Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

Objective & Challenge
Remember the days when a business proposal required pages of documents? Those days are far gone with modernization. Now, business owners are mainly young, hungry, on the go entrepreneurs. To keep up with fast paced young entrepreneurs that seek instant gratification, connecting with SMEs on familiar, vibrant platforms is vital. The primary objective of BizSmart Challenge 2020 was to drive awareness among young entrepreneurs in a unique manner. Given the vague digital signal to identify SME owners online, the agency’s aim was to stand out in a cluttered space to give SMEs an opportunity to pitch their business in an unconventional manner.

Insight & Strategy
Facebook insights indicate that over 25 million businesses actively use Instagram to market to their target audience, and this number is growing by the day. It is no surprise that Instagram is one of the most rapidly growing social media platforms, especially when engaging with an audience with goldfish attention. Given the shift in business owners mainly being young and on the go entrepreneurs, the strategy was to reach out to them in platforms they are more familiar with in a stand out manner. With the existing strong presence and familiarity of business owners on Instagram, we recreated this space as a business pitch platform for businesses to pitch to their potential Sharks, which would impact their business reach in folds. With that in mind, Malaysia’s first ever 60 seconds Instagram Story Business Pitch was activated. Supporting this activation, we dived deep to identify the pain points and touchpoints of business with less than 5year business operations. Reports on Global Web Index on potential target audience behaviour showed that their main operation was through social channels, which was the most cost efficient platform in connecting with end users where a staggering 98.5% were active on social platforms (mainly on Facebook and Instagram). Article on NST identified that the conversations and pain points of SME business owners were around business coaching, funding, operation and clientele topics which was the essence of the BizSmart Challenge that is to help SMEs. Our strategy going into this was to share what BizSmart Challenge can do to address their pain points, and provide them with an unconventional method to pitch their business to gain the guidance needed to elevate their brand. We wanted to speak their language to reach out to them. So, we emulated the same structure of how a business is run through a condensed three step process of innovation, optimization and systemization.

Execution
With Instagram Story Business Pitch, we kept the mechanism simple as it was created for socialsavvy, young entrepreneurs. All they had to do was pitch their business in 60 seconds via Instagram story: 4x Instagram stories answering the key questions of “What is the business about?”, “How are you different from your competitors?”, “What inspired you to start your business?” and “What is your business plan for the next 3 years?” with the hashtag #BizSmartChallenge2020 for tracking on submission. In the spirit of business coaching even prior to joining as a BizSmart contestant, we rolled out how to join videos and static assets across all digital platforms where we targeted potential audience that were interested in entrepreneurship, business operation, business strategy, finance, crowdfunding, business coaching, SME funding which had a potential audience pool of 3.5 million. To complement the momentum of the Instagram Story Business Pitch, we activated 65 organic posts and 22 paid ads on social throughout the campaign. Besides social, we also leveraged on the monthly average of 17,700 search queries on Google when it came to business coaching, operation and funding with text ads informing user about exciting RM1.5 million prize quantum by Alliance Bank Malaysia. To take the campaign a step further and collect quality leads for the submission via Instagram stories and the submission portal, the ads throughout the campaign was optimized towards link clicks, landing page views and leads which we then used to exclude participants that have already signed up and create a lookalike audience to amplify the reach among highintent users that are more likely to join the challenge. As a final push for a submission call out, we analyzed the interim performance and proceeded to activate the locations most entries were submitted from, most effective ad formats, targeting and communication. In terms of targeting, we expanded the reach among indirect interest group based on digital functional tools used by business to operate, such as Hootsuite, Shopify, Google Analytics, ipay88 and more.

Effectiveness
The campaign achieved more than its set KPI on submission entries with close to 500 submissions making it the highest number of submissions since its inception in 2013, which was the campaign’s benchmark. Ads activated contributed to 90% of the total submission gained. Impression served doubled compared to the previous years, with 7.3 million impressions, and the campaign gained a social reach of 5.7 million. With the activation of Instagram Story Pitch, the campaign drove over 238,000 engagement, with 81% were from Instagram activated ads that guided users on IG Story pitch submissions. On top of that, the campaign drove a healthy number of returning users of 41% and a high time spent on landing page of 3.15 minutes displayed the effectiveness of our retargeting approach paired with the final call communication. The media strategy of optimization, systemization and innovation were effective identifying the right channels, high intent audience and turning an existing IG Story Ad format into a powerful tool for businesses to pitch their business. In all, the Alliance Bank BizSmart Challenge campaign provided a platform for SME business owners towards a step closer in saying, “Sharks, we have a deal!”