A Great Example of Content Marketing in Singapore

By Tom Radford, Director of Innovation

How to get Content Marketing right in Asia

Red Cross Connection/Your blood Saves lives

A winner at the 2015 Loyalty and Engagement Awards, this campaign works because it takes the emphasis away from blood donation and focuses on the outcomes of this work. It also pulls at the heartstrings in a dignified and sensitive way with great storytelling. And there’s also a twist; they’ve gamifed it.

There are two parts to this campaign that make it really stand out as a great content marketing and loyalty engagement piece. Firstly there’s the empathy engagement. If I was a cynic I would call it guilt tripping but I’m not, because I’ve given blood myself and received it too, so I know how important this message is.

A Celebration of Life

Part 1.  Your Blood Saves Lives

Yes, we’ve seen it all before with other blood donation campaigns in the UK etc but this is very much a campaign aimed at the Singaporeans themselves. They’re just ordinary people, who want to live their lives and now they can. A series of films where victims, smiling and alive, talk about what it means to them to, well, just be there.

The films don’t waste time going into too much depth about how accidents happened; focus on the message ‘I’m alive because you gave blood’. That’s a very powerful and simple message. And because the interviews are beautifully shot and with care and sensitivity, you really feel how grateful these people are. After one watch through you’re feeling guilty and want to get up off the sofa and help. It really hooks you in emotionally, you can imagine yourself being in that situation and how grateful you’d be. It’s a celebration of life. This campaign leaves the viewer with a feeling of empowerment and ownership; an essential part of engagement.

People turn to social media and the internet to enrich their lives, and anything which gives them an opportunity to be a hero and help their community does exactly that. Powerful stuff well executed.

Content Marketing that understands Singaporeans

Part 2. The Red Cross Connection App

Now this is the really clever part. By downloading this app you’re entering a community of people who can be notified if there is a shortage of blood.  An army of lifesavers, if you will. And because you’re notified, you can do something about it. It’s a game; it has rules, winners, scores and outcomes. Singaporeans loves games, I can attest to that. Singaporeans also live much of their lives on their phones, but don’t be fooled into thinking they don’t care about each other. The sense of community on this island is extremely strong, as is a desire to contribute to society and the greater good. It’s in their DNA. That’s why this app is such an intuitive idea. Phones are the second arena of our existence and we respond to them. A message will get seen and an opportunity to interact (in this case, scanning a QR code to notify the app that you have given blood) puts you right in the game.

Content marketing really works when it’s measurable in this way. For the Red Cross, engagement is easy to measure by looking at the interactions but for the individual donor, they get to measure their contribution and that is, once again, tremendously empowering.

So what are the key take-aways here?

• Understand the empathy level of your audience
• Understand the community you are serving the content to
• Get into the culture and work with it
• Appeal to their habits (ie. their phone)
• Tell real stories with real victims
• Focus on the outcome not the event or action
• Understand that people want to contribute and help
• Empowerment and Storytelling

This is content marketing 101. With this campaign Red Cross have captured the hearts and minds of their audience by gently touching a nerve. One thing that is always on everyone’s mind somewhere is mortality and the safety of their loved ones. I’m not suggesting you leverage that for profit, but when your job is saving lives…well it’s bloody obvious!

P.S. This campaign wasn’t quite so successful…

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