more opportunities and thrive online.” “From First-Scale to Full-Scale” Marvin, one of the pioneers in the country’s digital marketing landscape, commented that it is LeapOut’s mission to help Filipino businesses, especially those who are eager to establish their footprint online via digital marketing. “The goal of digital companies is not only to share information but also to help users navigate the digital landscape by elevating their user experience. Usually, we help companies that have the vision and goal to serve online customers but have no capabilities and capacities to venture into digital media,” he said. To guarantee success in this transformation, Marvin said LeapOut is committed to empowering its clients to succeed from laying their foundation online to providing excellent customer experience. This end-to-end approach is what digital marketing professionals consider the “from first-scale to full-scale” approach. Using this extensive approach, the company has provided and is currently providing these services to its clients from SMEs to those belonging to the top ten Philippine companies. “We have already helped and continue helping businesses and organizations in the Philippines. in transforming their digital footprint,” Marvin added. LeapOut’s clients include household brands such as SM, Ajinomoto, Cebuana Lhuillier, Malayan Insurance, and Wilcon Depot. To accomplish this, LeapOut helps conceptualize, create, and compose digital content for its three key businesses: social media and content marketing, e-commerce, and paid media. The company started as a digital marketing agency. The company later ventured into e-commerce development and programmatic advertising. Screengrab of Marvin explaining how digital marketing benefits businesses during the radio interview streamed live on Pilipinas, Ngayon Na Facebook page. Hypertargeting 101 To showcase what digital marketing can do to businesses on the program, Marvin described the power of programmatic advertising. With this technology, companies can now show their marketing content and copies directly to their specific intended audience. He demonstrated this technology through an example. A company wants to offer two contents to two demographics: Content A is for seniors and Content B is for millennials. With programmatic advertising in Google and social media platforms, the company can show only Content A for seniors in the platform you subscribed to and Content B to only your target millennial audience. Since this method will only allow your content to be seen by your ideal audience, it provides amazing efficiency to your campaign. It lowers the cost as it prevents you from showing the ads to unintended audiences. And because only your target people can access your content, your probability of sales increases considerably. It Started With A Mission When talking about LeapOut’s mission, Marvin shared the humble beginnings of the company. He recalled the time when a plumber sought his service when he was still an advertising agent in 2009. Short of funds to pay for the ad, it took some time for the plumber to pay for the creative and publish it online. At a time when the internet was just starting and selling online services was difficult, the freelance plumber believed that the new tech would open business opportunities. This kindled Marvin’s passion to open an agency to serve as a launch pad for the growth of SMEs and micro businesses. With digital marketing, he believes these small and startup businesses have a “leveling playing field” where they can compete head-on with established companies and corporations. Cybersecurity Insights Aside from digital marketing, Marvin also provided his insights on cybersecurity, especially on email and social media accounts. “Social media accounts like Messenger and email addresses can be hacked and faked,” he stressed. One of his takeaways is to be mindful of emails that we receive. For email, check for the sender. To find out if the email address or URL is legitimate, check the domain name if it matches the exact spelling of the domain name (.com or .edu) of legitimate sites. Another thing you can do is to verify whether the sender uses a real name. When you are doubtful of the sender, you should research if the email is factual over the Internet or confirm with your friends and people you trust. Pilipinas, Ngayon Na! airs every 2 pm – 3 pm on DWIZ 882 kHz and Aliw TV 23. The entire interview can be streamed on the Pilipinas, Ngayon Na Facebook page.

Featured Blog

LeapOut Gets Media Spotlight on Award-Winning TV & Radio Show Pilipinas, Ngayon Na

