In this article, you will learn how to implement successful social media marketing campaigns in Singapore’s market.
Let’s dive in:
We always hear of the term Social Media Marketing.
But have you ever wondered, how exactly should one go about performing their social media marketing?
According to Wikipedia, Social Media Marketing refers to the usage of Social Media platforms and websites to promote products and services.
This form of marketing allows customers and internet users to post user-generated content rather than using advertising copies prepared by marketers.
Social Media Marketing refers to using the platforms that are widely available out there with the prevalence of the internet to market your business.
The most prevalent platforms out there in the world include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.
With tons of information about Social Media Marketing Strategies on the internet, we have condensed it into a bite-sized guide so that you can easily digest and understand.
Getting started with social media can be a little overwhelming for many small businesses.
But many times, not many business owners know how to even begin.
Some of the common questions that we usually get is “How to start social media marketing for small business?” or “What kind of content is good for small businesses specifically?”
These two questions are interlinked with each other because social media is all about content marketing.
In order to start, you need to determine the purpose of your content and build a solid social media marketing strategy so that your marketing efforts are fully utilised.
The last thing you want to ask yourself is “Why am I not getting the results I want despite posting content on social media regularly?”
When it comes to advertising on social media, most Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore are producing advertisements the traditional way.
In their ads, they talk only about themselves, their products and their services.
But do you know that no one goes onto social media like Facebook, Instagram or YouTube to figure out about a particular business, its history, how many employees, etc.
These advertisements are only effective for big companies and big brands like Coca-Cola that posts about themselves on social media.
As an SME, start small and take a step at a time.
You want to communicate what does the customer get or what kind of problems can your company solve for them before you talk about your product, services or business.
It is important to first analyse your customers.
Be very specific to the niche they are in.
Then identify their pain points, the problems that they might have now or even future problems they have never thought about before.
Once you have obtained the required information, you can start to create content on how they can use your products or services as a solution to their problems.
For example, you are a property agent and your customers are all buyers in general.
As you drill down your customers profiling, you may want to target families and new couples.
That’s where you can identify the problems by reverse engineering what your customer wants and then create bite-sized content that are helpful for your customers.
This way, you will see a lot more engagement and a lot more sales from your marketing efforts.
Now that you know how to start your social media campaign, keep in mind the golden rule:
“Talk about your how you can help your customer, not your business, product or services.”
How many times should you post on social media per day or per week or per month?
Now it really depends on what placement you’re on.
Placement meaning whether the posting is on stories, or on the news feed?
Generally on the feed, you don’t want to flood it with information.
About once or twice a day, that’s probably sufficient and safe for a lot of organisations.
If you don’t have a lot of pieces of content, it’s fine to post once or twice a week.
It is important to make sure that those pieces of content actually gain engagement.
These postings should contain interesting pieces of content.
The last thing you want is to post every single day just for the sake of posting and have no real reason why you post with no real engagement purpose for the piece of content.
There is another piece of placement that is called ‘Stories’.
‘Stories’ are the vertical pieces of placement whereby people look through very quickly.
For stories, you can post them freely.
There isn’t really a limit to the amount of pieces of content you can post.
You can post a hundred pieces of content.
That’s okay because on certain days, you could have a high key event and you want to do a behind the scene where you are just capturing every single angle of the event.
The news feed is a holy grail of conversion and if your content is cluttered, people will unsubscribe or unfollow your page.
As people who are on social media often engage with their social circle, they want to engage with interesting content.
Your ideal content here should capture people’s attention.
For instance, posting a video about “5 ways you can purchase real estate without any money in Singapore” would capture way more attention than “Guide to buying real estate in Singapore”.
Therefore, you should leave your hallmark pieces of content to the news feed.
Examples include your milestone pieces of content such as winning an award.
For the rest of your content, you could place them into your ‘Stories’.
‘Stories’ are mostly the captured moments of your day-to-day life.
They include anything and everything that you want to test out.
However, if you are doing it on YouTube, you can probably have longer pieces of content.
For instance, these pieces of content that goes up to 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and even 45 minutes because people on YouTube actually consume a lot length of content.
