Case Study 5: Singtel

My personal thought on SingTel online marketing strategy (Dated 30 May 2010)

The shift from traditional marketing to online social media marketing requires new skills, tools and understanding of the internet platform.

The purpose of tackling this new challenge is to engage customers and prospects through online, and to drive the conversation in reputation enhancing direction.

I did a quick research and notice that there are some rooms which allow us to quickly extend the international exposure of the company.

1 of them is the articles/news related to SingTel such as,
“SingTel to provide vital communications lifeline in war zones”, dated 3rd of May,
and
“SingTel wins Seatrade Asia Innovation Award again”, dated 27th April,
are only featured in SingTel website.
To me it is a big waste.

There are millions of people around the world reading news through RSS or Google News feed or Yahoo News feed. Isn’t it great if these news/articles are featured in the Google News or Yahoo news and being read by millions?
And let’s not forget lots of blogs are using news feed as their content which means you will earn backlinks and exposure through these blogs as well.

* Press release website such as Business Wire, Newsvine, PR Web, are users based news portal where everyone can submit the their own press release. The submitted news are being collected by Google News, Yahoo News and broadcast to the whole world.

The 2nd thing I notice is the current SingTel search engine marketing.
When internet users search for certain keywords such as “mobile broadband”, “wireless broadband”, “iphone”, the chances of SingTel ads show up rate compare to M1 and StarHub is about 2 – 5 – 10.
Singtel 2, Starhub 5 and M1 10.

Although statistic shows Google is the world no1 search engine, but Yahoo still has around 30% of search engine users. However, Singtel ads has never show up in Yahoo which means SingTel has already give up 30% of the chances to compete with the competitors.

Let’s talk about keywords and SEO.
By comparing m1, Starhub and Singtel in term of SEO, all have ranked well on certain keywords.
But I need to stress on, heavily, that m1 and Starhub have done a pretty good job in search engine marketing.
After researching some keywords, I quickly notice that when comes to the keywords they aren’t ranked well, they have ads on the top spots.
Whereas as I said earlier, I rarely see Singtel ads on the important keywords, whether it ranked well or not in the organic search result.

For the onsite SEO, overall is good but we can do a bit more on each page especially include the keywords on the title and description.

* This is just my personal thought. If you are the company/website owner and wish me to remove the content, please let me know.