In this post, we will share with you our customer journey and look at Facebook advertising to help you maximize your performance.
Facebook Ads: Advertising on Facebook
Facebook has been developing into a platform that is for more than socialising and entertainment.
It is a platform that provides great opportunities for big and small businesses to convert people into customers, expanding their customer base.
And there is a function on Facebook that has become a useful tool for businesses: Facebook Ads.
We have come to the final session of MarketingFest Series #1: ‘Introduction to Advertising on Facebook’. In this session, the speaker walked us through how advertising on Facebook works.
Understanding more about how Facebook Ads works will help you effectively leverage this platform for your adverts.
The speaker (Vievient Choy) and the emcee (Laureen Quah) of the event.
Let’s go through some key messages from this session.
1. Understand Ads Manager
Ads Manager is where you can do everything with Facebook Ads.
Let’s see what we can do with Ads Manager:
a. Create adverts b. Manage multiple adverts c. Evaluate advert performance d. Publish and manage adverts on different Facebook Group applications, such as Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp
2. Create Advertisement on Facebook
a. Why are you running an advertisement?
When running adverts on Facebook, you need to identify the objective of your advertisement and know what you are trying to achieve with your advert campaign on Facebook.
The Facebook Ads platform offers plenty of objectives for you to choose from for your ads campaign.
Choose the Facebook Ads campaign objectives that are aligned with your business goals.
b. Who do you want to reach out to?
After defining the objective of your advert campaign, the next step is to identify the audience you want to reach and encourage so that they take further action when seeing your adverts on Facebook.
c. Add media and Copy
Last but not least, once you find out who you want to show your adverts to, choose the media of your adverts.
The media can be an image or video, while the copy is the content of your advert campaign to encourage the target audience to take action.
3. Types of audience of FB ads
a. Core audience
The core audience is the audience that is available to you within the platform of Facebook who are all Facebook users.
You are allowed to manually select the characteristics of your core audience, such as the location and age.
b. Custom Audience
For this, you may upload a contact list. It is to reconnect you with the audiences who already showed interest in your products and services (for example, users who have subscribed to your newsletters), so you can retarget them with your Facebook ads.
c. Lookalike audience
Lookalike audiences are those that are similar to your existing customers or the people who have bought your products or services. Lookalike audiences are very useful for Facebook ads as it enables you to reach a new group of high potential audience and convert them to customers.
4. Understand customer avatar
To spend your budget effectively on ads, show the ads to the people who are more likely to purchase by just seeing your ads.
Therefore, it’s a good idea to determine who we want to target; understanding customer avatar is essential before running ads to the target market.
By understanding the characteristics and preferences of target customers, we can craft the right message that resonates or meets the needs of the customers, which in turn, increases the conversion rate.
5. Capture Attention
People usually scroll fast on social media and would not stay on a post for more than 3 seconds if it doesn’t catch their attention.
To capture the attention of the audience, you need a good image and a simple, clear message that can grab their attention instantly.
Besides, it is important to use recognisable characters or product images on your ads as it will help the audience recognise your brand immediately.
Facebook is a powerful platform to engage with your audience and stay engaged with them.
Creating and running effective Facebook ads that resonate with your audiences makes them want to connect with your brand.
This will bring a positive impact on your brand image and increase the revenue of your business.
In this session, we are pleased to have Vievient Choy, a Facebook Certified Trainer to share with us how Facebook Ads Manager works and the decisions advertisers make in the ad creation process.
We also took a deeper look at the customer journey and how Facebook advertising impacts the conversion process.
We enhance our body’s immune system by taking supplements or consuming healthy food to keep ourselves healthy.
Just like your body, strengthening your website’s immune system ensures that it performs well. But how can you do that?
In the second MarketingFest Series #1 workshop, we looked at ways to strengthen your website’s immune system through SEO.
You might have faced the issue of website traffic suddenly dropping.
Improving your website’s immune system with search engine optimization SEO will help you solve this and other issues and generate organic traffic to your website.
The speaker (Martin Tang) and the emcee (Laureen Quah) of the event.
Let’s dive into the key takeaways from this session.
1. Use Google Search Console
With Google Search Console, you can fix all the errors on your website.
It also helps you measure your website’s search traffic and performance.
You can easily see and analyse how your website is performing via a graph generated by Google Search Console.
The data in the search console helps you understand the problems with your website and know what you should optimise.
2. Understand Why Google Search Traffic Drops
You might have experienced a situation where you verified your website on Google Search Console and found out that the search traffic had dropped dramatically.
What causes drops in search traffic? Below are the main causes announced by Google Search Central:
a. Site-level technical issues
b. Seasonality
c. Page-level technical issues
d. Reporting glitches
3. Investigate The Search-Drop Pattern
You can change the date range for data to compare on Google Search Console—the maximum range is 16 months.
Monitor the performance of the search traffic from time to time by, for example, comparing the performance every three months.
You can analyse traffic performance by looking at different search types separately.
If there is a drop in your Google Search Console results, note any changes you made to your website during that period.
4. Read the Latest SEO Information
Many articles have been shared about SEO tips and solutions, teaching you about SEO or how to optimise SEO.
But are you reading the right ones?
To keep up to date with the latest and best information about SEO, always read the posts on the Google Search Central Blog first.
This is where Google shares its latest update.
