Market research firm Advertiser Perceptions has found that in recent years, using paid branded content has been critical towards successfully increasing product consideration, driving sales, and reaching new target consumers. Forrester has also reported that 57% of millennials mentioned much of the content marketing material they receive from B2B firms is useless. In addition, the majority (69%) feels that it is extraneous as they can easily obtain most of their information from various other sources.
Be it B2C or B2B, content marketing undoubtedly is an important aspect of marketing for many companies. But what exactly is content marketing in Singapore? In this article, we will be sharing more about the importance of content marketing and some examples for you to look at.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is more than just digital marketing. It is a marketing approach where the content is created based on the needs of the target audience to suit their tastes and preferences while aligning with your business goals. It involves engaging with the audience’s emotions to boost customer interaction with your brand and requires strategies to be well thought out beforehand.
4 key components of content marketing
As content marketing becomes more integral in today’s marketing strategies, it is crucial for marketers to understand the nuts and bolts of successful content marketing.
- Brand positioning – How do you define your brand and the types of experiences it should bring to your audience? Consider the following points:
a. What makes your brand personality unique?
b. What makes you better than your competitors (competitive advantage/unique selling points)
- Value proposition – How does your brand, content, or products value-add for your audience?
a. How does your audience benefit from viewing your content?
b. How do you stand out from other content creators?
- Business objectives – What do you want to accomplish with your content marketing plan?
a. Does your content marketing plan take into consideration the business’ goals?
b. How does your content marketing plan bring your business closer to its objectives?
- Strategy – How do you plan on achieving your desired outcomes?
a. Who do you want to reach and how will you deliver your content to them?
b. How are you going to measure the effectiveness of your efforts?
Types of content you can use in your content marketing strategy
There are many content options you can choose from to adopt within your content marketing strategy. Hence, diversifying the type of content you use throughout the buyer’s journey will be the key to a successful conversion. Some common examples include:
- Blog posts
- Email marketing
- Visual content, infographics, and videos
- eBooks & podcasts
- Case studies & testimonials
- Webinars & online learning courses
Important content marketing metrics to track
There are various metrics you can use to measure the success of your content marketing campaigns.
- Primary indicators – The key money-generating conversions that all your superiors care about such as: conversion rates, cost per lead, etc.
- Secondary indicators – These metrics influence sales despite not being directly related such as: email and blog subscribers, social media followers, etc.
- User indicators – These metrics may influence your sales, but don’t necessarily translate into a successful sale such as content views, likes, and shares.
- Sharing metrics – These metrics show how shareable your content is such as: tweets, pins, forwards, inbound links, etc.
Why should brands in Singapore start paying more attention to content marketing?
A poll conducted by The Straits Times has revealed that Singaporean consumers spend an average of 12 hours and 42 minutes daily on their smartphones. The top activities engaged by users are ranked as follows:
- Reading personal e-mails
- Online messaging and calling
- Social media and networks
- Work and business purposes
- News and sports updates
- Gaming apps
People are consuming content on their digital devices at an unprecedented rate. Yet, the average click-through rate across all display ad formats and placements is just 0.05%. In fact, you are 475 times more likely to survive a plane crash than to click on an ad according to Solve Media.
As a result, there is an impending need for organisations to shift their focus towards creating valuable and consumable content rather than dumping most of their budget into advertisements.
Other reasons why content marketing is important to brands include:
- Generate positive ROI in the long term – Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates approximately 3 times more leads for every dollar spent. Conversion rates through content marketing are also nearly 6 times higher than other marketing types.
- Gain consumers’ trust and build a loyal following – 80% of B2B customers go through at least 3 pieces of content before engaging with any sales personnel. As a result, companies that engage in blogging efforts have observed a 67% increase in leads as compared to competitors. As for small businesses that blog, the results are two-fold, standing at 127%.
- Complements the efforts of other sales & marketing channels – Content marketing is a great way to build links and improve organic search engine rankings. One such way is to build backlinks by creating and distributing valuable content (eBooks, analyst reports, case studies, research papers, etc.) in exchange for user details.
