Curious about some of the challenges Singapore marketers are up against?
Read on.
We polled some of these challenges, as well as some tested tactics that you can use to meet them head-on.
Generating Traffic and Leads
Singapore marketers have reported to be still struggling with generating enough demand for their content. As more and more people hop into the online marketing bandwagon, the more the competition stiffens, thus making this statement even truer.
With so many existing options to publish your content, coupled with more ways to publish it, it’s becoming even harder to know where to channel the bulk of your marketing and promotion effort.
So how do you deal with this challenge?
The best way to tackle the issue of generating enough traffic and leads for your content is to answer two key questions:
- Is your content high quality enough? It’s simple logic here: unless you’re producing top-notch, mindboggling posts that your readers can’t get enough of, don’t expect anyone to come running for it. Is your content the type that someone would pay to read? If not, then you know what to do.
- What type of content is your audience interested in? Is what you post relevant to their needs? What aspect of their lives does it address? And to what degree do they find it useful?
These questions are meant to guide you through the writing process. They’re meant to remind you that you’re still writing for the user – and that you should be more focused on writing what’s quality to them.
It turns out; customer interest is shifting. As a matter of fact, more than half of customers have reported preferring video content over blog posts.
So after you find out what piques your customers’ interest the most, the next thing you want to do is promote it to your audience in a way that they’ll have an easy time taking notice.
Online users are swamped with content. Most of them don’t even depend on search engines to find answers. Articles follow them wherever they go. They’re popping up in their timelines and newsfeed. They’re buzzing up in their pockets via mobile notifications.
In other words, everyone is trying to sell them content, and until you learn to put in more effort, and offer excellence, there’s nothing much you can do to win them over.
Keeping Track of their Return on Investment
Keeping track of your ROI still stands as a challenge to a great majority of Singapore marketers. It’s not easy – and Singapore marketers are experiencing the brunt of it.
By keeping track of ROI, marketers can understand the effectiveness of their marketing campaign or of the content they produce. They’re able to measure the cost and make comparisons to see if it’s a worthy investment. Plus, being able to prove your ROI goes hand in hand with the decision to increase your marketing budget.
Where there’s no ROI or where you can’t demonstrate it, then it’s hard to allocate a budget.
This is not always easy, especially where there isn’t a flowing communication channel between your marketing activities and your sales reports.
So how do you handle this challenge?
Your only stab at this is establishing a link between your marketing activities and the sales results you’re getting. Find a marketing solution and a CRM tool and tie them together with a Service Level Agreement to close the loop that exists between your marketing effort and sales results.
That way, you should be able to see how many customers and leads you’ve managed to generate through your marketing activities.
Securing Enough Budget
Securing enough budgets for your marketing activities is a pressing challenge not only in Singapore but also in other parts of the world. This is especially the case with small businesses and organisations, most of which aren’t in a position to secure a sizeable or flexible spend for their marketing activities.
And it’s not as easy as you’d like to think. This has proven to be an even greater challenge than it seems.
So how do you tackle it?
There’s only one way around this – and that is, being able to prove the ROI generated through your marketing effort. If you can calculate your ROI, then it would be much easier to convince any organisation to allocate you a bigger budget.
Plus, try to make your inbound marketing more successful. If your results are salient enough, then you’ll most certainly have an easy time securing a higher budget for your marketing team.
And always keep in mind that inbound marketing is a long term marketing strategy. The result may not show off immediately, but that’s no reason to back off – but to consider doubling down.
Marketing to an International Audience
It’s marketing until you start marketing to an international audience and it morphs into a challenge. As you already know, the first step to running an effective marketing campaign is identifying buyer personas.
Now imagine a situation where you’re marketing to an international audience — an audience that you’ve never interacted with before, how do you pull it off?
Not only do you have to figure out how to market to this audience, but you also have to know how to organise and optimise your site for these countries.
So what’s the solution to this challenge?
This is not something that you figure out. It’s something that you learn. There are some really useful resources about this online that you should consider checking out.
You have to begin by understanding the global market. Learn about their local trends and how to explore them, and most importantly, learn how to both identify and choose the best localisation providers.
Keep in mind that your site’s visitor might be speaking an entirely different language or multiple of them. There’s also a fair chance that they could also be hailing from different time zones.
Your global audience also needs to find your content appealing. This means that you have another task of figuring out how to keep them on top of your mind. Take your time to study and understand the audience and their living environment.
Learn about their season references, monetary references, and their unit of measure. Give your translators both the permission and tools that they need to customise your content and make it adapt to that specific audience.
Best of all, you want to make sure that you’ve also optimised your site for the global audience you’re targeting.
Training Your Marketing Team
As companies scale and technologies evolve, the more it’s proving to be an even bigger challenge to train your team. Whether it’s training them on marketing concepts or training them to adapt to the ever-evolving world of marketing and get used to the ever-changing tools of trade or even nudging them to achieve their full potential, training your team still stands as one of the biggest challenges that Singapore marketers have to deal with.
There’s no denying that you need a well-trained and competent team of marketers to pull off a successful marketing campaign. But even the few ready-made members of your team that you enlist have to be trained and made to readjust to their new working standards and policies.
Even more important than being able to learn and understand, is that they’re able to take in what they learned and execute it correctly, with no room for any error. That’s important because your success, for the most part, depends on your level of perfection.
This is a bigger challenge than you can imagine, and one that has pushed many marketers out of business. After all, you can only do so much as a one-person army.
So how do you overcome this?
