Virtually all businesses and brands have delved into digital marketing, and the only way to gain the edge is to start doing social media marketing in Singapore.
While social media marketing will help increase the reach of your digital marketing campaigns, unfortunately, most marketers do not do it right.
In this article, we look at the benefits of doing social media marketing in Singapore.
We have also looked into the ways that you can work around social media marketing to enjoy the various benefits.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing refers to the processes of creating, publishing, and sharing content on various social media sites.
This is not restricted to social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, but it also includes sites such as blogs, wikis, instant messaging, podcasts, video sharing sites, and more.
With such a wide array of social media platforms, you need to have a robust social media strategy that you can adapt to each of the platforms.
Benefits of Doing Social Media Marketing in Singapore
With that said, these are the benefits of social media marketing in Singapore in 2019 and beyond.
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Increase Brand Recognition and Loyalty
Many digital marketers labour tirelessly to fine-tune their digital marketing campaigns by focusing on search engine and SEO campaigns.
While it works, the shift in customer dynamics has made it necessary to undertake social media marketing more seriously.
At least 80% of internet users in Singapore access various social media platforms every day.
This makes social media the perfect place to interact with your target audience. When done correctly, social media marketing will increase brand engagement. This, in turn, increases brand recognition and loyalty.
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More Opportunities to Convert
Digital marketers are finding it much more difficult to convert leads into paying customers, and this is where social media marketing comes in.
The race to appear higher on search engines is also more competitive, and it takes a lot of time and money to rank high for your target keywords. Social media marketing, on the other hand, helps you reach out to potential customers in a much more effective manner.
For example, Google and Twitter have a partnership where the relevant tweets to the searchers’ query will appear on the search results.
The searcher can click on your Twitter page, where you need to have links to your website and blog. With proper on-page SEO and valuable content on your blog, you will convert the searcher into a paying customer.
Besides that, every post on your social media is an opportunity to convert your audience to customers. For this reason, you need to ensure that you have properly optimised content with appropriately placed CTAs on your landing pages.
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Increased Inbound Traffic
With so many social media platforms, you should strive to get as many followers clicking on links that will take them to your website.
However, to make this possible, you need to have relevant and appealing content that will entice your audience to click through to your website or blog.
On top of this, you need to use the appropriate targeting ads to ensure that you drive high-quality traffic to your site.
This could include Facebook and Twitter ads, boosting posts, as well as sponsored content. Without social media, your business will only get interaction from existing customers, with few chances of getting new customers.
With that said, you should ensure that every social media profile you create should be an opportunity to lead customers to your website. On top of this, you need to ensure that you have relevant and valuable content that will entice new visitors to convert.
Ideally, at least 8% of your annual revenue should go-to digital marketing and half that to social media marketing. You need quality content on your social media to trigger more inbound traffic.
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Decreased Marketing Costs
As marketing trends changes, marketers are debating the ROI of digital marketing.
There are hundreds if not thousands of businesses in Singapore today that are still using TV, Radio, and print advertising which can sometimes sum up to millions of dollars.
However, an effective Facebook can increase traffic to your site, and retain the customers at a much cheaper cost and resources.
This is how social media marketing in Singapore helps to reduce social media investments and thus increase ROI
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- It allows for an immediate response, and you can convert a potential customer without reinvesting into the campaign
- Satisfied customers will share their experiences on their profiles, and this word of mouth marketing is more trustworthy to the customers, and it is free
- Social media allows you to market your brand much quicker than traditional marketing methods
- Thanks to communities, you can respond to customer feedback which results in more brand engagement
- With instant feedback, you will spend less on market surveys and direct sales
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Higher Brand Authority
Modern customers are on the lookout for a brand that goes the extra mile to engage and interact with them.
With over 3 million social media users in Singapore, a majority of the people take to social media to brag and complement a product or service. Besides, social media platforms have become a link to what people know and what they want to know.
To get the ball rolling, you can interact with influencers in your field to get people talking especially when you have launched a discount on your products or services, or you are running a contest.