Tools to help you discover what content to produce
- Buzzsumo – A well-known content discovery and research tool that scours the internet on your behalf for the most popular content. This will help you in identifying the topics, formats, and strategies that will generate the best results.
- Feedly – This tool collates all the blog posts you follow onto a centralised platform so you won’t run out of reference materials.
- Alltop – This tool indexes articles and blogs and makes it all available on the platform for you to sieve through.
- Medium – A popular blogging platform with various high-quality content from contributors worldwide. It’s great for when you want to obtain perspectives and insights into a specific topic.
- Social Animal – This tool helps with finding the best-performing articles on the internet and identifying backlink opportunities. Other useful information it provides include keyword performance and showing posts that are trending.
Examples of successful content marketing in Singapore
Successful campaigns have the power to drive emotions by telling stories that resonate with your audience and influence the behaviour of your consumers. With so much being said about content marketing, let us now look at 2 campaigns that have won the hearts of Singaporeans in the recent years.
- Singapore Red Cross: “A gift of life” and the ”Red Cross Connection” campaign
This 2-part campaign won the 2015 Loyalty and Engagement Awards with empathy engagement as its main success factor. The first part aims to spread the message of how donating blood can save lives with a twist. Instead of emphasizing on the call to action (donating blood), the campaign targeted the sharing of outcomes and gratitude with a series of short stories from 8 blood donation recipients.
A simple yet powerful message was transmitted to emphasize the importance of being a blood donor: “Because you were there when we needed blood, we are alive today.”. This campaign leaves the viewer feeling empowered, which is an essential part of engagement.
The second part of the campaign involves a digital outreach with the “Red Cross Connection” app to encourage more youths to make blood donation a part of their lives and share their lifesaving act with their social networks as agents of positive change. The app has created a network with a purpose with a gamification element. With this app, users enter a community that will be notified whenever there is a shortage of blood.
Users will then be prompted to donate at the nearest blood donation centre. For those who are unable to do so, they will be encouraged to share the alert on Facebook via a button on the same page, leading to a domino effect that helps to spread the message and encourage others to donate blood.
In the first 3 months alone, 18 blood shortage alerts were sent, gaining the Singapore Red Cross 41,500 followers and 20,042 new blood donors.
- Giant: “Lobang Queen” and “Singapore’s most kiasu town” campaign
Giant only joined the Facebook bandwagon back in 2017, which made them way behind their competitors such as NTUC and Sheng Siong, giving rise to this 2-part campaign. With the establishment of their Giant Super Savers Club (GSSC) Facebook page came Singapore’s beloved aunty, “Lobang Queen”.
This persona became Giant’s spokesperson and admin of the facebook page. This campaign was built around the idea of having a deals-obsessed aunty running the page with the latest Giant deals and money-saving tips, making it relatable to Giant’s audience (housewives). Lobang Queen also responds to customer inquiries, concerns, and or complaints messaged to the GSSC Facebook page.
As a result, 61% of respondents in a 2018 Nielsen survey reported a favourable increase in Giant’s brand perception while 80% mentioned that they will be shopping at Giant in the coming weeks.
The second part of the Giant campaign was the “kiasu town” contest. It started off with a “Singapore’s most kiasu town” quiz on Facebook, which then went offline, to engage with heartlanders. Of course, incentives were offered in exchange for digital information, such as great deals for your whole neighbourhood!
This campaign ended up garnering lots of buzz and media coverage during the months it was running. This attracted attention from media outlets like The Straits Times, Channel 8 News, Channel News Asia, and many other popular blogs along the way.
With the relatability of this campaign, there were 57,000 quiz submissions throughout the entire campaign period. Subsequently, the GSSC Facebook page saw an 82% increase in followers in just a month. The campaign also managed to reach a total of 1,171,841 people in Singapore, with over 5,418,455 total impressions.
We hope this article has given you a deeper insight into what content marketing is and how other Singaporean organisations of today are executing them. Our word of advice if content marketing is your current priority, would be to first focus on drafting out a detailed content marketing strategy and proceeding on from there.
