Earlier this year, Facebook announced changes to its Ads Manager and Business Manager to improve user experience. These changes include:

Simpler design

A more streamlined and cleaner Ads Manager interface has been introduced. Its simplified navigation features allow more space to manage ads and promote tools that help gauge ad performance.

Copy & paste functionality and auto-naming

Advertisers are given more flexibility when creating ads with the launch of a copy and paste functionality. An auto-naming feature has also been added for businesses to customize their ads in a much shorter time.

Adding new clients made easy

Business Manager has been updated to allow agencies to activate their clients’ campaigns more efficiently. These updates include a streamlined process for agencies to add new clients, making it easier to manage clients’ historical reporting, as well as to assign and organize assets within a Business Manager account.

Over the past month, Facebook has also updated page posts and ads on mobile to provide a more consistent look across the Facebook’s family of apps and longer term value for its clients. These updates include:

These updates include:

visible primary text being shortened from 3 to 7 lines, with a prompt at the end to read remaining text.

maximum media height being revised from a 2:3 to 4:5 aspect ratio for photos and videos.

As part of its continuous efforts to refine targeting options, Facebook has removed targeting options that are outdated or had not been popular among businesses.  For instance, options associated with older song titles, albums or games are no longer available. The aim is to make it easier for advertisers to identify and take advantage of the right targeting options. In the meantime, guidance is available to those who are looking for options that have been removed.

With Facebook always evolving to deliver the best user experience and products, advertisers can simply kick back, relax, and quite literally, let Facebook do their work! Share with us your thoughts about the latest updates.

In June 2019, Facebook IQ released a study about consumers’ engagement with food-related social media posts across 9 countries. The results reveal the tendency of turning to mobile devices and social platforms for exploring eating options.

In July, we pulled off a social media campaign for Fete-Up, a Singapore-inspired healthy takeaway to build brand awareness and promote eating cultures in a fast-paced city.

Fete Up aims to offer healthy and well-balanced meals that are both tasty and reasonably priced, available in-store and via delivery. The eatery targets office workers and individuals who are health-conscious, yet hard to find time to prepare balanced meals at home.

Based on the brand vision and target audience, we’ve adopted “Right food, right away” as the core campaign idea⁠ — to enjoy healthy food delivered right to your doorsteps. Our campaign is tailored to achieve four key objectives:

1.Raise brand awareness

2.Promote healthy eating cultures

3.Boost sales in physical stores

4.Drive online sales and traffic to their website

We believe quality content is all about being informative, relevant, sharable and actionable. With this consideration in mind, we’ve suggested four core pillars revolving around:

1.Fetebox unwrapped: Menu promotion by showcasing nutrition facts

2.Healthy secrets: Informative health tips to raise awareness on balanced diets

3.Eat Well, Live Well: Engaging, sharable food quotes that speaks the brand vision

4.Deliver Right Away: Practical information on how customers can order to drive sales

Successful content marketing fulfils the needs of both business and customers: drive revenue and deliver relevant, engaging messages. This begins with industry-focused research and understanding about the company, products and clearly-defined target audience. Want to know more about content marketing and its myriads of rules and tricks? Speak to our specialists to maximize your business potentials.

Moving beyond social networking, WeChat has transformed itself into an enclosed, all-in-one platform with the new function ⁠— WeChat Mini Program. It takes pride in enhanced features ranging from e-commerce, games and news within the social networking app. In July 2019, we’ve expanded payment gateways for AJ Hackett, a bungee pioneer based in New Zealand with this build-in function.

Traditionally, WeChat official account is a business platform dedicated for content marketing only, while payment requests would be directed to external websites. With this mini-program embedded in our client’s account, users can now purchase admission tickets directly within the app while browsing creative content. In other words, we’ve achieved content marketing and e-commerce in one single platform. This equates to elevated customer experience and extra revenue to the business.

More about WeChat Mini Program

WeChat Mini Programs are considered to be “sub-applications” operating within WeChat, allowing access to web apps without the need to leave the main app.

The mini-programs can serve four main purposes, including e-commerce, utility, mini-games and news. More advanced features are available such as geolocation, task management, coupon redemption, etc.