Other than that, if you want to seek information from other resources, check the publishing date to make sure you are reading the latest SEO updates instead of information from years ago because it might not work for now.
5. Back Up Your Website
A healthy habit for your website is to always have a backup.
Keep a backup copy on your local drive or a pen drive instead of just backing it up to the cloud.
You can even schedule backups so that all your information and data is saved regularly.
You should also test how to restore your website.
Sometimes, people know how to backup everything but do not really know how to restore it.
Thus, it is important for webmasters to know how to restore a website.
Final Thoughts
SEO plays an important role in your website.
It is one of the factors that accelerate your website’s performance and make sure it appears in a high ranking in search results so that your website is visible and you can reach out to your audience successfully.
Practise the tips shared in this webinar.
They will bring you a healthy website that performs well and offers your audience a better customer experience.
Watch the full video of this SEO session by Martin Tang, Assistant Digital Marketing Manager of Exabytes.
We have recapped all the panel discussions from Series #1: Advertising.
Let’s move on to the workshops!
Before we continue, have you read the last blog post?
If you have not, click here to read it! You will take away fruitful information.
The speaker (Charlene Fernandez) & the emcee (Laureen Quah) of the event.
The topic of Series #1: Advertising’s first workshop was ‘Drive Online Sales with Google Ads’. Google is the most popular search engine in the world.
It is used by almost everyone to search for anything they want.
Because it is widely used, Google has become a good place for businesses to reach more people by running adverts on Google.
What can businesses do with Google Ads to achieve their business goals more effectively?
Let’s have a look at the main points of this session:
1. Search Ads
Creating Google search ads allows you to reach your target audience, track the effectiveness of your advertising, and move your business ahead.
However, you must first create a Google Advertisements campaign before you can begin running search ads.
This is where you can start thinking about how much you want to spend on search ads, where you want your ads to appear, and what kind of ads you want to show.
2. Campaigns with Different Objectives
Occasionally, we’d want to see different ads that are attempting to achieve different objectives.
When it comes to Google advertisements, you are not limited to just one goal.
If you want to receive distinct outcomes from Google advertisements, you can create two separate campaigns with different goals on Google.
Google will optimize your ads to encourage viewers to take the necessary action to help accomplish the ad’s objectives.
3. Update website frequently
A little bot from Google will crawl your website.
Google bot is hungry for data, and your content is its food.
The bot will analyze the content on your website and conclude what it is all about.
As a result, it’s critical to ensure that your website is always up to date and that all of the content is fresh.
4. Make sure the website is mobile-friendly
Today, most of us use our phones to search for information on Google, scroll through social media, and more.
As a result, you must make sure your website works properly on mobile phones when users visit and browse through it.
If customers visit your website and it takes a long time to load, it will have a negative influence on the customer experience.
5. Show relevant content in your text ads
People are looking for information to help them make a decision.
Your advertisements must provide information that can impact their decision.
If you know who you want to reach, use keywords that are most relevant to your target market in your advertising to encourage them to purchase from you.
However, determining the proper keywords for your advertisements might be tough; what you can do is keep testing until you find a keyword that performs effectively
6. Keep changing the keywords
Keywords allow you to display your ads as one of the results for a search query.
The key to having keywords that match a search query that is relevant to your business in your Google advertising is to have them match a search query that is relevant to your business.
Aside from that, we need to keep updating the keywords.
Because trends change all the time, we need to be aware of the most recent trends as well as our audience’s preferences to ensure that our ads are relevant to them.
Google advertising has made it easy for large and small company owners, as well as marketers, to reach a large number of consumers.
We’re happy to have invited Charlene Fernandez, Mahir Digital Bersama Google trainer, to this session to discuss with the audience how to construct Smart Campaigns on Google, as well as other ideas and techniques to help your Google ads campaign be successful.
Learn more about Google ads by watching the full video of this workshop!
This post focuses on the last panel discussion for Series #1: Advertising. As marketers and advertisers, we know that copywriting is extremely important when creating adverts. Words are powerful for communicating with your audiences, educating and persuading them to learn more about your products and services.
The moderator (Nowrid Amin) and panelists (Dheepu George, Olwen van Dijk-Hildebrand & Archangela Genoveva) of the event.
This session, ‘Improving Your Ad Copywriting to Drive Greater ROI’, shared ways to improve ad copywriting to make your adverts more effective. Let’s check out the key takeaways from this session.
1. Connect with Your Audience
Copywriting promotes your business and allows you to connect with your audience. Your customers will have problems, and you can use words to solve those problems. Businesses provide products and services to help people and make their life easier.
2. Use the Right Keywords
A good copywriter knows how to create SEO-optimised content. Use the keywords your target audience is searching for in your content. If your copy doesn’t contain the right keywords and target the right audience, you won’t lead your target audience to your brand. You need to make sure you have the right keywords to optimise your SEO and help your website land on the first page of search results.
3. Avoid Jargon and Technical Language
Avoid using jargon or very technical language when writing content. It will be very hard for the audience to read and understand what the content is trying to say. They won’t look for a dictionary to find out what the words mean. Therefore, it is important to use words that are easy to understand to make your content more accessible and easy to read.
4. Know Who You Are Targeting
When writing copy for an advert, you need to know the meaning of the words you use and know your audience. You are not writing for everybody. Try to imagine that you are writing for one person you would like to reach. Thus, it is important to understand your buyer persona and have that person in mind when writing copy.