On the other hand, people on social media consume very short pieces of content.
In general, the frequency of posting depends on the context of your business.
A guideline to follow is once or twice a day on the news feed and unlimited times on stories.
We want to address this commonly asked question once and for all.
The answer is “The number of ‘likes’ don’t really matter in the Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) context.”
On the contrary, the number of ‘Likes’ may matter if you are a big brand like Nike or Adidas.
This is because their success is being measured by the level of engagement for the content that they produce.
These big boys want brand stickiness and they are going for brand engagement, brand awareness and brand recall.
If you are a business owner of an SME, you should be focusing on content that brings you closer to sale and that means the actual dollars being transacted.
You can have many ‘likes’ for a piece of content and not get you any sale for the next 10 years.
Is it worthy of your effort to wait that long before you get a sale?
In fact, we have personally ran a campaign for a new page starting with 0 likes, and achieved SGD$36,000 worth of revenue with $4,871.14 ad spend; 7.4x return on investment!
As a business owner of an SME, it is important to ensure that there is a sale point, a purpose and an end goal whenever you develop content for your social media platforms.
Bare in mind that this does not mean that you should shove down promotions and only talk about your products or services to your ideal customers.
The content should consist of solutions to solve specific pain points and customers will remember you as the service provider that has the solution to their problems.
When your potential customers know that you have the solution to their problems, they usually are interested.
This opens up opportunities where your prospects are more willing to let you pitch your solution to them, explain how you can help them and then sell them your solution.
A content that is very specific and targeted towards the pain points of the prospect can allow you to lead them down the lead generation journey (or funnel).
Eventually, the prospect will convert and turn into buyers.
With that, would you agree that focusing on sales is much more important that keeping track of the number of ‘likes’ you get?
Based on our personal experience, some of our clients have never ‘like’ a single post on our social media platforms and yet engage us for our social media marketing services.
We also have clients that are not even the followers of our social media page.
This is because all the client needs is a piece of good content with useful information that are extremely targeted to their problems.
They will be more inclined to call and work with you.
You may have heard a lot about how ‘likes’ and ‘views’ are important for your social media marketing campaigns.
To a certain extent, more ‘likes’ can bring in sales because there is engagement.
But the sale that is transacted may be due to your content which happened to be relevant that make your customers know that they can work with you.
Some say that buying ‘likes’ will also benefit the brand due to inflated follower count.
This is actually really bad for the algorithm of Facebook because they will now take these followers as signals that they’re the kind of people you are looking for on Facebook.
Future engagement and even ad performance will be optimized towards these bought likes/followers which are often not our ideal customers.
(For example, buying followers from India will signal the algorithm to look for more Indian national profiles even if we set out targeting in Singapore only)
Another misconception that many business owners have is that they can use the hard selling tactics on social media platforms.
It used to work (probably five years ago) but in today’s context, this strategy might not be as effective as you think.
Consumers are more tech-savvy nowadays and they are always looking for solutions to meet their needs.
So, now that you know how to make use of quality content to bring your customer closer towards the sale.
Let us know how effective is this strategy working for your business.
For social media marketing, the priority should lie within finding out who your audience is.
Is your audience leaning more towards an older crowd?
Or is your audience targeted towards people with a bit more buying power?
Facebook is the ideal social media platform for businesses looking towards targeting:
This is largely due to Instagram being a relatively young platform, with the age of the general audience somewhere between their 20s to 30s.
When it comes to absolute viewers, Facebook’s 2.2 billion active users beats out Instagram’s users, which has only about 900 million people.
People are also more likely to click on an Ad on Facebook as they have been conditioned.
Understanding the behaviors of users in each platform is also crucial to achieve your objectives.
Instagram is the ideal social media platform for businesses looking towards targeting:
You should be executing your marketing efforts on Facebook for engagement if your target market is not the younger crowd.
This is because Facebook is not only the primary social media platform where sales are transacted.
You can actually get high quality leads which can result in the growth of your business.
Before you settle on a social media platform, it is vital that you have a clear objective of your marketing campaign and business goals.
