13. National Day!!!

Happy 54th Singapore!!!!!

This is probably the biggest wave that we can ride for promoting our business. Unlike the previous MIE batches, our course period has almost no holidays that we can take advantage of; in fact, National Day is the only chance we have.

The idea to do something on National Day has been circling around our minds for quite a while, but we only really started planning on the day of the second consultation. After much discussion, we came up with 2 possibilities. The first one is to give a 54% discount to all our products on National Day, while the second one is to do a giveaway.

We ended up doing a giveaway, as a 54% discount is not very practical in a finance standpoint, and since we did not list our prices on Instagram, the word 'discount' might not have a big impact on our potential customers. At first, we wanted to make a Merlion themed terrarium for this giveaway. However, due to time constraints, we were unable to get the Merlion terrarium to look up to par for a giveaway. It was a sunk cost, and we had to resort to Plan B, which is to give away one of our existing products. We then decided that rather than choosing one specific product, it would be better to let the giveaway winner choose.

The post for the giveaway was done on 7 Aug, and posted on 8 Aug. Before making the post, we took reference from other businesses that have done giveaways for their designs and wordings. Then we decided on the criteria to participate in this contest based on how much marketing we can get out out of this post.

I have mentioned before that we will do a paid post, but the post has to be special, something that has a strong call for action and attracts as much attention as possible. This is the chance we were waiting for, and we spent about $16 over 4 days for this post alone.

The participation rate was surprisingly high, where we have over 100 followers to choose from for only one giveaway. I was initially thinking that since there is only one winner, we would have a limited number of people participating. However, the response was overwhelming. Perhaps this is the power of free stuff in Singapore?

In the end we could only choose one winner, but the important thing is the marketing this event brings us. While no direct revenue comes out of it, we did garner quite a few more followers, from the low 100s to a high 200s. The $16 spent gave us 3803 impressions, and almost 400 comments in the post. With Instagram Insights, we also saw that the age range of our participants were quite large, between 18 to 34. This is similar to what we originally wanted to target, the middle aged working adults, but it seems that our products are quite popular with the younger side too, those that would not be willing to spend so much for our higher end products. Perhaps it is a good idea to try to lower our prices, since we know that there is market for lower priced goods too?

Of course, the story does not end here. A few days after the event ended, we tried pushing for our followers to purchase our terrariums by launching an additional 10% discount. To be honest I felt that 10% was inconsequential, but it was the decision by the group, as at the end of the day we still need to make profits from the sales.