5. Produce Emotional Content
The purpose of the word is to create emotion, generating people’s interest in your content. If you are trying to create brand engagement, emotional content is what you should look for. People connect with a brand if there is an emotional connection. Emotional content is effective in helping businesses to grow their customer base.
Final Thoughts
Aside from visuals, advert copy is the most important thing for overall advert performance. A catchy headline is key to grabbing your audience’s attention and continuing to read the content of your adverts. If you fail at copywriting, you fail at building a connection with your audience.
In this panel discussion, we were glad to have Nowrid Amin, Head of Digital Marketing, Juwai IQI as the moderator. The panellists were Olwen van Dijk-Hildebrand, Head of Content, 2Stallions Digital Marketing Agency; Dheepu George, Head of Content Marketing, Sendhelper; Archangela Genoveva, Performance Marketing, Gojek. Once again, thank you for sharing with us the amazing tips for creating good advert copywriting.
Want to write good advert content? Watch the full webinar video and learn how to write from the experts!
Have you read our blog post on the first Series #1 topic? If you have not, make sure you visit the blog post here.
Nowadays, businesses are using advertisement to reach their target audiences.
There are plethora of tips and tricks can be found online for businesses to do advertisement effectively.
Today, we’ll look at the second panel discussion for Series #1: Advertising.
The topic discussed during this session was ‘The best practices for businesses to use ads targeting‘.
The moderator (Wintson Tham) and panelists (SweetEe Chin, Adinda Katrina Sudradjat, Sheila Ashameeta & Jerrick Yeoh) of the event.
Budgeting is an important facet that business owners will always need to look at.
We all want to spend our budgets wisely while advertising our businesses smartly to reach the right audiences and, in turn, generate more sales.
Let’s look at some takeaways from this session:
1. Know Your Target Audience
There is no right or wrong audience. The right target audiences are those who already buy from you.
All you need to do is to educate audiences to buy your products.
To persuade them to purchase, you should make a buyer profile to understand the buyer persona and know their buying habits.
You can also observe your competitors to see what they are doing and how their audiences react.
Knowing your target audiences well will allow you to craft content that will attract them and convert them into customers.
2. Invest in Market Research
One of the common mistakes businesses make when planning their adverts is jumping straight to running their adverts instead of doing market research before planning them.
Creating adverts without knowing your audiences’ profiles, behaviours, and interests will lead you to target the wrong audiences who do not have the potential to become your customers.
Thus, it will not bring you any results.
3. Create an Optimisation Strategy
When looking for optimisations, you need to understand what you are looking to optimise.
After you understand what you want to optimise and have all the metrics and KPIs, this is where you can start building optimisation strategies.
For example, optimising your social media posts’ visuals and copy could attract new audiences and convert them into customers.
4. Observe Your Data
By collecting website data, you may learn that when people visit your website, they stop somewhere and stop interacting with your website.
The data could show the reason why people stop taking the next step—does your product not solve their problems, or is it not attractive enough?
Based on the analysis, you can plan ways to get them back to your website and take further action.
5. Determine the Effectiveness of Your Adverts
a) Objective
When determining whether or not the adverts work, you can look at whether the adverts have achieved their objectives.
Different objectives will mean looking at different metrics. For example, the objective could be raising brand awareness or increasing the conversion rate.
b) Revenue
People often think that revenue is the only factor that determines if their adverts are successful.
However, the result of adverts does not come right away. It takes time. Focus more on the results that bring lifetime value to your brand.
Final Thoughts
Advert targeting is important for anyone running adverts for their business.
It determines whether your ads successfully reach the right people at the right place and right time.
Thus, before targeting the right customers, it’s strongly recommended to conduct market research.
Research will help you better understand what your audiences like and where they are, assisting you in crafting effective adverts for your products and services.
We are pleased to have Wintson Tham, Assistant Business Consultant Manager, Exabytes, as the moderator. The panellists included: SweetEe Chin, Head of Marketing, Amazin’Grace; Adinda Katrina Sudradjat, Growth Strategist Manager, Prihal Data & Creative Studio; Sheila Ashameeta, Growth Strategist Manager, Prihal Data & Creative Studio and Jerrick Yeoh, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Exabytes to share with the audience about the best practices for using advert targeting.
Want to learn more?
Watch the full panel video, ‘The Best Practices for Businesses Using Advert Targeting’.
This year, MarketingFest brought you three series focused on different aspects: advertising, data and insights, and influencer and social media marketing.
Series #1: This series shared the advertising strategies that help business owners communicate ideas about their products and services to their target audience in the hopes of converting them into customers.
The moderator (Samantha Tang) and panelists (Evan Januli, Vickson Tan & Weng Wai) of the event.
The first panel discussion of Series #1 was ‘Figuring Out the Most Suitable Online Advertising Strategies for Your Business’.
As online business owners, we are always looking for the most suitable advertising strategies to achieve our business goals.
But how can we figure out which ones are suitable for our businesses?
The panellists in this discussion had the answers for us. Let’s go through some key points of this session.
1. Understand Your Business Well Before Running Adverts
When it comes to creating adverts, instead of just knowing who and where your target audience is, you also need to understand what your business is all about.
