A glimpse at web marketing services in Cebu

The most difficult part in a competition is when a business owner only believes in traditional forms of marketing. Traditional marketing still works fine. It’s the prohibitive cost that makes it hard for small businesses in Cebu to compete with the big guys. While there are those who would like to try web marketing, they just don’t know where to find the experts. Almost always, they end up talking to an advertising agency and sign an advertising package with them that is still largely traditional in scope and method.

There are actually two problems which I believe have caused the rather slow growth of true- to-the-bone online marketing in Cebu. First, it's as if like a precious gem to find someone in Cebu who are adept in pay-per-click advertising (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing (SMM). Only a few ad agencies offer such type of services and from these very few, they actually outsource it to a third party which they could easily find in freelancing websites. The lack thereof is not really due to shortage of such experts but because they are more inclined to service clients overseas that outsource the task to them or only take projects that pay well. 

The second problem is that, business owners in Cebu, and for the most part in the country, have yet to appreciate and understand the value of web marketing and what it can do to reduce their traditional marketing costs. If you offer them SEO or PPC right now they would stare at you and tell you on the face “What on earth are you talking about?” The same reaction I got like 15 years ago when I told them that they would eventually need a website for their business.  

It will probably take another three to five years for businesses to understand the real value of web marketing tools such as Facebook, Twitter, search engines, Linked-in, Digg and etc. Businesses that are abreast on internet marketing technologies or those that have embarked on them already will be most likely to enjoy and benefit the most from what they started. As a matter of fact, the growth of real estate in Cebu can be largely attributed to the efforts of realty firms and online marketing agencies that have made the most of out of the cloud to market real estate using social media and internet advertising.

On the part of service providers, I would like to also think that advertising agencies have the responsibility to tell their clients to provide a cost comparison between traditional and online marketing. Many ad agencies tend to offer traditional media more as it is lucrative and easier to implement. Ad agencies should not take web marketing as a competition, but rather, leverage and embrace its potential to offer it as an adjunct service to their clients.

Web marketing when implemented correctly, is more sustainable and wider in coverage. An SEO service for instance has a minimum contract of six months, and when the result is already achieved, the service provider will enjoy a continued operation and maintenance fee to retain the position of a client’s website in search engines. 

Web marketing has wider coverage in a sense that the service can be offered to anyone. Meaning, ad agencies can reach out to more markets rather than dog-eat-dogging with one another to scrounge for local clients. Ad agencies already have the distinct advantage. They have the portfolio, the creative prowess and the marketing sense to strategize a campaign. All they need to do is to get to know more about online paid campaigns, learn the tools and a technical person to understand data structures and html codes and they will do just fine. 

Hence, while waiting for the local market to mature in terms of their appreciation for web marketing, ad agencies should start building their web capabilities to address an emerging demand for web marketing services at the local front.  

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