#LEAwards 2020 highlight: Shopavision shines spotlight on live streaming in loyalty push

Shopavision was created by full-service marketing agency, OC Group, to be Singapore’s first and only independent, mobile-first live streaming shopping media app. It aims to provide retail and B2C merchants with an avenue to use live stream commerce to build their brand, engage with the audience and achieve sales in real-time. However, OC Group wants Shopavision to be more than just a live streaming app. As such, it launched the Shopavision Live Host Search competition, which saw it bag the bronze award for “Best Use of Social Media” at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s recent Loyalty & Engagement Awards 2020. 

Challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a curve ball into the plans of most brands, resulting in many event personnel, talents and individuals being affected as events were either cancelled or postponed indefinitely. In addition to being a live streaming platform, Shopavision wanted to build an ecosystem of livestream hosts and personalities.

As such, the team came up with the Shopavision Live Host Search competition, which launched right after phase two was announced in Singapore. The campaign’s main intention was to engage the event talents in Singapore who were seeking a career switch, a side income opportunity or who were simply keen to showcase their talents. The team also wanted to make use of the campaign to raise awareness about Shopavision among the public.

Strategy

With restrictions placed on large scale gatherings and physical events, Shopavision turned the competition into a virtual one, or what it called a SOLOMO campaign (social-local-mobile). However, the team was racing against time as it only had about two weeks to finalise the conceptualisation, confirm sponsors, as well as prepare and roll out the four-week campaign.

Shopavision tapped on social media and experiential live marketing to raise awareness about the campaign, focusing on Facebook and Instagram as the platforms were seen as the most effective way to reach out and connect with audiences. It also tapped on Facebook Live for the two-day finals.

Execution

To raise awareness for the Shopavision Live Host Search competition, the team rolled out publicity videos, a campaign microsite, as well as drove chatter on social media. For the publicity videos, Shopavision made sure that they were localised and carried out in English and Chinese. The two videos were then posted on Instagram and Facebook with paid advertising to reach more consumers. 

Meanwhile, the campaign microsite allowed for interested participants to submit their application and contained all the relevant information about the Live Host Search competition. During the two-week call for submissions, the team shortlisted 20 finalists out of 70 submissions. An announcement video was posted on social media to showcase the 20 finalists along with their individual 30-second submission video. This was followed by a week of online voting. 

To continue driving hype for the competition in the lead up to the finals, Shopavision also used social media to share behind-the-scenes snippets to build anticipation. It encouraged the judges and sponsors to share the news on their own social media platforms, and even engaged the audiences with other social media posts and interactive Stories. As the campaign was held on social media, Shopavision said it was able to easily track its performance results. 

These efforts culminated in a Facebook Live competition which saw 20 finalists performing to audiences over a period of two days for four hours each. Audience members were able to interact with Shopavision via real-time comments. According to Shopavision, the competition boosted the reach and engagement of its Facebook page, bringing in hundreds of audience and massive organic reach on social media.

Results

Shopavision achieved its core objective of creating online brand presence by leveraging social media to reach more audiences, acquire more followers and drive active engagement. The Facebook Live led Shopavision to witness a spike in organic performance and the campaign also achieved outstanding performance results on Facebook over the 28-day period with minimum media spend. Its total reach exceeded more than a million while video views hit more than 300,000. Shopavision also have more than a thousand new followers after the campaign.