For example, Instagram is a social media platform that places heavy focus on vibrant images, engagement and its nature tends to be less salesy.
Generally, Instagram users are more interested in visual graphics where they are able to see nice pictures and catch up on what their friends are doing.
If you are selling a service that requires personal details of your customers, or you are redirecting your Ads to a separate website/ landing page, you may find your campaign less effective on Instagram.
This is because the user’s intention is not to shop on Instagram.
One thing for sure is that we cannot change the nature of the social media platform.
If you are encountering challenges to market your campaigns, you may want to relook into the purpose of your campaign, conduct split tests and fit it into your chosen social media platform.
Posting of organic content on both Facebook and Instagram is possible and can prove to be effective.
Thanks to Facebook and Instagram Stories, you have the opportunity to fire both your content from one social media platform to the next.
This is because Facebook Stories allows you to publish your posts from Instagram Stories too, and in essence, take advantage of both social media platforms without having to post twice.
While posting on both platforms can be good for your business, it is ultimately better to understand your audience and identify them on the right platform.
If you just want to focus on one platform, some of the questions you can ask yourself include:
By choosing the right social media platform that is best for your business, you will not only be able to focus on the audience that you need, but it will make it easier for your business to succeed.
When it comes to the cost of social media advertisements (Ads) in Singapore, most businesses quote by day.
This means looking at advertising that is anywhere from $15 to $20 a day and start testing out your campaigns.
If you spend about $15 or $20 a day, you’ll probably get close to a thousand people (that are targeted) to view your video ads during that day.
By simply spending up to $50 in total, you should be able to gather the required information and determine if your Ad is effective or not.
An effective Ad is where people are responding and engaging well to your Ad.
While $15 or $20 is the base amount, for businesses, the costs are usually much higher if you’re looking to scale up the impact of your Ads without dramatically increasing the cost.
For this, you will need to have an understanding on how to make your Ads effective.
Instead of spending all of your money and throwing everything into a single ad, perhaps it’s better to split your Ads and space them out into multiple videos, with different talking points in each of them.
If your business is about to launch a new exciting project somewhere, you will find many different points to talk about.
Here’s how it works from the example of a real estate agent running Facebook advertisements below:
First Video Ad
As a property developer, you can first talk about the appreciation gain that was acquired through the development of a particular area.
Second Video Ad
Your video could be focusing on the master plan and how that specific master plan is going to develop.
Third Video Ad
Feature the actual condo itself!
You can focus on particular units, talk about the ideal facing for swimming pools or the west sun, and largely regarding the condo’s feng shui.
By utilizing all of the factors and examples above, you can create mini and micro content that allows you to push out more of these content pieces.
Then, let Facebook or other social media platforms test out your content pieces and find how effective your Ads are.
When you do receive an increase in likes, shares, enquiry or comments in a certain content piece (say the master plan), you can then have an idea of what your consumers like and what they want to know.
From there, continue to create more content pieces revolving around the master plan, or your most engaging topic.
There are many agents and businesses in general that are creating copious amounts of content, simply throwing it out there, and hoping that the social media ads will be effective.
For them, they might have spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on videos and Ads that they themselves don’t know if it will work out.
That is not a cost effective way to go about formulating your marketing.
Creating smaller pieces of content is beneficial in the long run because:
Creating more content pieces not only aids you in getting more people on board, but enables you to grow brand loyalty from your audience.
They will be able to see that your business contains many different facets, rather than just one particular attribute.
Single ads that focus on one particular product and pushes the consumer to click that button and sell them that product at a 20% discount doesn’t work anymore on social media.
It’s better to think of strategic ways to roll out your content so that it makes sense for your business, so that your audience can engage with your business better.
It can be exciting and overwhelming when you build your social media marketing plan for the first time.
There are so many factors and considerations to building a successful social media campaign in Singapore.
If executed right, it can truly benefit and boost your business.
We hope that this guide has allowed you to at least understand what is social media marketing and make it a little easier for you to get started in your social media marketing journey.
Check out our digital marketing course to get a head start with social media marketing in Singapore.
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