Look at what you are selling and the brand image you want to build and bring to the target market.
Know your business well.
Only then can you determine which platform is most suitable for running your adverts effectively.
2. Explore Beyond Facebook and Google
Online advertising is not limited to Facebook and Google.
It is time for you to explore other platforms where you can implement your advertising strategies more effectively.
However, if you intend to implement your strategies on other platforms, you must first look at your audience demand.
Understand your audience base, such as who they are and which platforms they use.
3. Target Audiences
Nowadays, many tools can help businesses customise the audiences they want to target.
You could also do some research to determine which groups you should be targeting to achieve your goals.
Nevertheless, even though you have these tools to help you, you may still wonder if you are reaching the right audience.
4. Sync Your Adverts Across Platforms
When running adverts on different platforms, you need to synchronise the topic discussed in the adverts.
Not only do the adverts need to be synced, but you also need to make sure that when you’re communicating with partners or having a KOL share information about your products or services, everyone is talking about the same topic regarding your products and services.
5. Raise Awareness Organically
The more you do, the more returns and results you will see.
To raise awareness and engagement organically, you need to define your content strategies and know what kind of organic posts you want to create to reach your audience.
When you start to explore beyond unpaid strategies, you will find that there are other ways to organically reach people.
For example, you could reach out to different communities on social media and collaborate with them.
Final Thoughts
When you first step into the world of digital marketing, it might not be easy to identify the most suitable advertising strategies for your business, and you might get lost.
Various platforms allow you to run adverts, and many different advertising strategies can be found online.
However, you need to know that the strategies that work for others might not work for you.
To find the most suitable strategies for your adverts, you need to look at your business and know what your business is all about.
In this session, we were glad to have invited Samantha Tang, Chapter Lead of Google Business Group (GBG) as a moderator.
For the panellists, we had Vickson Tan, Senior VP of Marketing, Exabytes; Evan Januli, VP of Brands & Marketing; Weng Wai, Head of Marketing, iCar Asia.
Once again, we thank them for sharing their valuable insights on the exciting topics of this session.
Watch the full panel video, ‘Figuring Out the Most Suitable Online Advertising Strategies for Your Business’ video and kick start your advertising journey!
Cloud hosting allows programs and websites to access cloud resources. Unlike traditional hosting, where solutions are housed on a single server, cloud hosting distributes solutions across multiple servers. Instead, the application or website is hosted by a network of connected virtual and physical cloud servers, which provides greater flexibility and scalability than traditional hosting methods. The cloud network, rather than a single on-premises server, is used to deploy applications and solutions.
The amount of resources available varies depending on the demands of the users. Organizations only pay for what they use. Databases in SQL (including MySQL) and NoSQL can be hosted in the cloud. APIs, online portals, and mobile applications enable solutions to be automated and managed. Transferring one’s company activities to the cloud, such as document storage and emails, can save expenses, expedite workflow, and eliminate the need for in-house IT gear and people.
A competent cloud provider will also be able to let distant employees collaborate online, report for duty, and gain safe access to sensitive data. The opportunity to focus on core business operations while the cloud-based service handles bothersome IT problems like support, maintenance, backup, and security is perhaps the biggest benefit for small businesses.
Choosing the best cloud solution among a multitude of firms offering an ever-growing array of outstanding cloud solutions has become a difficult challenge and you canhire network talent or simply follow this few advice to help you pick the finest cloud service. You will be able to pick the finest cloud service provider customized to your unique demands while evaluating possible cloud service providers.
Advice 1
Define the cloud services that your firm provides. Being aware of your cloud computing requirements can help you choose the sort of service you require. There are a variety of software-based cloud options. Dropbox, for example, is a photo, video, and document storage service. Founded in 2005, Salesforce is a company that provides online customer relationship management (CRM) services. Intuit specializes in online accounting. Should you require something other than simple data storage?
There are companies that offer a variety of cloud computing solutions for general use, including IT networking infrastructure as well as on-demand access to software, apps, and virtual servers. Is the cloud service secure? When it comes to keeping an enterprise’s critical data in the cloud, online safety and security are critical. A minimum of a few common protective measures should be in place for cloud computing solution providers by now. Furthermore, they must be continually updated in order to prevent the plethora of harmful attacks that occur on a daily basis. You must confirm that a cloud provider’s security is flawless in order to have a decent night’s sleep.
Advice 2
Look for security features like anti-virus detection, firewalls, security audits on a regular basis, data encryption, and multiple user verification. Certifications like ISO27001 can attest to the fact that certain safeguards are in place (they usually require regular auditing of the company). You may also inquire about the company’s security history, including any known security incidents or breaches.
Advice 3
Another important question to ask is who will have access to your cloud data and if the cloud solutions provider does background checks on its workers to weed out possible identity thieves or hackers. Compliance with industry-specific government regulations is another issue that cloud providers should be prepared to address. If your company is in the betting sector, for example, you’ll want to make sure your cloud provider complies with the Gambling Commission’s requirements, which include conducting assessments and visits, providing guidance or particular counsel to license holders, and examining financial data. In what state is the data center, and where is it situated, and what is the security level?
It is just as important as the safety and placement of the servers and data centers where your company’s data are stored that your data is kept safe online. You’ll want to be sure you’re not working with a cloud provider whose servers are housed in a basement where anybody may break in and steal important information. To be sure this isn’t the case, inquire about how your prospective cloud solutions provider safeguards its servers against natural catastrophes including hurricanes, floods, fires, and earthquakes.