The Main Benefits of Mini Programs for businesses

-Massive user base

As announced on 15 May 2019, WeChat Monthly Active Users in Q1 2019 has exceeded 1.1 billion

-Less expensive than traditional apps

Mini programs cost less to develop due to its reduced size and complexity. It also runs smoother and faster.

-Easy access to various functionalities

Users gain quick access via multiple entry points without prior installation, such as scanning QR code, direct message or searching nearby programs.

WeChat Mini Programs have almost limitless potential. Connect with us to find out more about how WeChat Mini Program can benefit your business today!

If you advertise on Facebook and Instagram, it’s time to update yourself with some of the latest creative tools.

Video creation

In Facebook’s Video Creation Kit, you will now have even more visually-engaging templates to choose from.

What’s more, seasonal stickers and templates are now available in the Effects tab to help “freshen up” your ads. Your ads will never be “the same old thing all year round” anymore!

Meanwhile, 20 new font options have been introduced, making it easier to add text overlays that tie in with your brand guidelines better.

Ever felt “trapped” working on a video because the moment you start, you can’t step away as you don’t want to lose all your work?  The Video Creation Kit has made it possible to save drafts of videos, so you can work on your video whenever you have a moment and pick up exactly where you left off later on.

Video editing

Ads Manager allows selection of an aspect ratio  (4:5, 2:3, 9:16, 1:1 or 16:9) to crop your video according to requirements of different placements (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or Audience Network).

Similarly, you can trim the duration of a video for different platforms as well.

Dynamic ads

Whether you’re selling products, hotels, flights or vehicles, a dynamic ad might just work for you. Available in single-image, carousel and collection format, dynamic ads can be used across Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger.

Branded content ads

Advertisers can now promote branded content posts as feed ads, reaching a wider audience. “Paid partnership with” along with the brand name will appear to ensure ads transparency.

ThruPlay

Available for Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network, ThruPlay allows advertisers to pay only when ads are played to completion or for at least 15 seconds. Optimize your video ad campaign for ThruPlay, and Facebook will deliver it to users that are likely to watch 15 seconds or the whole video.

Let your creativity run amok and have fun experimenting with these creative tools!

The overseas property market used to be dominant by parents who have sent or are planning to send their children to study abroad and those who plan to retire overseas. Not anymore.

Hong Kong property investors recognize the stable growth rate and rental value of properties in cities like Vancouver, Toronto and London. The higher profit margin attracts investors to switch their investment to overseas from the local market, where there are ever-increasing investment costs and a slower rate of return.

Let’s not forget the reverse migrants. For instance, there are an estimated 300,000 Canadian passports holders in Hong Kong. After their emigration to Canada in the 90s and return to Hong Kong, thousands are moving back to Canada with their children, Canadian census data shows.

Given the high demand for overseas properties, this is a great opportunity for overseas property investment businesses to build an online presence to capture business growth via effective digital marketing.

Seminars and trade shows are mainly where conversion occurs. And while many agencies still stick to promoting these offline events via traditional media platforms such as printing pamphlets and placing newspaper ads, potential buyers of the digital era are doing their research and obtaining information online. By appealing to your target audience with an engaging O2O campaign, forward-thinking agencies can be ahead of the game in no time.

NDN Group has been helping to build brand awareness for SQM Global Properties, a real estate agent focusing on overseas sales and marketing services in Hong Kong. Our campaign delivers curated content driven by comprehensive digital marketing strategies that encompass social media, media placement, search engine optimization, geo-targeting and data management.

We also utilize instant messaging applications such as Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp for Business. It gives SQM an enriched, more personal way of communicating with its customers — photos, videos, documents and more — all within the messaging App. All of these, in turn, help SQM raise the number of attendees in its seminars and trade shows with promising results.

Do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you are aspired to expand your overseas property investment business. We are more than happy to offer professional advice to help you achieve your goals. We look forward to working with you in this new digital era.

The directorial debut of screenwriter Sunny Chan Wing-sun, Men On The Dragon won over hearts at the theatre this summer with a life-affirming Hong Kong tale. The film follows four telecommunications employees as they embrace challenges at work and in life, and move forward as their better selves.

The movie’s portrayal of spirited members of the broadband industry rang a bell for our team — this is perfect material for our client, Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN), to produce fun social media content that prompts engagement. It only seemed natural for us to make a parody out of it.

