Target Audience:

1. Chinese Permanent Residents in Singapore
2. Chinese Single Millennials
3. Chinese Millennial Families

Singapore’s Premier Urban Outdoor Recreation Space

Part of Singapore’s plans to transform its “Garden City to a “City in a Garden” to raise the quality of life by enhancing greenery and flora in the city, Gardens by the Bay is intended to be the city’s premier urban outdoor recreation space. Today it is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Singapore with over 50 million visitors by 2018.

In the same year, Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay prepared to make their foray into the Chinese market, one of the largest outbound travel markets in the world. Chinese tourists consistently topped visitor arrival to Singapore. In 2018, Chinese visitor numbers saw a growth of 5.87% year over year, hitting a record of 3.4 million.

Many Chinese travellers had low awareness of Gardens by the Bay’s offerings, particularly the ticketed domes, the attractions main highlights. Although Gardens by the Bay had a strong social media presence on platforms like Facebook, there still lacked digital presence on platforms in the Chinese market. This also meant Chinese travellers were unable to share their experiences with their followers on platforms like Sina Weibo and WeChat.

An Integrated Marketing Solution

There was a need to build strong brand awareness and raise interest to drive actual visitation for Chinese travellers through an integrated marketing solution. The campaign would need to communicate the variety of offerings Gardens by the Bay offered–including ticketed attraction. The attraction needed to showcase their best and most unique features to firmly establish their footing in the Chinese market and inspire potential visitors to visit the one-of-a-kind Singapore icon.

There was an opportunity for us to target Millennials FIT and Millennials Family Travellers, as well as Chinese permanent residents in Singapore, capturing the market share featuring visiting relatives of Chinese nationals residing in Singapore. We would need a strategy to reach and connect with the above travel segments to drive actual visitation to the attraction.

Pride of Singapore “狮城之傲”

Our proposed solution was a multi-channel social media campaign launched in two phases. The campaign aimed to inspire potential Chinese travellers and Chinese Permanent Residents (PR) residing in Singapore who would use China’s social media platforms while visiting Gardens by the Bay. The attraction was positioned as the Pride of Singapore, reflecting the clean and green city that the city is known for. The first phase was to set up an official social media profiles with all-rounded information of the attraction followed by a soft launch to ready it for the China market entry launch. With this strong foundation, the second phase kicked off in full bloom on 9 August 2018 to extensively boost our digital social presence. The campaign consisted of 3 main components:

1.     Launch GB official Weibo and WeChat accounts

A major social media launch to increase the engagement and follower count of the page. Tapping into the combined total of 1.5 billion active users (monthly), we were on a mission to reach out to FIT Millennial Singles and Families, as well as Nature Lovers. As a mobile-internet society, Chinese travellers have increasingly turned to WeChat and Sina Weibo for the latest travel trends and inspirations. Gardens by the Bay leveraged on the strengths of both channels to provide a larger variety of content in the form of posts and articles. The attractions beautiful imagery was showcased through awe-inspiring native advertisements, videos and creatives.

2.     Collaboration with Sina Weibo’s annual promotional campaign – Travel with Weibo

To gain greater exposure and generate excitement and awareness of this beautiful attraction, we tapped into Weibo’s annual promotional campaign. Travel with Weibo is an online travel extravaganza showcasing leading destination brands for Chinese travellers preparing for their long national holidays in October. In addition, a mini contest, “Connoisseurs of Gardens” was conducted to engage users.

3.     Feature unique perspectives of Social Media influencers

Partnerships with well-curated key opinion leaders (KOL) were also launched to create excitement and hype for the attraction when they share their amazing Gardens by the Bay experience. These partnerships allowed us to gain wider outreach on multiple popular and trendy travel platforms beyond our Official Weibo and WeChat accounts, like Qyer and Mafengwo. The unique perspectives and word-of-mouth of the leading KOLs is able to direct traffic towards the official Gardens by the Bay Weibo and WeChat accounts, thus driving increments of followers.