This leads to new followers looking out for ways your content, products, or services can provide a solution to their needs.
Consequently, the more people talk about your brand on social media, the more authoritative and valuable it will become.
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Better Search Engine Ranking
Google is constantly updating its algorithms to keep up with consumer dynamics. Since social media is widely used by the majority of people, it has become a factor in search results page ranking.
With that said, your SEO tactics might fail to help you rank high for your target keywords, but social media marketing will.
This is not only applicable to the mainstream search engines, but also to the integrated social media search engines.
Google and other search engines are now including social media content. For this reason, any brand worth its salt is doing social media marketing in Singapore to better its chances of ranking higher on search engines.
More so, your brand will come off as legit, trustworthy, and credible.
This will better your search engine rankings for your target keywords. It is, therefore, important that you pair your SEO efforts with proper social media marketing in Singapore.
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Richer Customer Experiences
Social media marketing provides an opportunity for brands to interact with customers and demonstrate their best level of customer service. This is an opportunity to enrich your customer relationship in a simpler yet effective manner.
This calls for you to respond to every message, complaint, and reply to your posts.
For example, if a customer complains about your product on Twitter, you should respond on the platform, and immediately take action to solve the problem.
On the other hand, if you get a compliment, you should thank the users and recommend other products.
This means that you should turn on mobile notifications on your social media platforms to know when a customer reaches out to you.
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Improved Customer Insights
Social media data was once used to measure the impact of marketing campaigns, but today, it is essential in uncovering consumer insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKaTSUq3jd4
You can use the customer insights to follow the digital trail left behind by customers on the sales cycle.
However, most marketers have not yet realised how to leverage social media data to improve customer experience.
The data from your social media marketing campaigns hold more than just a means of measuring success, but they can help you improve user experience by
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- Understanding digital trends
- Analysing and qualifying your audience
- Improving your products
- Tracking brand reputation
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Higher Conversion Rates
With over 3 million social media users on social media, properly done social media marketing can wildly improve your conversion rates.
However, it can be difficult to achieve the conversion rates that you need when doing it manually.
That is why you need a conversion rate tool to automate the process and guarantee higher conversion rates. You will need to ensure you get the following points into your social media strategy to increase the conversion rates
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- Ensure that your links are pointing to the relevant landing pages
- Create informative, relevant, and valuable content
- Use interesting headlines
- Optimise your posts for each social media platform
- Assess your data constantly
- Schedule your posts and interactions
- Re-share and repurpose your content
Social Media Marketing Hacks to Grow Your Business
Surely, you cannot ignore social media if you want to scale up your business.
The above benefits will give your brand more leverage in the current competitive digital world of business. With customers’ attention spans getting shorter, you need to devise ways of continuously connecting with the target customers via the different social media platforms.
Here are 10 social media marketing hacks to enable you to reap maximum results.
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Understand the Different Customer Personas
Before doing any form of marketing, it’s imperative to do extensive market research to know the needs and expectations of your customers.
Use different social media platforms to create different customer personas as every site has a varying demographic user base.
Knowing the different personas will help you come up with stellar ways of engaging the target customers. 32.5% of TikTok users are aged between 10 and 19 years. On the other hand, 33.1% of Instagram users are aged between 25 and 34 years.
Such information will help you decide whether launching a marketing campaign on either of the platforms is a viable idea.
For example, if you run an online clothing business, you can decide to run two marketing campaigns on each platform concurrently.
Monitor the results achieved from each platform to know the specific areas that you should improve.
Virtually all sites have an analytics page with important metrics about the campaign such as total number of comments, number of new followers, number of messages received within a given period and more.
Use the reports to know which form of content best relates to the target customers on each social media platform you use for marketing.
Concisely, understanding the different personas of your customers will help you to create laser-focused content and campaigns.
It will also save you time and money that you would have spent creating the wrong content or running campaigns on the platforms whose users are not interested in your brand.
