The E-Commerce Class held on July 19th, 2016 on the topic of Pemasaran Media Sosial drew a crowd of 107, including a delegation of business students from Universiti Selangor. Organised by the Selangor Information Technology and E-Commerce Council (SITEC), the session featured two speakers who shared their experiences and lessons.
The first speaker was Engku Anwar Hilmi (pictured, below), co-founder of Media Online Malaysia. According to Engku Anwar, digital marketing is not just restricted to Facebook, but can take place across a number of platforms. However, he stressed the importance of knowing what the target market is.
He also touched upon the “noisy world” problem, where people nowadays are constantly bombarded by ads, causing fatigue to the human psyche. One example is how Facebook fanpages are being created just to draw likes, rather than being used to interact with potential customers.
After that, he offered a few tips to the participants, with the first being that social media marketing requires an investment of time, where the higher the engagement level desired, the more time that has to be invested. He also advised current and prospective merchants to create a business that has identified a problem, and presents a solution, while continuing to be sustainable.
Addressing the issues of trend followers versus trend setters, he shared about his friend who started a business selling batik clothes to the plus-size community in Malaysia, rather than join the fad of people who started selling headscarves following the fame of certain headscarf sellers.
The second speaker was Uzz Taufek (pictured, below), the digital business director of Leo Burnett Malaysia. He focused on how the social media marketing realm was a fast-moving and ever-changing animal, and offered tips to those who intended to utilise it.
He advocated building a digital ecosystem, and having an overall strategy and plan that utilises content marketing, like how Adidas and Nike sell the idea of being healthy, rather than their products.
However, social media marketers should also be agile and creative, tapping trends and generating content that fits the sweet spot between the needs of the brand and the needs of the audience, while maintaining what he calls “thumb-stopping power”, or the power to get someone to stop scrolling and click your ad.
Then, Uzz stressed the importance of engaging and interacting with the audience, as well as listening to said audience, rather than just push product after product on them.
“Don’t just think about targeting your target audience, think about how you can engage and utilise your target audience to reach a bigger market. Think about this when you are creating your content, which should also hit the sweet spot between the needs of your brand and the needs of your audience,” said Uzz, who believes that there is no such thing as a digital marketing strategy, but marketing strategies in a digital world.
After the speakers had shared their session, the Merchant Information Sharing Session commenced with Farhan Yun (pictured, below) from kedaiweb.site introduced his product, an online website building platform that enables SMEs to fully develop their website in a few minutes through a drag-and-drop interface. The websites created would also be fully integrated with a payment gateway.
Nur Azian Arshad (pictured, below) then shared about SPIKE, a mobile point of sale system available for Android and iOS, which she notes will enable businesses to track inventory and prices in real time, while allowing employees to be sales consultants. The app will also track sales history, which would allow business owners to adjust their own orders for new stock.
