Small businesses were hit the hardest

With the inability to continue business during government mandated lockdown periods and the over-reliance on physical transactions, local businesses were hit particularly hard during COVID-19.

Since Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) account for 99% of all business in Singapore, their recovery will be crucial to the recovery of Singapore’s economy.

Accelerated preference for digital payments

Since COVID, 70% of Singaporeans have increased online purchases and mobile shoppers have also increased from 41% pre-COVID to an astounding 93% during COVID. This shift was particularly profound on mobile – with the flourishing mobile shopping apps like Lazada and Shopee.

Visa needed to help small businesses go online to survive

We recognized that for small businesses – it was digitizing or perish. A fundamental tenet of going from bricks-to-clicks is acceptance of digital payments. That’s where we could help.

Introducing ‘9x16 Stores’ – a vertical videos campaign showing the limitless potential a 9x16 mobile screen can unlock, when they bring their small shops online with Visa.

To show small business owners the value of moving business online, we created a vertical video idea that smartly uses the narrow mobile screen to dramatise the small and cramped physical space of common local shops. In just a second, with the support from Visa, these 9x16 small shops instantly transformed into an online business with limitless growth opportunities.

We created different versions according to the most common types of small shops in Singapore – mamak shop, plant shop and tailor store.

Despite an astounding shift to online payment (especially on mobile) from 41% to 93%, small businesses are still heavily reliant on its physical stores– less than $2 per $100 of goods sold by local brands were transacted online.

While sales heavily relied on physical transaction, as business owners, they tend to go online to find new suppliers and business partners– in fact, 80% use mobile at work, and more than 60% report that mobile played a significant role in a recent business decision. With that, we knew our campaign should be a mobile-first campaign with precise audience targeting.

While most branded videos are designed for horizontal screens, 94% of our mobile usage is vertical. In fact, major social/video platforms have introduced vertical video format to provide a more intuitive content experience. Therefore, we’ve decided to hone in on the small but highly impactful format – vertical videos that is mobile-by-design.

We created different versions according to the most common types of small shops in Singapore – mamak shop, plant shop and tailor store.

We then served these three versions on rotation, targeting small business owners in Singapore on different social and digital platforms. Each vertical video ends with a strong call-to-action to visit Visa Small Business Hub to learn more about how Visa can help bring their business online.

The campaign went live towards the year-end where consumers spending would increase due to the festive gifting period. It effectively reached out to small business owners and prepared them to drive sales during this period.

Building awareness

• Instagram Stories: the ‘9x16 Stores’ vertical videos garnered 10,132,513

impressions in totality with 578,727 Thruplays.

• On the programmatic advertising platform, the videos achieved 65.62%

View-Through-Rate and 0.15% Click-Through-Rate which is 60.62% and 0.13%

higher than industry average respectively.

Trigger interest in Visa Small Business solutions

• With just a fraction of media budget from Phase 1 and a niche small business

owner audience segment, we expected a much lower volume of website visits versus the previous phase. It surprised us when we saw we garnered more than 80K of visits to Visa Small Business Hub, which equals to 70% of total visits in Phase 1 of the campaign.

• There was a total of 138 small businesses to sign-up and redeem Visa eCommerce Starter.

Increased Visa solutions uptake and usage

• During campaign period, Visa successfully got 106.9K new small businesses to start using Visa solutions.