Data marketing strategy for Singapore small businesses

Living in the information age, consumers are constantly bombarded with numerous advertisements and content which can be overwhelming. The focus of most marketing initiatives has been to identify the ideal customer.

How do you decide the characteristic of this customer?

Data-driven marketing strategy

During the course of your business, you would have engaged your clients and understand their needs and preferences. Perhaps it is time to review your client profiles.

For instance, you may have the age group or income level of your clients, which are useful in forming strategy for product launch for a particular segment of the market.

Take a look at Singapore homegrown global brand, Charles and Keith. When you think of the brand, you may also think of other related brands or designs of which each attracts a particular market segment. So how does your business identify the ideal client and therefore the market segment that is most relevant to your business.

Small business can do it too!

Small businesses can tap onto useful business metrics to grow their revenue. You do not need the mechanics of Multinational Corporations (MNCs) to engage in this activity.

For example, if you are in the Food and Beverage (F&B) business in Singapore and you have intention to increase the selling price of your product, this is a useful time to collect some useful information on the impact to your business.

Ignoring other factors, you might be interested to understand the sales of individual products after the increase and make comparison to the sales before the rise in price. Such information is simple to collect and easy to analyse.

Let us take a look at the furniture business line. Singapore well-known brand Furniture and furnishings, often introduces new collections either on a seasonal basis or a creation of a new furniture line. They have multiple brands under the group. Each new product introduction can have impact on other brands products too.

If a trend is established when your price changes, you would wish to understand the impact on a potential fall in volume as a result of an increase in the selling price of the products. In other words, when the price of a particular product increases by 1%, does your sales volume fall or increase by more or less than 1%?

New products launch

Likewise, Singapore Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) may be concerned whether an introduction of a new product can lead to a widening of their consumer base and hopefully revenue. This can be applicable to fashion and lifestyle products and services where the differentiation across product category may not be significant.

A concern is to explore if the new product eats into the revenue of your existing product category. As such, the above metric of measuring the degree of changes in revenue before and after sales launch becomes imperative to keep a record of the revenue impact after the launch of the new products.

This is perhaps most applicable to the growth of local e-commerce that have been sprouting in the internet sphere. When we take a look at start-up GoFresh, an e-commerce site for grocery and food shopping, it is critical for some similar nature e-commerce business owner to identify shopping trend and behavior so as to identify the “hot selling products” .

This can be done by understanding the profile and spending power of your consumers. You may wish to look at the average spending power of customers on your site too.

If possible, you may also wish to see if the new products allow you to capture a new demography of consumers. If so, you may have succeeded in broadening your consumer base.  When we take a look at Singapore NTUC Fairprice and NTUC Fairprice finest, we can see the different market segments it is targeting based on understanding what consumers wish to purchase and tap onto data to drive their product display in their respective supermarket to expand their consumer base.

Lag and current indicators

In designing business metrics, it is important to have a balance of lag and current indicators. For example, if you were measuring the quarterly sales, you would only be able to have the figure when the quarter ends.

By the time an accountant or yourself have the knowledge of the data, it might be too late to introduce small-scale salvage strategy. The degree of lag in your indicators becomes relevant in formulating data-driven marketing strategy.

Current indicators are business metrics with a shorter timeframe such as weekly sales result that is able to capture recent sales trend or product sales volume. As a business owner, one should be interested if a product appears to have a growing momentum. An ideal combination is to have a mix of lag and current indicators with more emphasis on the latter.

Social media marketing & Business metrics

The social media platform provides a useful platform for SMEs to have readily available metrics. The proliferation of Singapore business in various sectors such as education, fashion, F&B, and product manufacturing businesses have tapped onto social media to build brand awareness.

In particular, for business owners using Facebook for marketing effort, you should be able to have a glance of the demographic of your fan base. This piece of information is useful as you wish to ensure two things: you are targeting the right demographic of your consumers and more importantly, the total percentage of the targeted group should ideally be at least 60% of your total fan base.

Identifying the right platform to broadcast your business with a data-driven marketing strategy is critical for SMEs to leap ahead in their progress. Take some time to derive some simple-to-collect data and you will find the process rewarding and insightful.

Have you created your business metric?