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Apply the Less is More Approach
Three years ago, social media marketing strategies focused on quantity than quality.
Brands that posted multiple times per hour enjoyed massive popularity on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. The main goal was to be in the minds of the target customers at all times.
Today, companies focus more on posting quality content to spur engagement with the target customers. Posting too many posts overwhelms the customers thereby painting a negative image of the brand to customers.
A recent study by Hubspot revealed that posting more than two times per day has the potential of significantly reducing engagement.
Some of the factors that you should consider when developing a posting frequency are the average age of your followers, their browsing habits, and location.
Concisely, for your brand to stand out from the crowd and grow to its full capacity, you should apply the less is more approach.
Instead of posting randomly, you should channel your energies to sending outposts that resonate with the target audience.
The posts should be valuable and thoughtful for them to be effective in encouraging followers to visit your website and shop.
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Post More Video Content
In the current digital world of business, the demand for video content is literally insatiable.
According to Cisco Visual Networking, 80% of the global internet traffic in 2022 was from video content. In the social media realm, video is the most preferred form of content.
This is one of the most plausible reasons why videos get more engagement than text and visuals.
60% of online shoppers report having decided to buy a product or service after viewing a video posted on social media.
Today, virtually all social media platforms pay more attention to video than other types of content.
Facebook, the largest social media platform, is widely used by brands to connect with their customers.
Natively shared videos on this site are given more priority than text and other visuals. They get 86% more reach and so they are more effective in spreading the word about a product or service.
That said, you shouldn’t ignore other platforms such as Instagram and Twitter as they also have thousands of followers.
They are different types of videos that you can create to connect with the customers. They include;
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- Tutorial videos
- Explainer videos
- Product review videos
- User-generated videos
- Behind the scenes
Make sure that you adhere to the video settings and requirements of each platform to avoid your videos getting deleted.
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Consider Automating Your Social Media Activity
Posting fresh content across all social media platforms can be tedious and time consuming especially for small and medium businesses that don’t have an in-house social media team.
Every day, they spend at least two hours creating posts and responding to comments.
Luckily, there is advanced software that automatically posts on all the platforms at the set time.
Here is an article we recently published that highlights the top 10 best digital marketing automation tools.
Ideally, a social media automation software allows marketers to schedule social media posts across all the platforms that they use. If you prefer Facebook, you can leverage SocialPilot to create posts in advance and set them to go live at a specific time of the day.
Automating all your social media activities will free up your schedule and increase your efficiency.
You will also get ample time to focus on other equally important tasks of your business such as market research and email marketing.
However, you will still need to regularly check the posts published to respond to comments and messages. Don’t keep the followers waiting for more than two hours to get a response. Also, you should respond to not only positive but also negative comments.
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Leverage Humanised Chatbots
Chatbots have gained massive traction over the last couple of years as brands create ways of automating social media activity.
Unlike the automated software discussed above, chatbots are designed to send automated replies to followers immediately after they send a message.
They will come in handy when you’re offline by engaging with the audience.
You can include links in the automated reply messages that the customers can click to get additional information.
Also, give them an option to contact the support team if the automated replies don’t meet their needs amicably.
In a nutshell, use the chatbots to respond to questions from potential customers immediately. Otherwise, if you keep them waiting until you get back online, they won’t hesitate to move to your competitor’s website.
Apart from communication, you can use the chatbot to guide the customers through the sales funnel. Make sure that the chatbot has automated replies to frequently asked questions to avoid annoying customers with messages that are irrelevant.
Unlike a social media team, chatbots work round the clock. Here are the primary benefits of leveraging humanised chatbots on different social media platforms.
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- Prompt Responses: Online customers gravitate towards brands that respond to their message fast. By installing a chatbot, you are sure that all inquiries from customers are responded to promptly even in the wee hours of the night. Never again will you lose customers to your competitors because you don’t have someone manning your social media account.
- Personalised Replies: New generation chatbots send personalised replies to customers. They achieve this goal by first capturing the name of the sender and then generating a message that best matches the question. That way, customers feel appreciated and this encourages them to shop on the website.