Don’t forget to ask about the many forms of physical breach protection available.For example, how are the facilities safeguarded against physical and virtual thieves attempting to steal your personal information? The ISO27001 standard is perhaps the greatest sign that a cloud merchant’s data centers can withstand legions of security attacks. The ISO27001 certification verifies that an organization’s data, systems, and products meet industry security requirements for data redundancy, data server physical protection, privacy, and customer access. What is the expense scheme for this project?
When searching for the best cloud provider, pricing is unquestionably an important consideration to consider. Finally, it comes down to this: only pay for services that you actually use and are interested in obtaining. Keep an eye out for large up-front fees or lock-in restrictions, which are not typical of reputable cloud service providers, and instead look for other options.The price system should be pay-as-you-go from the start, with the option to add more services if needed. Costs are generally charged hourly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, and annually, depending on the supplier.
Prices might range from as little as $1 per user per month to more than $100 per month. What is the history of downtime? A period of time during which a service is essentially unavailable to users is known as downtime. The optimum response to this crucial issue is never, but that isn’t a realistic expectation. The most well-known cloud service providers, as well as the largest and most well-established, are not exempt from occasional outages.
Given the potential cost and disruption to a company’s operations associated with cloud outages, it is preferable to choose a seller with as few as potential. When problems do occur, it’s also critical that the firm responds in an open and transparent manner. The same logic applies to the provider’s recommended remedies and improvements as a consequence.
Advice 4
Seek for providers who make their downtime history logs available on their websites, such as http://status.cloudsigma.com. If they don’t have these reports, make sure to ask about their track record; online reporting is typically recommended.
I’m not sure how I’ll get access to my service. By connecting into his or her vendor’s customer login page, an individual should be able to view his or her cloud-based company data from any remote place at any time. He or she should be able to sign in from any device, such as a laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
What rules do you have in place for data import and export? Data portability is one of the most effective vendor lock-ins. You’re locked in if you can’t migrate your data from one supplier to another, regardless of open standards, APIs, or other factors. Look for a service that has built-in data export (and import) capabilities that is free (or inexpensive), simple to use, and easily available. If you change your mind later, you may find it quite costly to abandon a service that lacks this. Even if you’re simply on a monthly rolling contract, how inexpensive is that service in fact if switching to another service is difficult, time-consuming, and risky?
Customers of cloud services fail to fully examine data portability, which is arguably the most ignored concern. Is it possible for a cloud provider to adapt its services to a client’s changing business needs? Your cloud service requirements are likely to rise in tandem with your company operations. Learn what extra capacity and pricing it offers to ensure you’re choosing a reputable and adaptable cloud vendor.
Advice 5
It’s best if you can find a provider that gets cheaper per unit as you grow. If your plans include expanding your team, you’ll need to make sure that adding additional members to your account is simple. What kind of customer service does the vendor provide? Always seek for a highly accessible and efficient support system while choosing the finest cloud provider.
Customer service should be available online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays. Some providers provide this for free, while others charge various fees, and it’s a must-have if you’re placing any essential business services in the cloud. Before purchasing any service, double-check this. Because quality varies, make sure you’re aware of the typical response and resolution time.
Also, check to see if the technical help is given by experienced engineers or by support service people that read or copy scripts rather than resolving your issue one-on-one. The former is clearly superior and will save you a significant amount of time when using support services to resolve difficulties.
Advice 6
The following advice is typically to login in and customize the account after choosing and signing with a cloud vendor. Adding workers as users is also a part of this. Because cloud hosting requires only an internet connection, it is possible to conduct business from virtually any location. Mobile applications that are compatible with all devices are provided by the overwhelming bulk of web-based hosting services.
A cloud-based web host, in addition to all of the above, provides superior security because the data is kept in the cloud and can be accessed regardless of what happens to the computer. There are cloud service providers who will take you through the installation procedure. Others, such as Amazon and Google, provide just online introduction materials. That concludes the stages for selecting the best cloud service; hope they were helpful!
The B2B food export industry has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, it has experienced many ups and downs in the past two years, due to supply chain disruptions, global lockdowns, and other COVID-related issues.
As many economies in the world are opening up, now is the best time for the B2B food industry to expand its business through online opportunities.
The rapid digitalisation of the B2B trade has made it easier for food wholesalers to reach buyers from around the world. In this challenging time, how does Alibaba.com help Malaysia’s B2B food exporters meet millions of buyers around the world with the power of a B2B marketplace platform?
In this article, we will cover everything you need to know, including the uncertainties, challenges, and trends in the food industry, so that you can kickstart your online export business.
People panic buying food, causing many retail grocery stores to struggle to keep up with the global demand
Challenges B2B Food Export Faced during the Pandemic
The uncertainties caused by the pandemic have posed a few large challenges for the wholesale food and beverage industry to overcome. Here are a few of the most notable challenges that SMEs in the B2B food export industry have faced from the start of the pandemic until today.
Factory Shutdowns
Many factories have experienced shutdowns at different times over the course of the pandemic. Some factories might still be closed today. However, in Malaysia, most food companies are allowed to operate. When factories are shut down, food production can’t carry on as normal, contributing to shortages.
