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 purchases3 and mobile shoppers have also increased from 41% pre-COVID to an astounding 93% during COVID.4 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

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.

To help Singapore small business owners to understand the values of eCommerce, particularly mobile commerce, Visa must show the transformative impact of bringing small businesses online and provide the resources/tools they need do so.

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.

All audiences would be directed to Visa Small Business Hub where Visa provides tips and tools that could equip small businesses with the resources and advice they need to start bringing their business online.

• Implementation

To show small business owners the value of moving businesses online, our vertical video idea 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 – mom & pop shop, plant shop and tailor store.

• Media channels and integration/ • Scale

We then serve these three versions on rotation, targeting small business owners on Instagram and Facebook.

• Timeline

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.

Overall, we’ve achieved big success in reaching our objectives, all mainly through 9x16 small videos:

Build awareness of Visa Small business Solutions

• On Instagram Stories, the ‘9x16 Stores’ vertical videos garnered 10,132,513 impressions in totality with 578,727 Thruplays.

• For 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 of Phase 1 and with a niche small business owner audience segment, we garnered over 80K of visits to Visa Small Business Hub, which equals to 70% of total visit in Phase 1 of the campaign, significantly greater than expected.

• 138 small businesses signed-up to 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.