Tony Chua January 11, 2024

Shopify SEO: Everything You Need To Know

March 14, 2022 1 Comment

In the age of the global pandemic, online stores have become one of the primary sources of goods for people. In response, brands are focusing on their e-Commerce websites and pages to meet the demand of their target consumers, utilizing various platforms like Shopify to establish their online presence. In fact, the platform has had a surge in usage as data shows its subscribers increased in number since October 2017. But with so many brands going on Shopify to establish their online stores, there’s bound to be competition. Businesses must continuously adapt to efficient methods and strategies to not get left behind. One such method is search engine optimization (SEO) for Shopify Stores. If you’re a beginner in the field of SEO, here’s what you need to know and how it can help boost your Shopify store. Why SEO is Important for Shopify Stores Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing a website through various methods to rank high on the Google search results. This is done in order to increase the number of people seeing the website link when they search for the relevant keywords. SEO solutions benefit not only a brand’s website traffic but also their profit. According to SearchEngineJournal.com, stores get almost twice as much traffic on their websites when they rank first compared to the one ranking second. While higher traffic is not the direct cause of increasing profit, there is a correlation. With more traffic comes more customers that will buy something from your store and add to your sales. Adding keywords to your Shopify store Your ranking can be affected by the following factors: Natural links leading to your page from other websites Engagement-based website authority Domain name age Optimized website structure and content While the first three are hard to control, especially when you’re just starting, the last part can be done with the use of good keywords on your website. When choosing them, certain factors should be considered. Namely, what are your competitors ranking high on, and what types of keywords to target. Experts recommend checking competitors’ keywords to get an idea of what the competition is doing and what keywords to target. It also helps to analyze why precisely these competitors are ranking high and why your shop isn’t. Another thing to consider when choosing keywords is if certain ones are easy to rank on. For example, most shops use the long-tail form because it’s more specific and targeted. In addition, it’s easier to rank on due to low competition. Still, shops must learn to consider the customer’s search intent or why they’re searching that phrase. Whether the intent is informational, transactional, commercial, or navigational, the keywords you’re targeting should match the content on your website. Applying SEO to home, product, and collection pages The best way to apply SEO on your Shopify page is to use keywords into the following: Meta titles – The search engine checks your title tag and your content to see if they match. Meta description – This is the quick summary of what your content entails and can be seen under the meta title when the page appears on your search results. Image alt text – As the search engine can read text but not images, alt texts are necessary so they can be crawled. Page content – The recommendation is to use unique, readable content with the keywords integrated seamlessly. All of these should be done for the home, product, and collection pages. Make sure that the meta titles and meta descriptions are SEO-friendly and persuasive enough to attract people. For the product and collection pages, keywords must be inserted in the alt text of the product, collection, and featured images. Add rich snippets or structured data to inform users of more product details and entice them to click. Moreover, other measures to help optimize a website are to put descriptive file names on the images, match the link text of internal links to the page they’re linking to, submit a sitemap to Google for verification, and hide content that might negatively affect SEO through robots.txt. While Shopify has automatic features that you may not need to optimize structure or create your own robots.txt file, you can still make an effort to improve things manually. For the robots.txt file, you can allow or prevent certain URLs from being crawled, block specific crawlers, and more. Fixing the page loading times of your store With all the efforts to optimize your Shopify store, you can run into different kinds of issues. A common one is the site speed, usually caused when loading images featured in collections pages. A slow loading time is a bad thing, as 47% of online shoppers typically expect a 2-second load time. Otherwise, they’re likely to leave your site in favor of others. Fortunately, there are ways to fix this through Shopify’s platform. For one, selecting a lightweight Shopify theme can do wonders, as some take longer and shorter than others. You can also optimize the images themselves, using .JPG files over .PNG as the former’s file sizes are smaller. Lastly, you can use the lazy loading function so that the images load as you scroll down, therefore decreasing the time it takes to load. By doing these, you’ll be able to reduce the bounce rate, the percentage of users leaving your site after only viewing a single page. Sample SEO projects LeapOut has done various SEO work for a variety of clients. Such high-profile clients include Sports Central, an online store apparel in the Philippines, and Crate & Barrel, a high-end home decor store. For Sports Central, the website visibility is 8.88% as of January 2022. This is a good improvement from the initial visibility at 7.32% last July 2021. Moreover, from an authority score of 16 last June 2021, the website increased to 35. Its scores last November and December were 38 and 36, respectively, with the drop associated with the migration to a different domain. Otherwise,