Supply Chain Shortages
With many factories shut down and food production operations halted, the pandemic has caused food supply chain disruptions. Because different regions produce different types of food, supply chain disruptions have occurred at different times over the last year.
At the beginning of the pandemic, food safety had to be seriously assessed because it was unclear whether COVID-19 could spread through food. This incident contributed to supply chain disruptions for a short period.
While the pandemic did not cause any major food security issues that left people hungry on a global scale, and most of the world is returning to normal, there are still isolated supply chain disruptions.
Restaurant Shutdowns
To avoid the spread of COVID-19, many restaurants were shut down, and only take out was allowed in many parts of the world. These changes in the restaurant industry affected the demand for food products and altered the way customers buy food.
Although it directly affected B2C markets rather than the B2B market, the effect still comes back to food wholesalers. Grocery stores became busier as the demand increased rapidly, and B2B food supplies saw a shift in their clientele.
Shipping Disruptions
There were disruptions with shipping throughout the pandemic. Both air freight and ocean freight encountered disruption issues.
Ocean freight saw a spike in demand and the supply was not able to cope. For airfreight, there was not enough air cargo space to meet the shipping demands of global trade.
In addition, travel restrictions greatly reduced the number of commercial flights at various locations throughout the pandemic.
Price Increases
According to supply and demand rules, prices rise when supply falls and demand remains constant. Prices have risen due to scarcity and a reduction in the supply of food products during the pandemic.
Opportunities in B2B Food Supply Market after the Pandemic
Major advancements in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and treating those infected with the virus have been made, thanks to the efforts of scientists and medical professionals. This outcome has allowed the world to revert to a more normal state.
Restaurants are slowly opening up to normal capacity, and the foodservice industry is beginning to flourish once again.
Of course, the pandemic has not ended, but now is a good time for food wholesalers to explore opportunities and export to many countries.
9 Reasons to Start Selling Food on a B2B E-Commerce Platform
1. Digitalisation Is the ‘New Normal’
Many years ago, business digitalisation was introduced to many industries, but many businesses still insisted on practising traditional business models. Digitalisation used to be an optional strategy for many businesses.
However, with many in-person business operations being halted due to the pandemic, online trading and exporting have become the new norm.
B2C e-commerce marketplaces were already very popular, so the digitalisation of the B2B sector was a natural progression. Digitalisation makes things convenient for sellers, and customers prefer online buying nowadays.
2. Larger Reach
When you create a storefront on a B2B e-commerce platform, you can reach a much larger audience not only in your own country but also overseas. For example, Alibaba.com has over 17 million buyers from over 190 countries around the world who are looking to source items for their businesses.
Buyers come to these platforms with the intent to buy, making it easy for sellers to connect with them. Buyers will seek out what you offer. In other words, it is easier to sell to these warm leads from a B2B e-commerce platform than to sell to the cold leads.
3. Save Time with Automation
Many B2B e-commerce platforms nowadays are equipped with automation tools, helping food wholesalers save time and redirect their resources to more important tasks.
Alibaba.com, for example, offers tools for automatic product listing. Some other popular automation tools take care of advertising, lead generation, translation, and more.
4. Customer Relationship Management Tools
Customer relationship management (CRM) is important for wholesalers to understand their customers, communicate directly with them, and keep track of who has purchased and who has not. Most innovative B2B e-commerce platforms are equipped with CRM tools.
Powerful CRM tools help food sellers understand the status of different leads so that they know which one they should continue to nurture. Moreover, these tools provide insights into your customers’ backgrounds.
You can even better understand their cultures when dealing with them.
Make sure the B2B e-commerce marketplace you select allows you to manage customer relationships.
5. Discover Brands Online
Brand awareness is important and essential for businesses today. Improving and expanding your online presences is the best way to increase your brand awareness. And you can do that with most B2B e-commerce marketplaces.
You can incorporate your brand’s personal touch when creating your digital storefront in the B2B e-commerce marketplace. List your products and add your brand logo and other information about your brand. This process gives life to your brand, and buyers will be more inclined to buy from you.
6. Improve Discoverability
Most B2B e-commerce platforms come with internal search engines to let visitors easily search for the products they are looking for. When you properly optimise your product listings with the appropriate keywords, your ideal customers will be able to find you.
There are two approaches you can take to maximise your discoverability on an e-commerce marketplace: search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (paid adverts). Running adverts and optimising your product listings to rank high on the platform’s search result pages will bring more traffic to your digital storefront and product offerings.
7. Demand Forecasting Tools
Demand forecasting tools enable you to make data-driven business decisions based on purchase trends, inventory levels, and future sales potential to maximise revenue. Most B2B e-commerce marketplaces are equipped with demand forecasting tools. They help you study and forecast market demands.
Demand forecasting tools have been especially important throughout the pandemic when there is so much uncertainty. It is nice to have guidance from experts and data that would be hard to obtain on your own.
8. Easy Exporting
Exporters face many challenges, such as language barriers and varying international trade laws. Tapping into a new market can be difficult if your new international audience is unfamiliar with your brand.
B2B e-commerce marketplaces are equipped with tools such as auto-translators and more to overcome these challenges when dealing with global customers and navigate exporting like a pro.