- Neutrality: Customer care representatives have emotions and sometimes they can affect the quality of support they offer to customers especially if they are stressed or tired. Chatbots don’t have emotions and so they are able to maintain a high degree of professionalism and they are not biased.
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Increase Your Reach by Using Stories
Snapchat was the first social media platform to introduce stories. Other social media platforms shortly followed suit. LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook all have their own stories feature.
Basically, a story is a feature that allows social media users to share videos and images with their followers.
Unlike conventional posts, stories are only available for 24 hours. According to a recent report by Instagram, stories posted on the platform are viewed by more than 500 million users per day.
Brands understand the potent power of stories and use the feature to continuously engage with customers.
KFC is one of the companies that use stories to promote their offers and news such as their recent partnership with Uber Eats.
If you are yet to start using Stories, you are missing out. Spring into action and start sharing fresh content with your target customers via Stories.
The beauty of this feature is that it gives customers a chance to respond to polls as well as swipe the story to visit the website.
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Convert Your Social Media Account into Shopping Channels
Most businesses use social media mainly as marketing tools.
They only use the platforms to promote their products and services. However, Facebook and Instagram now allow marketers to create shoppable posts. That is, customers can directly buy a product or service without leaving the site.
The posts are connected to the main online store that captures the customer’s data and completes the transaction.
The process is done through secure servers to protect customers from data phishing.
For example, if you come across a shirt that you like when browsing through your Facebook feed, you can buy it without leaving Facebook. Its such convenience that will place your brand miles ahead of the competition.
Alternatively, you can create a Facebook shop with all the products that you offer.
Customers will be able to make purchases by just clicking on the “Buy Now” button.
Concisely, offer a seamless online shopping experience to customers in 2023 and beyond by transforming your social media platforms into shopping channels.
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Ensure Your Social Media Marketing Content is Conversational
A decade ago, social media marketing was a one-way street or one-sided.
Brands only sent out messages to customers but didn’t give their customers a chance to respond. Such coined strategies were not only effective in achieving short-term goals.
Today, social media marketing campaigns are wired to connect with existing and potential customers at a personal and deeper level.
They are two-way streets or double-sided and this greatly helps brands to amicably meet the needs of the target customers.
The responses from customers enable marketers to learn more about their target customers. For example, by analyzing the frequently asked questions and complaints about a product or service, they are able to know which areas they should tweak.
Hence, in your quest to get ahead of the competition, you should not focus on only telling customers about your products or services. Instead, you should strive to spark a conversation with the customers.
A conversational marketing strategy puts more emphasis on resolving the challenges that customers are facing.
It empowers the customers with valuable information and offers effective solutions to problems. In the process, it nurtures and guides them through the sales funnel thereby helping you to realise the full potential of your business.
If you have been focussing on convincing the customers to spend money, you now need to change the strategies to offer solutions to their challenges.
Dove is one of the companies with stellar conversational social media marketing campaigns.
It helps followers to overcome the challenges they face. One of the recent projects that were a major success focused on helping girls get more comfortable and confident about their body physique.
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Post More Snackable Content
Snackable content refers to posts that are relevant to the target audience and sharable. Before embarking on social media marketing, you should carry out extensive research to understand your target audience.
Today, the average attention span is only 8 seconds. If the posts are boring and don’t grasp the attention of the followers within the first 8 seconds, you won’t get tangible results.
A majority of the social media platforms focus more on short snackable content than long-form posts. Such content is easy to understand and share.
TikTok is one of the platforms that gained traction in 2020 by encouraging its users to share snackable content. Today, the platform has more than 500 million monthly active users.
Conclusion
The sooner start social media marketing in Singapore, the better.
Your competition is already doping social media marketing and this means that you are missing the opportunity to increase your ROI on the digital platform.
When done right, you will reap the benefits, which lead to more traffic and higher conversion rates.
Contact us today for professional digital marketing in Singapore, which includes social media marketing.