New Google Ads Lead Form Extensions: How To Get More Leads

February 22, 2021 No Comments

Another simple yet significant tool for search engine marketing in the Philippines and around the world has occurred when Google made its recent announcement. The leading pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform now allows advertisers to present their lead form when people click on their ad on search engine result pages (SERP). As consumers are becoming smarter, they constantly find new ways to be more informed. And for the industry of digital marketing in the Philippines, the competition to get leads is getting tougher. To make this easier, Google made in-SERP lead form extensions available to help both advertisers and their audiences reach their goals faster. For more information regarding the use and benefits of this extension, keep reading: How does it work? First, create a lead form extension in Google Ads and add it to your campaign. This is available for Search, Video, and Discovery (Gmail) campaigns. When a user clicks your ad, the extension would pop up a form directly without the need of a clickthrough. Upon interacting and opening the form, the audience could request or download information from your brand. This is done by submitting their contact details like email address, phone number, and other information in exchange. Afterwards, they would be asked to visit the advertiser’s site or go back to the SERP, video, or email. What are the considerations? Aside from having a good history of compliance, assess what kind of content you would be using. When creating lead form extensions, sensitive or adult content is not eligible. From Google’s help page, you also have to provide a link to your privacy policy to appear at the end of the lead form. And for Video or Discovery campaign users, you need more than $50,000 USD total spend in Google Ads or equal before proceeding. What are the advantages? One of the extension’s benefits is generating leads more effectively and efficiently to drive conversions for your business or organization. Having a pop-up lead form on the SERP, video, or your email presents a quicker way of collecting your audience’s information. Thus, this gives you advantage over their diminishing attention span with ads. You now have the chance to move these leads further down your marketing funnel and reach your business goals. In the future, more people could respond to your ads, as this extension makes the whole process easier for both parties involved. How can the leads be managed? You can manage your lead data by downloading them in a CSV file. Another way to do it would be to create a webhook integration to have leads moved directly into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. However, keep in mind that you can only download leads submitted in the last 30 days. Because of this, you would have to download your leads often. What are the things to keep in mind? Even if PPC visitors are 50% more likely to convert than organic visitors, you should still improve all other marketing efforts in your arsenal. Use the Google Ads in-SERP lead extension forms to support the strategies you already have. Make the most of creating and optimizing for Google Ads in Search, Video, and Discovery by constantly researching for better practices from bigger companies, your competition, and Google itself. This includes regularly improving your keywords, creating simple but enticing ads, having a strong call-to-action, and reviewing your campaign performance. Additionally, your PPC efforts would be a lot more effective in conjunction with your search engine optimization, website and app development, and social media marketing as well. With your paid and organic strategies going hand in hand, you are likely to attract more well-intent leads for your business or cause. You would be able to provide value for your audience while getting the value you desire in return. For better assistance with gaining more relevant leads, consult your trusted digital marketing agency in the Philippines today to get you started!

Facebook Advertising: The Impact Of Removing Page Likes

January 22, 2021 No Comments

Every day is a new opportunity for the social media giant Facebook to improve and advance its services. But whether their changes get reported in advance or abruptly, these decisions can easily affect the digital marketing industry in the Philippines and all around the world. Just recently, Facebook has announced a design revamp on their public pages in the platform. This would include an updated look, navigation, news feed, engagement format through Q&A, tools, and insights among others. Most importantly, pages from companies, organizations, public figures, and artists would no longer have the “like” button. The removal of this feature could significantly affect the way Facebook advertising is managed in the long run. For a better understanding, here’s what to expect once Facebook removes the like button especially for brands, and what can be done about it: Redirected focus to what’s really important Instead of the likes being the main metric of a page’s reach, Facebook wants its users to focus more on the followers. The leading social platform has explained that the former metric can be deceiving, and is not representative of a page’s true popularity. A like is initially designed for the user to show interest and support for a page. On the other hand, a “follow” would suggest that the user is choosing to see content and updates posted by this page. So while having many likes is a good thing, this does not necessarily mean that the “likers” want to see or engage with this page on their newsfeeds. By putting more attention on a brand’s following, social media managers could better see and analyze who the fans of their content and offering really are. More stable and accurate measurement Sometimes, the difference between the amount of page likes and followers is not big enough to cause a brand a huge worry. However, if there is a sizable discrepancy between these numbers in the first place, then something might need to change with the brand. This suggests that a new social media marketing strategy is necessary, in order to avoid losing more followers in the future. Additionally, brands could maximize the use of their follower data with this Engagement Rate by post formula from Hootsuite: Engagement Rate of Post = Total engagements on a post / Total followers *100 According to the popular social media management platform, the follower count is generally a more stable metric to use than dividing total engagements by reach. This is because the amount of reach could fluctuate more often, therefore possibly result in inaccurate data. However, keep in mind that other KPIs must still be measured in comparison, to see the bigger picture of a brand’s progress. Opportunity to adjust strategy & content Although garnering many likes is pleasing and gratifying, it could end up nothing more than a vanity metric for brands. Instead, focus on quality over quantity. Spend more time growing committed followers by producing creative and relevant content. Do not underestimate the impact of regularly engaging and being responsive with these followers as well. Unlike most likers, followers are more helpful for brands, as it is more possible to get them through the end of the customer journey. Starting from awareness, these followers are more likely to end up making a purchase decision—which is more significant in achieving the brand’s business goals overall. In the end, removing Facebook likes could cause some brands to stagger a bit at the start. But with more considerations for content strategy, they would be building up their pages for better, more tangible results now and in the long run.

