Brands can play their part to come up with Mother’s Day ideas that will reward their customers and their Mums. It may be just one day in the entire calendar but your audience will remember the fond memories made and the family time spent. These are immeasurable and are all part of marketing magic for Mother’s Day!

1. Promos to Reward Mum

Gift a freebie and you can increase customer retention and attract many new shoppers. You do not have to offer anything fancy or exorbitant as a giveaway. A promo code, a discount, free or upgraded shipping are great ideas as exclusive rewards for mothers. One way is to create a coupon exclusively for Mother’s Day. Mothers can enjoy discounts on selected items or storewide discounts using this promotion.

Or offer free gift-wrapping for shoppers during Mother’s Day season to help time-strapped workers who are rushing to get gifts. It is a sweet touch that saves time and earns customers.

2. Gift Guide For All Your Great Products

Here’s a guide for your gift guide:

1. A gift guide should target different mum personas. A yoga lover, home cook, a teacher, a gardener and a CEO are considerably different in terms of personality.

2. Gift guides should come in different forms that are optimised for your channels. Blog posts, infographics or an engaging image… all of them work but make sure that they are well-designed!

3. Write a compelling guide copy that converts. Use sensory words to make the audience see, hear, smell, taste or feel your words for them to get their hands on your products!

4. Include both affordable and luxurious items to appeal to shoppers with a different  budget.

3. Reminders for Mother’s Day

For busy individuals who forget key holidays and dates, give them a nudge closer to the date as a service. Use a popup to remind them of Mother’s Day when they add an item to their cart or leave your store without making a purchase. To create a popup reminder where users will not immediately hit the “Close” button, use a simple design tool that allows you to create engaging and interactive designs such as a spin-to-win game.

4. Share Selfies, Photos and Videos

Social media is for sharing moments. Run a photo contest for Mother’s Day where followers have to share a selfie with their mother or someone who is like a mum to them. You can pick three winners and gift them with products they will enjoy – serums, makeup, a free dinner for two or two-for-one bubble tea deals. For very active followers, ask them to upload a video dedicated to their mums or kids. Remember to create a hashtag to capture these social media moments!

5. What Kind of Mum Are you?

Quizzes are a great way to engage with your audience and get some insight into them at the same time! Get your customers to take part in a “What Kind of Mum” are you quiz online where you can make it a true or false or multiple choice questionnaire. After they submit their answers, they can enter their email to have the answers sent to them – which allows you to build your database at the same time. Score!

6. Conduct a Poll for Mums

Instagram polls are easy to create and can especially target young mums. It is a quick, fun and cost-effective way to drive engagement on your social media page.

7. Collect Messages, Stories and Memories

It is easy to forget the sacrifices our mothers make for us on a daily basis. Whether it’s a small gesture or a big sacrifice, it is always nice for them to feel appreciated. Create a contest for your followers to express their love and appreciation for their mums. Reward participants with a small gift that they can share with their mum for this special occasion.

8. Mum’s Advice is Often the Best Advice

For mums who love beauty products, give them a little pampering this season! Run a campaign where your followers list the best beauty advice that their mum has given them. It will be a collection of invaluable beauty tips from the beautiful women in our lives that can be shared with every women out there. Gift the winners with a set of beauty products that they can share with their mothers.

9. Go Matchy With Mum On Social Media

Engage the help of parenting influencers this Mother’s Day. Pick mummy bloggers, mother influencers and working mothers for this campaign to showcase your product such as matching mother-daughter clothes, beauty products or accessories. Influencer posts will drive engagement and viewership with their aspirational visuals and powerful messages that their thousands of followers keep tabs on – motivating them to do the same and possibly, make your Mother’s Day campaign

The post Marketing Magic for Mother’s Day appeared first on Marketing Company Singapore | Branding & Advertising Agency |ENCE.

Over our 12 years in business, we have seen so many women enter, take charge and rise up the ranks to become influential leaders who have shaped ENCE Marketing into what it is today. We are staffed with a good number of women marketers, most of whom are in leadership positions. With no intention to stereotype, we notice that women bring with them a certain meticulousness, attention to detail, ability to multitask, nurturing nature and innate ability to mediate and sooth ruffled feathers – all key qualities for anyone at the workplace, especially in a marketing agency.

It’s not everyday that the power, strength and grace of all women are celebrated, so use this special day to show your appreciation to your female customers and women in your life!

How are some marketing ideas for International Women’s Day 2020!

1. Treat the ladies to special deals and discounts

We all love a good bargain!

Promote special deals on your social media channels and put a time period to encourage more participation. To leverage on user-generated content, get your audience to submit content or share snippets on their own channels while tagging the women they are showing appreciation to. Make it a contest or reward everyone with a small gift to spread the love and the virality!

