Should you invest in influencer marketing in Singapore or go with direct Facebook advertising?
Influencer marketing is a hot marketing strategy in the Singapore advertising space as more and more advertisers seek to leverage social proof and popularity of influencers to push out their products.
One company created a social lollapalooza with influencer marketing with their gaming chairs: Secret Labs.
Influencer Marketing in Singapore Case Study: Alpha Body Tech.
I worked on a project with a friend’s Facebook advertising agency trying to generate leads and sales for alphabodytec a fitness technology company.
Our team used a two-prong approach:
- Hiring out fitness influencers, using media created from them, using a sales funnel and then tracking sales using a UTM link
- Step two: launch a funnel and purchasing social media traffic from Facebook and Instagram
Photo Credits: alphabodytec
Here are my thoughts on the mixed results we got from influencer marketing in Singapore and direct paid media.
#1 Scalability
You can hire out 10- 20 influencers but ultimately they have a limited audience size. Yes, if your product has a good direct connection with their audience base, yes you can reap in sales and rewards quickly.
For any given time, your in house team can work with up to as many as 5 to 10 influencers.
Our team did see sales coming in from influencers putting out stories and posts on Instagram.
However, you can also argue that influencer marketing isn’t scalable like direct paid media such as Facebook advertising is.
Our team eventually shifted to the Facebook advertising platform, and after restructuring their ad account, re looking the customer acquisition process on click funnels, our team saw a consistent increase in sales solely attributed to direct paid Facebook advertising.
#2 Effort to Communicate and Coordination
I am biased but I personally do not think it’s worth the effort to coordinate between 10-20 influencers trying to simply push out a couple of products. It’s better to simply purchase traffic from a paid marketing platform such as Facebook or Google.
For the majority of our projects as our SEO service in Singapore or digital marketing agency, our team do not rely on influencer marketing at all to increase traffic, sales and profits for our clients.
#3 Social Proof
However, there are upsides and leverage to influencer marketing done right.
You can leverage on social proof generated from influencer marketing and then re-run the same advertisement to cold traffic on the Facebook marketing platform. The pro marketers do that to create a lollapalooza with buzz, likes and comments generated from influencer marketing.
Social proof is one of the key pillars of persuasion as cited by Robert Cialdini and it’s extremely powerful as a marketing tool.
#4 Product Orientated Advertising
In today’s short attention spanned marketing space, large advertising platforms such as Facebook are moving away from direct response marketing to product-oriented advertising.
This is to ensure a positive user experience on these platforms and make sure the product itself sells.
Yes, stories do sell. However, some times stories and emotions can over sell, and advertising platforms are aware of that.
This is why influencer marketing might not be optimal in the long run. (or you might find it hard to get the ads approved on your advertising dashboard).
I might be biased but if you’re able to talk about your product with great copywriting, then there’s really no need for some popular influencer to push out your product for you. Great products coupled with great advertising sell themselves.
On the other hand, you can argue that big corporate brands to corporations have never hesitated on using models and influencers to push out products. So why shouldn’t you?
#5 Audience Size
Lastly, the audience size on Facebook and Google advertising platforms are extremely scalable. You can go broad and target entire Singapore on these platforms. leverage on the advertising platform algorithm, and get leads and sales!
The audience size on advertising platforms infinitely huge.
The secret here is to go broad and not micromanage audiences in your ad account once you’re getting a good ROAS and conversion.
On the media buying technical end, I always believed in going broad after getting 10-30 conversions on your conversion pixel. This has helped me manage multiple ad account campaigns simultaneously without micromanaging every single ad and audience.
Lastly, the audience size of these advertising platforms is much more than any influencer you engage.
Conclusion: Highly Dependent on Budget if You Should go with Influencer Marketing
If you’re low on budget, I recommend focusing on creating great digital advertising messages and focusing your budget on a media buying system that works for you. If the cost per influencer shout out is around $50 – $100 per post/ story, then you may be much better off allocating that budget and testing out ad angles on the Facebook advertising platform.
It’ll also save you all the time and trouble of looking for influencers, coordinating with them, creating the media alongside them with the right message, and then tracking sales and efforts.
Can influencer marketing in Singapore work? Yes, definitely. However, it is highly dependent on where your company is at, how much advertising budget you have, and how you eventually leverage on the social proof these influencers can potentially generate.