Altering the original screenplay to fit our story, we invited the company’s frontline Certified Professional Engineers (CPE) as protagonists, who pull hard on cables instead of rowing the dragon boat. As the story goes, the team fought off hardship through hardcore training, setting wifi lanes miles on to become the men HKBN meant them to be.

One could easily catch our tribute to the original movie trailer with equal cinematic tension and extra humour. Most importantly, the parody lives and breathes the Hong Kong spirit, which aligns with HKBN’s core brand value of “Make our Hong Kong a Better Place to Live”.

The parody video was very well-received with over 600 likes, 143 shares and 39K views to-date, fast becoming one of the most popular posts on the company’s Facebook page. What’s more, it caught the eye of the Men On The Dragon Official Facebook, which dedicated two posts to mention our video! The interaction generated a wave of positive and complimentary comments, making it a digital marketing triumph for HKBN.

New Digital Noise has been working with HKBN to develop tongue-in-cheek lifestyle Facebook posts that can establish the company’s credibility and expertise in the telecom sector and ultimately expand its fanbase. The movie parody not only imparts its creative prowess, but also professionalism of its CPE team. Our team is thrilled to be on track to bring HKBN one step closer to its target audience.

According to Instagram statistics, one-third of the most viewed Instagram Stories are generated by businesses. Also, one in five Stories receives a direct message from its viewers. This is how promising it is to place Ads on this popular feature that rolled out in 2017. Steadily maturing into a channel of its own, Instagram Stories will definitely continue to flourish as an Ad platform. Here are a few tips for running great Instagram Story Ads.

Instagram Story Ads pop up in between the Stories of accounts you follow. Keep in mind that photo ads only last 10 seconds and video ads up to 15 seconds, plus users won’t be able to return to them later, so it’s important to always catch the eye in an instant. Strong visuals and clear messages are a must.

Make your ads as visually-appealing as possible, with the brand name clearly-visible right at the beginning to make an impression. 60% of Stories are viewed with sound on so don’t forget to add music to your ads. All of the above will contribute to prompting the viewer to click on your call-to-action (CTA) at the bottom, or follow up for more information afterwards.

If you are used to creating Facebook ad, you will find it easy to do so with Instagram Story Ads. You can also manage the latter from the same dashboard as your other Facebook or Instagram campaigns! And of course, it comes with Facebook’s comprehensive demographic data.

Instagram Story Ads give brands a new way to connect with potential customers. If you are interested, feel free to drop us a line for more insights.

In 2018, individuals surfing on Facebook has amounted to an average of 1.45 billion per day, which is over one-fifth of the total world population. This versatile and gargantuan base of active users is why you need to know about Facebook Marketplace.

Launched in 2016, Facebook Marketplace allows both individuals and businesses to buy and sell commodities and services. Now, businesses can also place ads in Marketplace and reach out to target audience while they’re actively shopping. Those who are already advertising on Facebook can easily extend your ads to Marketplace by selecting Automatic Placements in Ads Manager, where they will appear alongside product and service listings.

Facebook Marketplace provides established businesses with an additional channel to expose their goods and services to a broader target audience while eliminating regional boundaries. For start-ups, the Marketplace also serves as a far-reaching platform to build brand awareness and expand the scale of business in a shorter period of time.

Advertising across Facebook platforms is an easy way to further the reach of your target audience, talk to us if you wish to know about more ways to connect with them.

Instagram has released IGTV, its sibling application on 20th June, 2018. The app recognises all users as creators, encouraging us to visualise our ideas and thoughts through long-form videos by phone.

IGTV allows creators to make vertically-oriented videos as short as 15 seconds, and as long as an hour (exclusive to larger accounts). Creators are able to enjoy greater flexibility in video editing, and include more elaborated content, images and ideas in their production. Followers can express immediate feedback through likes, comments and direct messaging.

IGTV has not included any advertising elements as of yet. However, businesses can make good use of this simple and intuitive platform to draw the audience closer to your brand. Virtual store tours, product demonstrations and how-to videos are all good ways to generate traffic, boost brand awareness and ultimately sales. Talk to us about incorporating IGTV in your marketing strategy!