As a Singaporean business owner, you understand how difficult it is to generate word of mouth about your company. There are countless competitors out there and they are jockeying to gain market share—particularly among Millennial and Generation Z customers.
While there are a number of tactics that you can select to target those customers, one strategy has become increasingly popular in recent years.
We’re talking about influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing can help spread word-of-mouth and generate buzz about your products or services. It allows you to tap into an audience that you may not have necessarily targeted in traditional marketing campaigns. And it can leverage the virality effect, allowing you to spread the word about your product or service at an extremely fast clip and at a lower cost per acquisition than traditional campaigns.
If you haven’t yet already, you should consider influencer marketing. The results may surprise you.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Before discussing the nuances of influencer marketing, you must understand what it is.
Influencer marketing is a strategy that leverages an individual’s influence and fame to drive traffic to your product or service. In other words, you are selecting a well-known person to speak about your product or service to a targeted market segment.
Typically, an influencer will promote your product or service on their social media channels. By providing their own personal endorsement, the influencer essentially lends the credibility that they have already built with their audience. Ideally, your targeted audience will then be convinced to buy your product or service.
Our Influencer Marketing Agency Services
We are specialists in influencer marketing in our agency and would be happy to help you navigate the influencer marketing ecosystem in Singapore. While it can be confusing, we have years of experience and are happy to share our passion for influencer marketing. As an example of the work we have done, we worked with several companies on their own influencer marketing campaigns in the country. Some examples include:
Zalora
Zalora is one of the largest online fashion retailers in Asia. It sells over 50,000 products ranging from skirts and dresses, sneakers and slippers, sportswear, and watches. Some of the top brands that Zalora carries include Abercrombie & Fitch, Adidas, Hollister, and Under Armour. Zalora offers lightning-fast shipping, cash on delivery, and free returns. Zalora has a heavy presence on social media, with 5.5 million Facebook followers, 129,000 Instagram followers, and 64,000 Twitter followers.
AnotherSole
AnotherSole is a company that sells some of the world’s most luxurious and comfortable shoes. The shoes are 100 percent leather, weigh only 280 grams, and are perfect for travel. The company prides itself on using premium materials and offering their shoes for below $100 USD. Along with this, AnotherSole donates 10 percent of its revenue toward the goal of feeding hungry children, building sustainable communities, and supporting their growth.
Vermilion Group
Vermilion is a company that sells tasty nutritional jelly supplements. Founded by two Western doctors and a Traditional Chinese Medicine physician, the company seeks to combine Western and Chinese medicine to cure patients’ ailments. The company ultimately creates “functional food,” which is essentially supplements in food form. Vermilion has produced jelly that focuses on your eye health, joint health, digestive health, and slim support.
Adlina Anis
Adlina Anis is an online Singaporean fashion retailer that sells hijab and modest clothing. Specifically, Adlina Anis sells items like scarves and shawls that are made by hand in a workshop owned by the company. Working with Adlina Anis, we managed the company’s social media accounts and their influencer marketing campaigns to great success.
Explore Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has become increasingly popular in Singapore. If you want to reach a younger audience or present your products or services in a non-traditional way, you may want to seriously consider working with an influencer.
We would be happy to help you navigate influencer marketing in Singapore. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us should you have any questions.
Macro Trends
In Singapore, influencer marketing is an increasingly important tool in a marketer’s toolbox. The Digital Influence Lab has provided some great statistics on the widespread use of technology and social media in Singapore. In Southeast Asia, Singapore has the highest internet penetration rate (greater than 80 percent) compared to other countries. Singaporeans, on average, own 3.3 devices per person (the smartphone being the most common), meaning that there is a strong built-in audience to access influencer messages and marketing.
Singaporeans love social media. 96 percent of Singaporeans own at least one social media account and spend a daily average of two hours and 27 minutes on social media. In 2016, as many as 3.2 million Singaporeans accessed social media through their mobile devices, and this number is projected to grow to 3.6 million social media users by 2021. Among the leading social networks in Singapore, WhatsApp is the most popular (with a 73 percent penetration rate), followed by YouTube (71 percent), Facebook (70 percent), and Instagram (44 percent). Millennials are especially active on social media platforms, with 50 percent of Singaporean Millennials commenting on or liking a friend’s post every day.
Besides WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube rule in Singapore. There are 4.9 million total Facebook users in Singapore and more than 4 million total YouTube users. 45 percent of YouTube users prefer YouTube over television and more than 60 percent of Singaporeans watch YouTube from mobile.
Ultimately, the macro trends are positive for Singaporean companies who wish to leverage influencer marketing.
Why Influencer Marketing?
So while influencer marketing seems to leverage key trends in Singapore, why would you still choose an influencer marketing campaign over something else?
There are several important reasons.
First, influencer marketing presents your product or service in a different way. Compared to a traditional print or television ad, influencer marketing leverages word-of-mouth. Someone else—a person that has already built up their credibility with their audience—is vouching for your product. Often, that person will actually use your product in a YouTube or Instagram post and will give their honest feedback to their audience. They can also speak about your product in their own style which is unique and authentic. This is difficult to replicate in traditional advertising.
