The modern customer today is savvy, empowered and informed. Compared to the past, they are no longer passive recipients of targeted information about brands from watching TV, media platforms and newspapers. With the rise of social media, the power is in their hands to choose the information they want. In fact, they’re increasingly tired of the pervasive advertising on social media.
Our e-book “How Singapore BNPL empowers retailers to reach outside the box” presents how brands can turn this into an opportunity, find out more here.
In Southeast Asia, Singapore has one of the highest social media penetration rates, with users spending a lot of time on social media like YouTube, WhatsApp and Facebook. During the pandemic, the live broadcast application Bigo Live became the most popular mobile application, generating the largest consumption and expenditure in 2020.
According to Lore Oxford, Head of Global Cultural Insights at We Are Social, what a brand needs to do is not blindly obey the market or pursue expansion; it is more important to find your own brand and constantly interact with the consumer groups. This is a process of continuous dialogue and mutual nurturing between brands and consumers.
Here lies the biggest opportunity for brands to take the chance to set themselves apart through social media. In this blog post, we outline some helpful tips on how to market your brand and grow the business in this digital age.
- Connect with customers
- Branding needs to connect to customers with narratives that they can easily understand. In other words, data is not enough. Branding needs to disentangle customers’ cultural attributes, the language they use, and offer meaningful content for them.
- Ride on star power
- In fact, influencer marketing campaigns may even be more powerful than traditional marketing campaigns. Of the most viewed videos on YouTube, 86% are made by influencers, compared with 14% that are made by the beauty brands themselves. These key opinion leaders offer a stream of fresh and interesting self-made content which go a long way with connecting with the right audience.
- Everyone loves a real-life story
- Compared with expensive video content produced by the brand on its own, vlogs created by ordinary consumers resonate more strongly with potential customers. By inviting real customers to be brand ambassadors and share their real-life stories, it reflects the brand’s ethos of inclusiveness.
- Emphasis on social responsibility
- Millennial and Gen-Z’ers are increasingly concerned about issues like sustainable consumption, environmentally friendly products, organic foods, and ethical fashion. Brands with compelling stories about such issues can create more content to emphasise this aspect.
- Play with new technologies
- Be it augmented reality, virtual reality, NFTS and building rich worlds in the Metaverse, brands are on the cusp of a major revolution. It’s these creative new mediums that will truly make your brand stand out and create an immersive experience like never before.
Ultimately, having a constant supply of creative new ideas, the imagination to dream big and willingness to experiment with disruptive and novel approaches is crucial to win customers over.
Delve deeper in our e-book here and get an in-depth look on how retailers can successfully harness these strategies, for both traditional retailers and online start-ups.
The digital world is your playground – it’s up to you how to brave those frontiers.