2. Women, only

Depending on your brand and its suitability, consider running on women-only promotional campaign as a gesture of appreciation for your female customers! To make it more targeted, filter only the female demographic in your social media campaign, or email database, so that your target audience will receive your message and feel acknowledged and rewarded.

3. Acknowledge your staff

A personal touch always makes content that much more interesting. Post a picture of your female employees, but you do not have to neglect the guys! Use this opportunity to show appreciation to all your staff and let them be seen by your customers. Your brand will come across as a fun and accommodating workplace, and a brand that cares and makes an effort to connect with their staff and audience.

4. Launch a CSR Campaign in the name of International Women’s Day

In today’s day and age where a small act of kindness or an effort to give back to society is crucial to show that your brand is still rooted in human values, consider running a CSR campaign that is linked to women. It could be donating funds to a charitable organisation that roots for women’s rights, or volunteering with an organisation that is in line with a cause that your brand is compatible with, such as breast cancer awareness or support for single mothers.

We wish all our staff, clients, friends and family a happy International Women’s Day 2020!

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Reaching new customers

Traditional retail marketing approaches used to focus on persuading customers to increase the frequency of store visits as a basis of their marketing efforts. With digital marketing, however, the focus is on reaching a wider range of audience and giving them an easier option to explore, select, and purchase just about anything they want online. Reaching more customers has never been easier with the help of platforms like social media and search engines. Today as much as 80% of marketers think that investing in social media marketing is a better use of resources for small businesses.

Customers first philosophy

The proliferation of eCommerce business means more stiff competition among rival firms and more choices for the consumers. It also means a harder-to-obtain customer loyalty and repeat business for retailers. In a market environment like that the only effective way for a business to stand out and retain customers is to focus on building closer relationships and providing more personalized services that competitors can’t match. The key is to understand what your customer preferences are and then streamline a communication strategy that ensures your customers are getting personalized treatment. Retail marketers need to be smarter in utilizing social media channels, online review platforms, live customer support, and whatever next is available, to directly connect with the customers to provide personalized responses and service.

Leveraging digital economy opportunities

The internet empowers retailers to reach consumers beyond geographical boundaries and any physical limitations. Retailers are able to connect with highly-niche audiences that can be sold to at higher margins because of the minimal overhead cost involved. In other words, digital marketing is truly helping retailers to scale their businesses at a rapid pace and effectively achieve their profitability goals at the same time.

How do you begin?

As a retail operation, you should start off focusing on crafting a smart digital marketing strategy that provides a mechanism to reach all the key points of contact where your audience can be found such as social media sites, review websites, email, apps, blogs and more. A genuine focus on personalized customer experience goes without saying. One better way to achieve this is by systematically utilizing data and analytics in order to understand and address your customers’ key habits, preferences and shopping needs.  Another practical way is to look at your competitors’ strategies and closely monitor if there’s anything viable they are doing that works on your audience. Once you identify your key competitors (who you think are ahead in the game), there are ways to track their digital marketing activities online. As a preliminary move, you can go on semrush.com or ahrefs.com and run a quick performance report to help you get a feel for their online marketing efforts and the overall digital footprints.

ENCE Marketing Group is among the agencies featured in BestinSingapore for the 34 Best Digital Marketing Agencies in Singapore in 2020

The post Digital Marketing And Its Impact On Modern Retailers appeared first on Marketing Company Singapore | Branding & Advertising Agency |ENCE.

• Collaterals

Setting aside a budget to produce collaterals that are useful and significant for the festivities of Chinese New Year is a very smart way of marketing your brand! Some items you can consider producing for your partners and customers are red packets, a paper bag to keep those mandarin oranges during visiting, a Lunar calendar or even a Chinese New Year greeting card.

This is a wonderful way of keeping your business and brand on the mind of your customers and partners during Chinese New Year, as they are reminded of you as they go about their festive routine! These are practical and useful collaterals that will be much welcomed when you give them out, that they’d hardly be tossed aside and forgotten, like what tends to happen to many novelty collateral items. Make your marketing dollar really stretch with these Chinese New Year collaterals!

• Social media campaigns

Digital marketing campaigns over the Chinese New Year period are a great way to engage with your customers and ring in the New Year with them in a fun and 

creative way. An effective social media Chinese New Year campaign will span several platforms and if you really want to go for the biggest fish in the sea, you’ll want to use WeChat or Weibo as one of the platforms on your social media campaign plan. These are the biggest and most popular chat platforms in China.