Second, influencer marketing may be more cost effective than a traditional marketing campaign. Influencers have created an audience of individuals who often have similar interests. By selecting the right influencer, you are able to tap into a pool of likely customers, as compared to advertising to a very general audience in a print or television ad. Market segmentation is key here, and influencers make market segmentation that much easier. In other words, your cost per acquisition is lower compared to another marketing strategy. Along with this, influencers may accept alternative forms of compensation like some form of VIP recognition or other public recognition (see below for more). This also lowers your cost per acquisition.
Finally, influencer marketing is growing increasingly popular in Singapore. Influencer marketing companies are managing tens of thousands of influencers around the country. Even the Singaporean government has embraced influencer marketing. The Ministry for the Environment and Water Resources recently launched an influencer marketing campaign to raise awareness of climate change and steps that Singaporeans can take to mitigate its effects. The Ministry engaged 28 micro-influencers with a combined reach of 100,000 people for a three-month marketing campaign. Called the #ClimateActionSG Instagram Photo Contest, the campaign saw influencers posing in pictures showing off their eco-friendly habits while encouraging their audiences to do the same.
Getting Started
So once you have decided that you may want to pursue an influencer marketing campaign, there are several key decisions to make. They are outlined below:
- Determining Your Objectives
One of the most critical parts of your influencer marketing campaign is having a clear understanding of why you want to use influencer marketing at this point in time. While you certainly can use influencer marketing at any point in time, you will likely generate more ROI if you are strategic.
Some of the most common times to use influencer marketing are when you are launching a new product or service. At the moment of your launch, you can select an influencer to speak about your new product or service to a curated group of fans. This is a way to generate buzz at the moment of launch. Beyond a launch, however, you can use influencer marketing to create general brand awareness or to simply build a community around your business. Focusing on building your tribe, so to speak, through influence marketing is a great way to create brand loyalty for your current and future products.
At this stage, you will also want to determine your key performance indicators (KPIs) for your influencer campaign. For example, you may hire an influencer with the hope of future purchases for a new product or service that you are releasing in the marketplace. Your KPI, then, would be product or service purchases that result from an influencer referral. Your KPI may simply be increased traffic to your website or “likes” or “follows” on social media. Whatever it is, you must meet with all relevant actors in your team to prioritize your KPIs before you approach an influencer.
- Finding and Selecting Your Influencer
The word “influencer” is quite broad, so you and your team will want to ensure that you are selecting the right influencer for your needs. Essentially, there are different types of influencers, ranging from A-list celebrities to micro influencers with tens of thousands of followers. A-list celebrities may have a larger reach than micro influencers, but they aren’t as focused a micro influencer focused on a specific niche. Those higher profile influencers will also likely cost more money to hire than someone who has less of a mass following. You can think of this as a spectrum, with larger, less focused influences on one side of a line, and smaller, more focused influencers on the other side. The influencer you choose on that spectrum is up to you, your business needs, and your objectives for your influencer campaign.
Last year, Influence Asia released its top 15 nominees of influencers in Singapore, ranging from influencers focused on beauty, parenting, fashion, and even health and fitness. You can find the complete list here. This is just a small sampling of well-known influencers in Singapore. That said, if you want to select an influencer that is in a more defined niche, you will probably have to do some digging. Search for hashtags related to your niche on social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. By doing this, you will gain a better understanding of the most popular Singaporean influencers in your niche and can proceed from there.
- Contacting Influencers
Once you have an idea of one or several influencers that you would like to use, you will then need to reach out and start a dialogue. You can either reach out to the influencer directly or go through an influencer marketing agency.
If you want to directly reach out to the influencer, you will want to connect through the influencer’s social media channel(s). In your message, introduce yourself, your company, and how you think you can collaborate. The shorter the message, the better. Because influencers receive many messages every day, you will want to make your pitch short and sweet. Ideally, the influencer will respond to your message and you will proceed from there.
If you are having trouble directly accessing the influencer (or wish to bypass the process entirely), you can try contacting the influencer through an influencer marketing agency. Influencer marketing agencies have spread across Singapore. In all likelihood, an agency represents your influencer. Once you find the influencer’s agency, feel free to reach out. Once again, keep your pitch email brief. Explain who you are and what you want to accomplish with the influencer. Ideally, the influencer marketing agency will coordinate future communications between you and the influencer.
- Generating Content
Once you have contacted your influencer, you will need to discuss the content of your campaign. While this will obviously vary depending on your product or service and your needs, collaboration with your influencer can be viewed on another spectrum. On one end, you can generate the content yourself and have the influencer simply share it on his or her social media channels. On the other side, the influencer can use his or her own creativity to generate the content and then share it on social media. The middle involves some collaboration and creative compromise between you and the influencer.
If you are concerned about protecting the presentation of your product or service, you’ll likely want to take more control. But if you enjoy how the influencer has presented products and services in prior campaigns, you may want to give him or her more freedom. Being cognizant of where you are on the spectrum will make you more satisfied with your influencer campaign.
- Influencer Incentives
Finally, you will need to decide on a way to compensate for the influencer. Compared to a traditional media or print campaign, you have some more flexibility here. Some influencers will simply want to be paid in cash. They likely will have a set rate per influencer marketing campaign, so be sure to ask. If you are searching for a more famous influencer, he or she will likely ask for cash instead of an alternative incentive structure.
If you are more creative, you can generate an alternative incentive payment for your influencer, whether that is providing free products to the influencer or simply recognizing them on your website or social media feeds. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box.
