Navigating digital shifts, personalising experiences, and unlocking growth in Asia Pacific’s dynamic markets.
In the dynamic landscape of modern business, marketing has evolved beyond traditional advertising to become a data-driven, technology-powered discipline.
As companies strive to connect with consumers across an ever-expanding array of platforms, the role of marketing technology, or MarTech, has become increasingly critical, encompassing a wide range of solutions designed to optimize every facet of the marketing journey, from initial customer engagement to conversion and retention.
Bertilla Teo, APAC CEO, Smartly, speaks to MartechAsia about the transformative power of automation, data analytics, social media management tools, and omni-channel strategies within the marketing domain, exploring how businesses can leverage these innovations to enhance their reach, personalise customer experiences, and ultimately drive significant growth in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.
MartechAsia: How can automation in marketing solutions help businesses optimize ad spend and improve ROI?
Teo: In a region like APAC, where markets mature at different speeds and digital behaviours shift rapidly, automation isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about control in complexity.
We see the most impact when automation supports real-time budget optimization, responsive campaign management, and creative variation at scale. It’s about enabling marketers to respond faster, test smarter, and stretch budgets further without sacrificing quality or brand integrity.
Gone are the times when automation only meant simplifying work processes. Rather, it is now also the game-changer for performance – allowing teams to do more with less, make sharper decisions, and unlock growth in even the most competitive markets. When automation is done right, it doesn’t replace the human strategist, it supercharges them.
MartechAsia: What role do data analytics and insights play in informing marketing strategies, and how can companies leverage these insights to drive business growth?
Teo: Data is now the heartbeat of performance marketing. But it is not the volume of data that drives results, it is how intelligently it is being applied. Our clients use data to optimize individual campaigns, as well as to inform broader go-to-market strategies. Data from live performance signals also allow them to adjust creative, audience mixes, or market focus.
From behaviour mapping to budget attribution, data unlocks speed and clarity. Marketers can now pivot, scale, or pause with confidence, better translating impact into measurable business outcomes.
Companies have to think of data as a growth driver, and not just as a metric. When embedded into every stage of the marketing cycle, businesses can then leverage these insights to make bolder decisions and unlock value across the funnel.
MartechAsia: How can social media management tools help businesses maintain a consistent brand voice and engage more effectively with their audiences?
Teo: Social media management tools have the power to help brands orchestrate narratives. APAC represents an immense and highly influential global market for social media. Its vibrant and diverse social media landscape is deeply localized across markets, featuring dominant local platforms like LINE, WeChat, Xiao Hong Shu, and KakaoTalk, many of which operate as ‘super apps’.
This unique environment requires brands to have a consistent voice while staying relatable. The ability to manage tone and cadence across formats, languages, and cultures is what sets standout brands apart.
Our customers often centralize their creative operations into a pre-approved content hub, so that brand identity is protected across channels, while still allowing for local market adaptation. This enables them to move fast, stay consistent, and adjust tone or messaging in real time when engagement signals shift.
Understanding when and where your audience is most active is also crucial for peak engagement rates. Optimized scheduling and audience segmentation tools use data analytics to suggest optimal posting times for maximum visibility and engagement. Furthermore, they allow for precise audience segmentation, enabling brands to tailor messages to specific demographics or interests, driving more meaningful interactions.
Lastly, by monitoring engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, sentiment), brands can gauge how their brand voice resonates. If a particular tone or message performs exceptionally well, it informs future content strategy. Conversely, if certain messaging falls flat, these tools provide the insights to quickly course-correct.
MartechAsia: What are some common challenges that businesses face when implementing omni-channel marketing solutions, and how can these be overcome?
Teo: The promise of omni-channel is seamlessness. The reality is often fragmented especially when data lives in silos and teams operate in isolation. Customer information also often resides in differing systems (CRM, e-commerce, POS, social media), making personalization and cohesive communication difficult. To combat these challenges, we worked with platform partners and brands to build unified data strategies within their campaign operations.
It is often the bridge between paid media and creative execution, connecting insights to action in a way that’s fluid, measurable, and scalable across regions. This extends beyond traditional social channels, supporting a wide range of paid media platforms including Meta, Google, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, Spotify and Reddit, across both static and video formats.
Additionally, businesses need to adhere to a fixed playbookwithcomprehensive and cross-channel brand guidelines covering messaging, tone, and service protocols. All customer-facing teams should also undergo training and regular refreshers to ensure consistent service delivery and a unified brand voice.
MartechAsia: How can predictive analytics and machine learning be used to personalise customer experiences and improve conversion rates?
Teo: Anticipating a customer’s needs is increasingly where marketing is heading. Predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms are the engines driving this foresight, enabling brands to craft customer experiences and uplift conversion rates. Predictive models when applied thoughtfully, can surface not only what a customer might need next, but when, where, and how to present it.
For example, Xero, a cloud-based accounting software operating globally, needed to promote different messages to different markets and update campaigns frequently across the full funnel.
Leveraging Smartly’s robust reporting tools helped Xero identify which creatives performed the best, allowing them to make informed creative iterations. As a result, Xero saw an average drop of 37% in their CPAs and a 224% improvement in their conversion rate for Purchase Orders, while also reaching 23% more people.
These kinds of deep dives help us understand the nuances of campaign performance, leading us to ask key questions that define our strategy.
Are certain creative formats resonating more strongly in specific markets? Are there points in the funnel where audiences are consistently dropping off? Are media investments truly contributing to incremental business impact, or just capturing demand that would’ve occurred anyway?
These insights then help marketers identify which levers to pull; whether that means adjusting creative strategy, rethinking audience targeting, reallocating budget, or optimising the media mix. Over time, they reveal broader trends in consumer behaviour and channel performance that inform not only future campaigns, but also wider go-to-market decisions.