One of our favourite Chinese New Year social media campaigns in recent times has to be Tiger Beer’s #SayItWithTiger campaign – a digital campaign centred around a microsite with a greeting generator that enables users to create authentic Chinese New Year greetings with popular phrases. It has global celebrities Liam Hemsworth, Diego Costa, Emily Ratajkowski and Chris Both behind it, who all made their best versions of a Chinese New Year greeting. The campaign spanned several social media platforms including Instagram, Weibo and WeChat. This campaign was hugely successful not just in Asia but all over the world!

• Limited edition product launches

Brands love to do this during Chinese New Year, releasing special, limited edition items that commemorate the Chinese New Year. These items are usually presented in colours of red and gold, with the zodiac animal of the year prominently featured. Popular Chinese phrases or characters denoting wealth, prosperity and good luck are also included on such items. Prada and Dior released monkey key rings last year during the year of the Monkey. Apple released two exclusive red Apple Watch sport models that were only available for a short time. Nike launched a pair of customised sneakers with the Chinese characters for “getting rich” and “fortune” on each heel – but this was ill-conceived as the two characters actually meant “getting fat” when put side by side.

If you want to try this strategy out, we really recommend going into the mind of the Chinese market and understanding how certain characters or imagery will be received, from their perspective! Getting an agency to help you think through the nuances of such a project would be very helpful in preventing inadvertent misrepresentation.

The post Marketing Strategies for Chinese New Year! appeared first on Marketing Company Singapore | Branding & Advertising Agency |ENCE.

However, in today’s increasingly complex and competitive market where traditional marketing models have broken down and the growth of data is accelerating at a breakneck speed which brings about rampant fragmentation, marketers have to gather their resources and come up with a holistic and coherent marketing strategy that touches base with multiple channels in order to effectively reach their target audience. In other words, integrated marketing.

According to Forbes.com, integrated marketing refers to “the process of aligning and coordinating a marketing organisation to deliver a consistent, seamless, customer-centric content experience across all channels”.

With more marketing channels comes more competition, and marketers are starting to realise that the one-size-fits-all marketing strategy is becoming obsolete. “Research conducted by Gartner has found that integrated campaigns across more than four channels outperform single or dual-channel campaigns by 300 percent” (forbes.com).

Brand Storytelling

Think of your brand as the overarching story. The chapters are the different marketing channels you use to drive the narrative forward. With integrated marketing, you will get a complete, comprehensive story, one that keeps you hooked and leaves you wanting more.

This is what integrated marketing can do, and what we love helping brands do – telling their stories to those who need to hear it.

Implementing A Holistic Marketing Calendar

Come 2019, don’t let your marketing get lost on the wrong channels or strategies. Our recommendation? Come up with a holistic marketing calendar with an omnichannel approach that is pared down into individual elements such as below-the-line strategies like content marketing and social media marketing and above-the-line strategies like print ads and TV broadcasts.

Say goodbye to 2018 and haphazard budgeting based on an ad hoc budget!

The post Integrated Marketing for Your Business in 2019 appeared first on Marketing Company Singapore | Branding & Advertising Agency |ENCE.

Marketing Tips for the Year of the Golden Pig

In the ever-evolving field of marketing, what is the best strategy for your business this year? We’ve seen new marketing methods, especially those practised online, replacing traditional ones such on TV, radio or press ads. We know how hard it is to keep up with the best marketing practices from year to year.

Budgeting is Essential

All business activities rely heavily on budgeting. But only the best understand that budgeting is not about saving money – it is allocating resources to the right people and the right approaches.

Do not scrimp on marketing. Marketing grabs your target audience and helps your business grow so make sure that enough budget is allocated to marketing. Note: Budget with care. Always strive to achieve the highest ROI possible for every dollar that you spend.

Laser-focused Content Marketing

Content Marketing generates leads, improves Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) rankings and creates brand awareness. In order for it to be cost-effective, do your homework. And that takes the form of data gathering – painful but productive. Understand which content really appeals to your audience, which channels they use, what devices they are on, how they access sites and the time of day when your audience is most active. The more data you gather, the better you understand your audience. And this is the key to the success and cost-effectiveness of any campaign.

An Integrated Approach

Content Marketing is but one of the many approaches available to you. With public relations, email marketing, social media campaigns (both organic and paid), influencer marketing, SEO, event marketing, and a plethora of other strategies, how do you decide on the best for your business? Here at ENCE Marketing, we believe in an integrated approach with measurable ROI to create the best solutions for our clients. Every solution is unique and every approach is KPI-driven, measurable and keeps your customers coming back for more.

The post Marketing Tips to Make the Year of the Golden Pig Work for Your Business appeared first on Marketing Company Singapore | Branding & Advertising Agency |ENCE.

