Be it creative ads or bold marketing campaigns, Singapore’s digital services company Circles.Life has always been able to put itself in the spotlight.
Last year, the telco company generated buzz by poking fun at rivals for their ”contracts and poor customer service” and this year it has been keeping users hooked by roping in comedians from Southeast Asia on its “Discover” platform out of its many endeavours.
Not being hesitant to quirky ideas, it has also recently an internal model called the “Entrepreneur’s in-residence” (EIR) where employees are given the opportunity to become co-founders of their departments within the company.
What separates EIR from a managerial position is that individuals take full ownership of the product they are heading by handling everything from budgeting to recruiting. It also gives them the autonomy to make important decisions and experiment with new ideas.
Carrie Sim and Benjamin Choo, who are currently a part of the new model, and the heads of the Daily Poll and Discover platform recently sat down with e27 to share insights on their processes behind crafting engaging content that generates high ROI for the company’s overall growth.
Here’s how they do it.
Analytics is all
According to the duo, part of the process of figuring out what kind of content needs to be pushed out involves spending a lot of time analysing data and metrics.
The Daily Poll is one such feature within the app which keeps users constantly entertained with fun quizzes and at the same time achieves the goal of providing valuable insights for effective content creation.
Sim explains that the team spends a substantial amount of time reading data to come up with ideas that have a higher chance of sticking with users rather than following random trends that end up failing in the end.
“The idea here is that since we have a lot of space to experiment, we can do a lot of different things within polls and observe which one sticks instead of spending too much time focusing on something on social media and then realising it doesn’t work,” Sim says.
“So it is really good in this aspect whereby it’s a really short and fast way for us to do adaptations before we invest time into creating, different forms of content. So it’s a balance between being creative and taking the risk to do something new with what the users tell us they want to see more,” she continues.
However, this does not mean that the process is a sure shot road to success.
Also Read: Morning News Roundup: Singapore’s Circles.Life lets go of employees despite recent fundraise
Sim further adds, “It is not always that our experimentation succeeds. And when that happens we think about why it failed and share the findings across teams and even during board meetings to explain what we learnt from it. But that’s how creativity happens, right? We try it out. It doesn’t work, but hold our accountability for it.”
Distributing for different channels
As digital marketing grows in popularity, there is a growing potential to use different social media channels to market a product or a service.
Part of their approach to receiving maximum engagement involves customising content across different channels – Sim admits that sometimes it’s not just about creating great content but also about effectively distributing it.
“So content is not just a quality game, but it’s also a quantity game. Even though quality over quantity is a good mantra to have as a baseline so that one does not put up bad content. Sometimes you have to think and look at it from a different perspective. The Daily Poll is one example of it, for example, the information received from it can be utilised in many ways as a blog post, a social media post or even as a way to improve emails for users.”
In Sim’s own words, “Valuable insights can help drive other pieces of content that we create.”
Also Read: Circles.Life co-founder on expansion, price wars and learning eight languages
Choo adds to the point saying that it is worth noting that the audience in different channels has different ways of engaging. He believes that each channel has users that exhibit vastly different behaviour and preferences for content.
“Even on the Discover platform, we have multiple channels of distribution like Facebook, Instagram, Telegram and even our own platform. The question we ask is should we market the same way for all our channels, or should we at least customise a personalised content based on who we think is the audience on each channel? Maybe the users using Telegram are different from the users using Facebook or Instagram,” he elaborates.
“So essentially this helps us in creating the right message for the right people and in turn helps us generate much more engaged content users,” Choo stresses.
Racing for relatability
Choo believes that being relatable with audiences is one way to grab attention and bring users closer to the company.
One of the ways to do this would be to listen to people on social media, ask them, or watch to see which of the posts receive the most number interaction or shares. Being a people-oriented company, this is something that Circles.Life constantly strives for.
“Recently when the Facebook news came out on certain fun features, the Daily Polls teams and the Discover team really reacted quickly and came up with Instagram filters and templates where our users could directly engage with us,” Choo points out.
Also Read: Circles.Life co-founder on expansion, price wars and learning eight languages
Other instances of being fleet-footed to react with external situations were when the company managed to organise a comedy show during lockdown to beat the “at home blues”.
However, relatability can differ in brands, which is why the two advice startups to focus on the demographics of their users and their behaviour patterns.
Both identify that one of the patterns in the current consumer landscape in the increasing popularity of bite-sized content, because of its snappy and quick nature. The two further add that this style is one thing that the team is currently pushing towards producing.
To conclude
Sim and Choo both believe that content creation is not simply about following rules of thumb of what’s trending on social media, but a process of organisation and deep analysis on a variety of factors that will end up creating effective social engagement which can then be used to further the growth of various verticals within the company.
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Image Credit: Circles.Life
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The post Behind the creative minds of “Circles.Life’s” cheeky content appeared first on e27.