Advertiser FAQs on iOS14’s impact on Facebook Ads

January 12, 2021 No Comments

Among many offerings of Apple’s latest iOS 14 update, one contentious feature is the AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework, which aims to provide more privacy to users. Apple’s iOS marks user data with an Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) system, and ATT will allow users the choice to withhold their IDFA from advertisers, preventing data tracking through apps. ATT also prevents advertisers from combining advertising data across apps. Needless to say, this will heavily impact the movement of major advertisers and social media marketing as we know it. Facebook has continuously spoken against the move since it was first announced in early 2020, saying that this will drop developers’ ad revenue by up to 40 percent. Apple has stressed that advertising without first-party information is possible, an example being grouping users by similar characteristics without disclosing identities. Now, Facebook is prepping to roll out new advertising systems to address changes that ATT will bring in. The OS update became available to users in September last year, but the ATT framework will be rolled out early this 2021 to give advertisers time to strategize. Now, advertisers and digital marketing agencies will have to innovate in running campaigns. With the short time left before the digital marketing landscape undergoes a major shift yet again, we look at the primary questions we need to ask about the ATT’s impact on the bread-and-butter platform of most digital marketing agencies in the Philippines: Facebook ads. What user data will advertisers lose with iOS 14? With ATT, iOS 14 users will be prompted in the App Store to opt out of data tracking from apps. Apple considers tracking data as, but not limited to, the following: device locations, email lists, advertising IDs, third-party advertising IDs, SDKs and displaying targeted ads. ATT also prevents advertisers from combining data between apps for the purpose of consumer profiling. This will directly impact the efficacy and optimization of tailored ads and campaigns. In a statement, Facebook has said that it is developing an Aggregated Event Measurement system for OS users, preserving user privacy per ATT’s standards while also providing developers enough data to run effective campaigns. How will this affect advertiser Facebook campaigns? In the event of retargeting an audience or creating lookalike audiences, iOS 14 devices or users might not be included anymore. Advertisers’ Pixels (which is a site’s single unique code connected to each Facebook ads account) will also be limited to eight conversion events at a time, which will prove tracking difficult for businesses with multiple custom conversion steps and products. Apple will also not allow incentivizing users with gated content to allow tracking permissions. Per Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines: 5.1.1 (iv), Advertisers may, however, explain why they need users’ permission, but they must also be transparent on how the data will be used. Advertisers must also honor a user’s permission settings, and no attempt of manipulation, trickery, or force is allowed to obtain consent of unnecessary user data submission. Which KPIs might be impacted? KPIs based around events happening outside of Facebook will suffer. For example: traffic centered around landing page views, conversions via iOS app installs and catalog sales outside of Facebook will not be accurately tracked anymore. However, events within Facebook such as link clicks will not be affected. Another Facebook change to note is the loss of longer conversion window tracking. Soon, Facebook will only be tracking the following: 1-day click 7-day click (default) 1-day click and 1-day view 7-day click and 1-day view How do we prepare for the new changes? There is still much we can’t determine for certain before ATT and Facebook’s changes are fully implemented, but here are some steps advertisers can take as early as now. Determine how much of your market is on iOS: This is so you can plan ahead on how much of your data will be compromised. You can also start switching your strategy to be more lead generation-heavy so you can rely less on Pixel for data. Verify your domain: Facebook recommends domain verification to prevent domain disruption. This will also enable advertisers to maximize the Aggregated Event Measurement feature once it becomes available Narrow down your events: Since only eight conversion events at a time can be done, set your priorities on what your top priorities are for tracking. Update to Facebook’s SDK for iOS 14 version 8.1: Facebook says that their iOS 14 version 8.1 SDK supports Apple’s SKAdNetwork API. This will enable measurement of app install ads. The new shift is sure to significantly impact iOS data measurement and interpretation as we know it. But the only constant in the digital marketing space has always been changing, and innovating to adapt is something digital players are no stranger to. With smart planning beforehand, advertisers can stay ahead of the curve to craft defensive strategies and continue bringing relevant marketing materials to consumers.