In this exclusive interview with MartechAsia, Nicholas Kontopoulos, Head of APAC Growth Marketing, Adobe DX, shares his insights on how marketers and retailers can localise and personalise the retail and shopping experience across various customer segments in Asia, with social media, this holiday season.
Key takeaways:
- Thanks to rapid mobile connectivity and highly tech-savvy consumers, Asia is fast-fueling the rise of e-commerce. However, marketers are struggling with offering promotions and content to their consumers’ satisfaction levels
- The holiday campaign planning period is a great time to re-evaluate brands’ social commerce strategy to create suitable and relevant campaigns across the region.
- Creating one campaign and recycling it wholesale across multiple countries in Asia is less impactful.
- Ideally, marketers should avoid creating a generic or tone-deaf campaign and instead, develop holiday campaigns that truly resonate with their audience.
- The most critical aspect and the starting point of marketing campaigns should include marketers spending additional time getting to know their customers and researching their individual markets to ensure messaging is right on target.
- We are now in the new era of the channel-less customer, where a brand is defined by those who experience it.
Asia’s share in the global e-commerce market only continues to grow exponentially, fuelled by COVID-19 behaviours and thanks to a rising middle class, improving financial infrastructure, and rapid innovation amidst a technology boom.
It thus comes as no surprise that e-commerce sales in Asia are expected to nearly double, reaching USD 2 trillion by 2025. But along with such high growth, retailers in Asia are also facing high competition for consumers’ interest, trust, and quality of experience. In countries including China, Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore, retailers and marketers are thus exploring new advertising formats to reach consumers – from live streaming to in-app engagement on messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Viber. And the scene is only expected to get more crowded and noisier very soon, as we gear up for the 2021 holiday season. How then can today’s retailers and marketers use social media to their advantage, creating unique yet engaging customer experiences throughout the holiday season?
In this exclusive interview with MartechAsia, Nicholas Kontopoulos, Head of APAC Growth Marketing, Adobe DX, shares his insights on how marketers and retailers can localise and personalise the retail and shopping experience across various customer segments in Asia, with social media, this holiday season.
E-commerce sales in Asia are going to touch $2 trillion by 2025. Are Asian businesses prepared for it?
Thanks to rapid mobile connectivity and highly tech-savvy consumers, Asia is fast-fueling the rise of e-commerce, making APAC an innovation hub with digital transformation across industries. Today, there are more than 350 million internet users in Southeast Asia alone, with 90% connecting to the internet using their smartphone.
As more and more consumers are becoming digital- and mobile-first in their habits, naturally, they are expecting to engage with brands digitally. For instance, per the ‘State of Social Commerce in Southeast Asia report’ produced by Econsultancy in collaboration with Hootsuite and Adobe Commerce, for almost 6 in 10 (59%) consumers in Southeast Asia, one-quarter of all their online shopping is influenced by social media, with Facebook (78%) and YouTube (52%) triggering a purchase. Furthermore, 44% confirm that they have made three or more online purchases in the past month as a result of seeing social media posts or ads.
Asian consumers are some of the most sophisticated shoppers globally but businesses here have been slow to adopt an e-commerce approach that is central to their go-to-market (GTM) strategy, leaving many to play catch up, especially since COVID-19 hit.
Take for example – the 41% of marketers who do not have their social technology fully integrated with their e-commerce platform or the two-third (64%) who don’t use analytics within their e-commerce platform. The resistance to change existing workflows means marketers continue to miss out on the growing customer base and massive revenue streams generated when consumers shop online.
Are businesses and marketers engaging the evolving Asian customer efficiently? Are they making any mistakes in doing so?
Many marketing teams that are new to the region — or expanding in new markets — make the mistake of using a single marketing strategy and identical campaigns for each country. It may feel convenient in the short term, but it costs them customers, growth opportunities, and revenue streams over time.
Per the same report, when asked to choose their top three challenges for the year ahead, marketers surveyed most commonly cited increased competition (53%), developing a social strategy that addresses different regions in Southeast Asia (32%), meeting revenue targets (31%) and changing customer expectations (30%).
But beyond these, marketers are also struggling with offering promotions and content to their consumers’ satisfaction levels. For instance, while 60% of customers want special offers or sales, only 44% of brands offer these. Similarly, even though 47% of customers want photos and videos from real customers, only 30% of brands offer them.
The gaps exist in the way brands use social media as well. For example, while 95% of shoppers use YouTube and 71% use WhatsApp, fewer brands are on either of these channels (76% YouTube, 51% WhatsApp). Frequency is also a mismatch – 84% of shoppers use YouTube daily versus 61% of brands.
The Holiday season is on the horizon. What are customers talking about and looking for that your marketing strategies need to be different?
The Holiday season – with Singles’ Day (11.11), Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year’s – means back-to-back occasions (and motivations) for consumers to shop and as a result, for brands to advertise and sell. In recent years, especially in Asia, new milestones such as 10.10 and 12.12 have also emerged so the market is only getting more and more saturated and competitive.
Given the flurry of activities and promotions, it is no surprise that consumers’ social conversations really start picking up because their traffic, purchases, and discussions increase dramatically. Topics tend to vary by country as another report by Adobe Commerce and Talkwalker highlighted – for instance, during Chinese New Year earlier this year, in Indonesia, discounts accounted for over three-quarters of all consumer consideration engagements while in Singapore, payment and delivery occupied a much greater share of the conversation.
This immediately indicated that by extension, brands should be focusing on promoting discounts in Indonesia, while by contrast, they should be advertising services and payment methods in Singapore.
Each year, the holiday shopping season is starting earlier than ever – especially during COVID-19 as shoppers continue to limit physical browsing and outdoor activities. Last year, according to Adobe Digital Insights, the online holiday season exceeded $188B in sales, resulting in a strong growth rate of 32% over the 2019 season. While the pandemic started accelerating the shift of spending online in March, by the holiday season, consumers had shifted twice (32%) as much as expected in one year (15% – annual growth rate seen since 2015).
Such emerging buying behaviours are placing an even bigger emphasis on retailers’ customer intelligence and understanding of where customers are in their shopping journey so that the brand experiences are personalized and contextually relevant. The holiday campaign planning period is therefore a great time to re-evaluate brands’ social commerce strategy to create suitable and relevant campaigns across the region.