9. Dedicated Support and Training
Growing your wholesale food business online may seem overwhelming. Luckily, most B2B e-commerce platforms provide personalised support or dedicated account managers to assist you along the way. They also provide digital learning materials for exporters to follow and kickstart their online exporting business.
Alibaba.com offers sellers unlimited access to webinar replays, a learning centre, a complete business blog, industry reports, and e-commerce playbooks.
How Alibaba.com Supports Malaysian B2B Food Exporters
Alibaba.com, the best B2B marketplace platform for Malaysian SMEs, has a wide variety of valuable features for food wholesalers. These tools are geared towards helping sellers reach new buyers both locally and around the globe.
Customisable Digital Storefronts
As I mentioned earlier, creating a digital storefront helps increase brand awareness and online presence. With Alibaba.com, you can fully customise your brand’s digital storefront with the help of API and integrations. Listing your product in your digital storefront with a piece of information will help buyers better understand your products.
Innovative Communication Tools
Communication is important for sellers when dealing with customers. The language barrier is one barrier that hinders exporters when it comes to online exporting.
Alibaba.com’s team understands the concerns of most of the buyers and has offered innovative communication and relationship management tools.
You or your team can stay on top of all your leads, understand their needs through their profiles, and facilitate a seamless communication experience with your potential buyers.
Trade Assurance
Every transaction carried out on Alibaba.com is backed by the Trade Assurance program. It protects both buyers and sellers and prevents scams.
Alibaba.com’s Trade Assurance program ensures that every buyer receives the items that they purchased within the specified time frame promised when the order was placed. This program also ensures that the quality of the product matches the advertisement.
Moreover, buyers can rest assured that every transaction that takes place through the platform is legitimate. Alibaba.com accepts dozens of payment methods, so you are sure to find one that works for both you and your buyers.
Support for Cross-Border Trade
If you are a B2B food seller looking to expand your operations into other countries, Alibaba.com is a great platform to explore and utilise.
Some of Alibaba.com’s tools for exporters include auto-translation and automatic currency conversions, helping you overcome language barriers and currency confusion.
Smart Product Posting and Dynamic Pricing
Smart product posting allows you to automatically import product listings from other platforms or databases. Dynamic pricing, another similar feature, allows you to set different prices for different customers, which puts more power in your hands as a seller.
These tools help food sellers who have a presence on many platforms create smart product posting and be more flexible with setting dynamic pricing for different customer groups.
Large Buyer Base
Alibaba.com has over 17 million active buyers from around the world. The platform receives about 300,000+ product enquiries each day, especially for the food and beverage industry. Malaysian exporters can easily find a large target audience.
These target audience groups will be very interested in your products. Using this platform is better than hunting for buyers in a large, untargeted pool of customers.
Sell on Alibaba.com
Alibaba.com is the best B2B Marketplace platform in the world, especially for Malaysians who are looking to take their business to the next level.
The Alibaba.com platform is equipped with powerful tools that connect you with high-paying customers, both near and far. Additionally, all transactions are protected by Alibaba.com Trade Assurance Program.
You might still have questions about the Alibaba.com B2B Marketplace platform. Don’t worry, contact our dedicated sales assistants to have a free consultation. You are encouraged to join our webinar to find out how to do online export thru Alibaba.com with Exabytes.
Take the first step out and ride the tide in the digital age!
Digitalisation may sound foreign and intimidating to some and the complete opposite to another. If you belong to the former, today is the day you take the first step out!
If you belong to the latter, learn continually! There is always “one more thing” to learn.
With many efforts driving towards assisting businesses to go online, the eCommerce Know-How workshop was launched.
Taking You Through Every Step of the Digital Journey
Taking your business online is one thing, but how do you maintain it and keep your eCommerce store active and attractive at all times?
The eCommerce Know-How workshop has been curated for businesses, especially small medium enterprises (SMEs) to grow their businesses online.
Through the many SMEs Exabytes has assisted in embarking on their digitalisation journey, there is now proof of businesses who took their businesses online from operating a brick and mortar store due to the hit of the pandemic.
We are all comfortable where we are and would not welcome changes if we do not have to.
These businesses never thought that they would need to convert their businesses by operating an online store rather abruptly if not for the pandemic.
Learn from success stories of businesses who have recently embarked on the digitalisation journey at the eCommerce Know-How workshops.
Tip! You can find out more about digitalisation grants to apply for your business with application assistance during the workshops.
This may seem impossible years back, but you can now sleep and earn money at the same time.
Back then, we were only able to operate our stores during the opening hours of malls or have someone manning the store. Now, you can operate your store 24/7 and all you need is a website.
Customers can browse through your catalogue and even make purchases at 2 am from America.
Learn about how you can set up your store online, “renovate” it to your branding and capture loyal customers.
Nobody likes to wake up at the break of dawn just to do weekly grocery shopping.
Nothing beats sleeping in, especially on rest days! Order your groceries in advance to pick it up on your way home or to be delivered in hours or days.
Now you can sleep in, avoid squeezing through crowds and free your hands from bags of daily essentials.
Level up from a beginner and learn how to lower the cost of setting up your store to bring in more premium quality products for your customers to enjoy.
Plus point, learn how to integrate and accept contactless payment too! No worries on the shortage of change.
Could your Halal business be one of the very first to go online?
Was your business affected by the sudden hit of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Many brick and mortar businesses have been impacted by the pandemic and many are forced to close down due to the restrictions of our current situation.