The staff who made the party possible

Party’s just getting started!

And it has started!

The mega winner of the night!

You can find more snaps of the night here:

To each and every one of you who have been a part of our journey, this party is for YOU!

Till the next one!

The post Office Warming Happenings! appeared first on Marketing Company Singapore | Branding & Advertising Agency |ENCE.

Inspired by the persona of a military general and the way a military base is run – with precision, respect and efficiency – The General Room provides a stylish and modern shared-office premise and facilities for businesses in the fashion, retail, financial, and wealth management sectors.

Their parent company, LGB Somerset, has appointed ENCE Marketing to help launch their first co-working concept in Singapore with a marketing strategy that encompasses branding, PR, events and design.

The post December Happenings! appeared first on Marketing Company Singapore | Branding & Advertising Agency |ENCE.

Through marketing, your brand and products gain a wider exposure to the buying public. These are also opportunities to show prospective clients what you have to offer. Communicate the reasons as to why they should choose you over your competitors.

This is exactly what a marketing agency in Singapore like ENCE Marketing Group can help you with. With our expertise and an array of marketing services, we let you focus on what you do best and that is providing high-quality products and services to your customers.

However, if not implemented right, there are marketing strategies that actually drive away consumers instead of attracting them. Sometimes, it is not the strategy per se, nor the technique. The failure lies on how the strategy is executed and how it is perceived by the customers. There are many things that can go wrong and make customers leave. Some of these are:

Redundant and irrelevant messages

Customers do not like getting messages that only aim to advertise a brand. They need messages that would update them on changes and benefits in the actual product they consume. Many customers leave because they are not engaged and feel like they are subscribing to a TV Shopping channel instead of getting an actual and relevant newspaper.

Generalising treatment

Do you send emails that greet your clients with “Dear Valued Customer” instead of “Dear Mrs. Davis”? You might want to change that approach first. Customers actually like being addressed as if the marketers and manufacturers knew what they purchase and why they do so. Avoid communicating to your customers in an impersonal way and you’re already on the right track.

Undervalued subscription

Selling your customers a dozen eggs and promising them they would get only a piece of bread with it as a promo is not likely to make them buy your products. They need something that would be of great value to them. Sometimes, they do not even need a promo to go with their purchase. They just need to make sure they are getting their money’s worth.

Know all of these would help you utilise a marketing strategy that would not only attract customers but would also make them stay with you for as long as you serve them. There are many ways through which you can do this. Here are some tips:

Do thorough market research

Get to know your clients first! Many brand owners and company heads miss the point of getting to know their customers. This is very important. You need to know what people need so you can give it to them. You cannot keep on producing sugar and hope to supply, for example, a diabetes rehabilitation clinic. Or produce flammable gas and supply a cigar shop. You see, what you need is to have clients that can relate to you so they can trust you and keep coming back to you.

Engage in content marketing

When you already know who your market is, you can plan already on what you can tell them. No more impersonal email responses, send-to-all SMS advertisements, and general taglines in giveaways. Personalised content may be time-consuming but the returns are tangible. Your clients would feel like you actually want to talk to them – build a relationship. They would feel that you like hearing from them and that their concerns would not go unnoticed. This would help them decide to come back to you every time regardless of the many new brands that potentially compete with you.

Invest in experiential marketing

Now, this is probably the most expensive of marketing strategies that you can utilise. Events, activations, and booth set-ups are indeed costly. However they get you closer to your clients in a way better than content or research can. This would also get your clients continuously excited with every new item you offer. They will look forward to events to actively participate. This way, they will be with you for a longer time hoping that they can enhance their experience in the same way.

You can get started with any of these marketing strategies whenever you want. Of course, it will be best if you get into marketing as soon as you launch your company or product. This will raise your brand profile immediately and interest customers to try on what you have to offer them. Eventually, your brand name grows with them, become a part of their daily lives, and hopefully a permanent fixture altogether.

ENCE Marketing Group can help you in this endeavor. We are a marketing agency in Singapore that have a dedicated team who are well-versed in the art of marketing. Together, we can work with you to determine the best strategies to use and the goals you want to achieve for your company. All it takes is just a little patience, courage, and maybe a cup of coffee. Let’s grab a cup and chat today.

The post How to Win the Hearts of Your Consumers Through Your Marketing Strategy appeared first on Marketing Company Singapore | Branding & Advertising Agency |ENCE.

Why It Matters

There may still be ambiguities surrounding CSR efforts – differentiating what CSR is and means and what it is actually not. Well, for one thing, we have to weed out the notion that it is another marketing tactic or PR spin. Secondly, CSR is not a reactive response to cover up a brand reputation in crisis. And third, CSR is not a disguise for gaining media exposure.