Before you lump your team together and train them as a whole, take your time to study and understand each one of them. Understand their strengths and weaknesses. Understand their struggles, and most importantly, understand where their interest lies.
The last thing you want to do is force a skill on them. If anything, you can only help them improve on their expertise. You can only help them sharpen what they’re already good at. If, say, one of them is good at copywriting, don’t force them to learn about analytics. Instead, encourage them to keep sharpening their skills and become better at it.
You might also want to encourage them to rack up some online certifications. Let them find different online courses and sign up for them.
And whenever you’re hiring new members, have a training program in place that they each have to go through before joining the rest of the team.
Identifying the Technologies that Better suited for your marketing needs
Another challenge that Singapore marketers have to deal with is identifying the right technologies to use. That’s because the feedback they can get with regards to these technologies is scattered. You have to keep gleaning various sources for recommendations. Some even turn to friends and colleagues or industry specialists, but they still can’t find the recommendations they need.
So how do you overcome this challenge? Where should you turn to for a software or tool recommendation that solves a specific problem that you have without having to waste your valuable time and resources experimenting with dozens of effete options?
Well, you might want to check out with Accel (link: https://www.accel.com), a free, interactive online visualisation landscape for marketing, whose focus is on solving some of the technology-related problems Singapore marketers face.
Important Stats that Dictate How you Conduct Your Online Marketing Campaign in Singapore
About 58% of Global Consumers are down with their Idea of Purchasing Some of their Products Internationally
In a recent survey, one that involved interviewing 3, 500 consumers from seven different countries including Japan, Singapore, USA, Germany, Australia, France, and the UK, it was found out that more than 58% percent of consumers have no problem shipping a product or hiring someone from another country.
This shows that your market is not only limited to Singapore consumers. Instead, you have a chance to rack up even more sales by targeting international consumers, as well.
About 61% of Singaporeans consumers also expressed their intention of making more international sales come next year. That means that the market is shifting at a much faster pace. So instead of localising your market, think globally by adjusting your campaign to start targeting international consumers as well.
44% of Singapore Marketers have reported failing to complete an Order because they think the product wouldn’t arrive faster enough
Ever wondered why a good section of your leads isn’t completing their order? It’s revealed that nearly half of them hesitate to go through with the decision to make a purchase simply because they think the product they’re about to order won’t be arriving faster enough.
Companies that offer next day deliveries were reported to make the most sales compared to sellers that take more than three days to make deliveries.
This is a more powerful statement for businesses that sell to online customers. The faster you’re able to deliver an order, the more sales you’ll be able to make.
It pays to keep reassuring your customers that you make faster deliveries. It’s even better when you’re able to include an option for faster deliveries, even if it means raising the shipping charges.
Singapore Marketers Said they Prefer Real-time Marketing
When asked about the marketing concepts that appeal to them the most, Singapore marketers were quick to point out that they prefer real-time marketing concepts.
That’s because web and marketing systems in the country have grown and become even more sophisticated. Also, Singaporeans are now turning to apps for services and almost everything they do.
For that reason, marketers are avoiding disintermediation by other apps and instead of looking for direct ways to communicate to their customers directly.
Other stats to take note of:
- As of January 2019, the population of Singapore was 5.83 Million.
- Singapore has one of the fastest internet broadband in the world.
- About 79% of Singapore’s population is active on social media. That accounts for about 4.85 million of the population.
- About 75% of the population in Singapore uses mobile phones to access their social media accounts.
- 99% of mobile phones in Singapore have either 3G or 4G internet broadband.
- 89% of the population in Singapore watch videos on their phones.
- 71% of laptops and about 42% of tablets in Singapore are used to access the internet.
- On average, a Singaporean internet user spends about 7 hours 2 minutes online. Of this time, about 2 hours 8 minutes is spent on social media.
- 60% of all social media users in Singapore are women, with the remaining 49.4% being men.
- 84% of the population in Singapore consider the internet as their primary source of information. They visit online whenever they want to learn about something new or confirm an important piece of information.
- YouTube is the most popular social media channel in Singapore. It’s closely followed by WhatsApp, with Facebook coming in third.
- Singapore is reported to have the highest internet penetration rate (at 84%).
- One million Singaporeans check YouTube every day.
- 46% of internet users in Singapore have installed Adblocks.
- About 52% of users book cabs online.
- Over 4.8 million Singaporeans are signed up on Facebook.
- An average Singaporeans uses about nine different social media networks in a week.
- Changi Airport has one of the fastest growing Facebook pages in Singapore, with more than 4 million fans.
- There are more than 840, 000 active wechat users in Singapore.
Online Marketing Trends in Singapore (in 2019)
- Content marketing has become more prominent, with more and more businesses adopting it. Those that were already using it are now amplifying their content marketing strategies. In other words, the competition in content marketing is super-stiff, even more, than it has ever been.
- The number of users adopting voice searches is rising rapidly. A great majority of web owners are also optimising their content for voice searches. It’s therefore important that you just on this voice search trend as soon as you can to avoid being left out or missing out on this section of the market.
- More are more digital marketing institutions are gaining entry into the market every day. They’re bound to be even more of these agencies in the future.
From this post, it’s safe to say that more and more businesses have now realised the importance of digital marketing and are now giving it their whole instead of half-heartedly jumping on this paradigm has it has always been.
Meaning, as a marketer, you have to get into the market with the mindset of someone that’s ready to take on their competition – rather than the mindset of someone who’s just doing something about it.
Get in touch with us for more tips on how to do digital marketing in Singapore.
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