The solution for business sustainability in this era is going digital!
Businesses of any industry can digitalise and grow their businesses online.
Kickstart your Halal online store and welcome back your customers who have been loyal to you, and enjoy shopping with you.
Learn from this workshop how you can embark on this digitalisation journey and see your business grow rapidly online!
Have you ever encountered websites that are old, outdated or uninteresting? What do you feel when you visit such websites? Do you have the confidence to buy from the company?
As Internet technology is constantly evolving and changing, all businesses should improve their website regularly by making it faster, simpler, lighter, and more secure so that it always offers the best possible services and user experience to the visitors, helping the company gain a good reputation, loyal customers and profits.
How often should you update your website?
Just like a car, a website also needs to be ‘serviced’ to prolong the overall lifespan. In this instance, a car requires regular maintenance in order to stay in good working condition. The same goes for websites. Website updates include the plugins and the theme you use.
While you should revamp your website at least every two years, changing the content on your website should be done regularly. This could range from daily to once or twice a year, depending on the type of content you have.
Outdated information, broken links, or low-quality content that is not engaging could be the reason why your website is not converting and has low online traffic. Updating your website content allows you to address these issues and potentially increase your sales.
Your website represents your brand. Most customers will visit your website before they buy from you. As such, it is important for you to keep your website up-to-date and focus on the content you are providing.
Why should you update your website?
A car that is maintained at the proper intervals and replaces non-working components when required helps you save money in the long run. The same goes for websites; a website that is seldom updated and with issues will require a higher cost to fix when it breaks down. In other words, maintaining your website from time to time lets you save costs too.
Security
One of the top reasons for website hacking is the vulnerabilities caused by an out-of-date website framework or plugin. If your website is hacked, it will cause problems for both your company and your customers because sensitive data such as customers’ personal details and credit card information could be stolen. Customers who feel insecure visiting your website will lose confidence in your business.
Plugins Update
Plugins are used on websites to provide functionality. Developers from all over the world have created numerous plugins. Hackers can sometimes exploit weaknesses in these plugins, allowing them to get access to the website. Next, hackers will go after all websites that contain this flaw.
The solution is to keep the plugin up-to-date.
Plugins are updated on a regular basis. When it comes to updating the plugins, some website owners are unsure where to begin. Updates are frequently released by plugin makers to address these security problems.
Backup Your Website
As a website owner, you should always be aware of the updates and always make a backup when updating your site.
This reminds me of the car theory. When it’s time to service the car, I would gladly pay the workshop to change my engine oil for me. I would pay them to run a total Vehicle Health Check to identify any future problems or safety concerns because I understand how important it is to keep my car reliable. I understand that my car needs oil change from time to time, so I am always prepared.
Drive Traffic and Customers
Those looking to use their car as a tool to make money will approach the process differently. They do not mind paying for full-coverage insurance and keeping the car in good condition by having a proper service. They see the value in having a solid backup plan in case something goes wrong.
Make a good impression
What about your website? Do you consider your website to be the equivalent of a brochure or business card? The fact is, your website plays an important role in making a good impression with your customers. Imagine having the best product in the world, but a poorly designed website. It will be disastrous as potential customers will be turned away before they have the chance to discover your company, products and services.
Fresh and new content
Another main reason to update your website is to ensure your content is fresh and new. Updating website content can help increase website traffic and convert visitors into customers. For instance, updating your website content during festive seasons, which are the perfect time to attract more traffic to your website, is a good way to generate sales using engaging, relevant content.
Create customer trust
Besides, it is important to keep your website content up to date because the information you provide is what creates customer trust. You should always keep your readers informed. The more frequently you update your website with new articles, downloads, and web pages, the more often a search engine will crawl and list it. You have a better chance of achieving a higher rank if search engines visit your site regularly.
Improve website ranking
Search engines use web crawlers (aka robots, bots or “Google bots”). It is a program used by Google to scan the internet for websites. Every time an update is made to your website, the search engine takes notice and reassesses your site’s ranking. Thus, updating content frequently increases the chances of your website getting a higher ranking.
Google loves fresh content
Google is certainly the most frequently used search engine. In fact, Google has an enormous influence on webmasters and how websites are constructed. Google loves websites that update frequently and that’s why you should add fresh content to your websites as frequently as you can.
Retain Visitors with Good Website Design
Companies should not concentrate only on content and online marketing, ignoring the design and usability of their website. A website with difficult-to-use navigation bars, unappealing colours, a non-responsive design, and a lengthy contact form can cause users to leave without giving the company a chance. Conversely, a responsive website that offers a good user experience keeps visitors viewing it longer.
Mobile-friendly
Having a website that fits the screen and resolution across all devices will give visitors a better user experience. Moreover, 30% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website is not responsive, you are likely to miss out on around 30% of your potential leads.
The Bottom Line
By updating your website regularly, you can help prevent security threats to your website, increase traffic and conversion, and retain visitors and keep them viewing your website longer. Never let your website grow stale; get started by updating it and keeping it up to date. You never know who is looking at your website or what benefit it may provide to your business.
Let The Expert Take Care Of Your Website
Need regular website maintenance? You can hire someone to take care of these concerns for you and provide complete peace of mind.
All you need to do is just let us know! Visit here to learn more about our services.