So, what are the main points behind the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility?

CSR is a mindset, as well as cultural (corporate) and proactive in nature.

CSR is about creating a corporate environment which is based on strong values—accountability, transparency and sustainability. Having a unifying mindset is the core through which it is translated into different CSR campaigns and programmes that benefit society and the environment as a whole. Specifically, CSR can include the following practices:

• Sourcing or manufacturing environment-friendly materials
• Maintaining good labour practices
• Efforts to use energy and water efficiently
• Effective waste management systems and reduction of (GHG) greenhouse gas emissions
• Community engagement: volunteering/sponsoring local events, hiring employees locally, adhering to local fair trade practices

Not all companies have CSR integrated into their business model. Some companies practically do not feel the need to, because aside from not being required by law, it strips away part of their financial or material resources. Moreover, some just don’t organically see that it’s an altruistic call for social and environmental sustainability. However, by ignoring Corporate Social Responsibility, what they don’t realise is that they could be doing more harm than good.

In Singapore, although companies have proven themselves to be highly progressive and advanced, they still have a way to go in terms of CSR. From 835 listed companies in the Singapore Exchange, there are only 30 entities who have submitted CSR reports. Global Compact Network Singapore, an agency advocating CSR and sustainability, reported more than 900 firms as members supporting the global initiative.

We at ENCE Marketing believe that every business has the potential to find ways to engage with their customers while doing what is right for sustainability in our society and environment.

We give you the reasons why businesses and marketers need to start paying attention to CSR:

You connect at a ‘deeper’ level with your target market.

CSR is the perfect opportunity for brands to communicate and collaborate more with their existing and potential consumers. Collaborative activities are a great way for the company to display a ‘human touch’ element and be a concrete example of their core corporate values or vision.

It develops better products and services.

Having Corporate Social Responsibility integrated into your business model is like having a blueprint for how the company can evolve. The culture of ethical practices, accountability, social awareness and environmental sustainability that is embedded in the company’s core values allows us to identify the present issues and problems of the society. This encourages more efforts in research that lead the company towards developing more high-quality and environmentally-friendly products, services and more advanced technology that will really add value for their target market. Remember, more useful products equal more opportunities for business and growth.

Moreover certain internal innovations—such as technologies for energy and water-use efficiency, using recyclable packaging materials and effective waste management—can also help in cutting down operational and logistics costs.  

It drives sales up.

What CSR is should not be directly associated with the primary goal of driving profitability. Instead, it is just a side-effect of the company’s efforts. According to Nielsen Global CSR report, 66% of consumers are willing to pay more products from socially responsible companies; therefore consumer brands that aren’t practicing CSR are ‘outperformed’ by those who do.

Moreover, aside from comparing the brands’ price tags, consumers are also checking the manufacturing labels or whether a brand promotes responsible business practices. Solid brands who know better grab this opportunity to be differentiated from others.

It encourages employee engagement and investor trust.

Consumers are not the only ones who can benefit from developing accountable, transparent and sustainable corporate practices, but the other stakeholders of the organization—the employees and investors as well. Employees and investors exhibit more enthusiasm and trust in a positive corporate environment that upholds integrity and transparency.

It’s a ‘Win-Win’ business model.

Aside from taking it as a means of proactive reputation management, CSR campaigns are a great way to match the efforts of the government and international community to  address the most pressing environmental and social issues we face today—such as geopolitical, environmental and socioeconomic instability, which definitely pose risks to the business landscape.

But for those businesses that label themselves as SMEs—in which resources for CSR efforts might be small, if not nonexistent—should they still jump on the bandwagon with the big boys?

Absolutely, “yes”.

While the CSR efforts are mostly associated with huge, high-profile companies, we must remember that CSR practices are not limited to allocating big bucks for community engagements, ‘greenwashing’ activities or writing cheques for charities. It covers all the efforts towards strengthening corporate or organizational core values that are ethical and sustainable, for the benefit of not only their target consumers, but for their employees, partners and other stakeholders. Therefore, even small organizations and brands must give CSR a go.

Does your company practice CSR? If so, share with us in the comment section below, or if your company has yet to participate in this initiative, why not start NOW? We at ENCE Marketing Group bank on tried and tested approaches that help companies execute appropriate CSR activities for optimal results. Feel free to get in touch with us, we have some great ideas on how you can engage in CSR!

The post Importance of CSR to Businesses and Marketers appeared first on Marketing Company Singapore | Branding & Advertising Agency |ENCE.