While China dominates e-commerce, creating a big opportunity for marketers in APAC, efforts across the region can focus on social media and video – as engagement in these areas is growing.
From connectivity to infrastructure, mobile to social, different regions of the world are experiencing varying levels of advancements or drawbacks that need to be taken into consideration when it comes to digital marketing.
In APAC, while China dominates e-commerce (creating a big opportunity for marketers in Australia and the region), efforts across the region can focus on social media and video – as engagement in these areas is growing.
E-commerce soars, moves mobile
China dominates the APAC region as the biggest e-commerce market in the world, which can be largely attributed to marketplace giants Alibaba and JD. At $1.13 trillion total, the e-commerce segment represents a hefty 23% slice of China’s overall retail market. Mobile is a huge driver of this climb, as experts predict that over 75% of e-commerce purchases will be made via mobile by 2018.
Brands will need to consider a mobile-first strategy, redesigning e-commerce sites to have sophisticated mobile capabilities. Additionally, marketers should be employing advanced data collecting techniques, making smart use of the purchase behavior data now available, and measuring the impact of their marketing efforts to the final online conversion.
Social media usage
Targeting individual users via paid social media advertising has proven difficult because of a proliferation of fake social media accounts. The issue of fraudulent traffic spans as far as “click farms” being used, where workers are paid to generate fake reviews and engagements on social sites. Instead of wasting spend on exposure to fake accounts, many brands resort to an inbound strategy to bring real users to them, such as offering branded chatbots.
Across the East China Sea, the island nation of Japan fares far better when it comes to social media growth. While consumers engage readily with the popular messaging app Line, attracting over 77% of smartphone users,Instagram has seen the largest growth year-over-year, providing greater opportunities for brand awareness campaigns.
Branded video consumption
In India, a country predicted to have 700 million mobile phone users by 2020, people readily share and enjoy branded video content, to the point where video represents over half of all mobile data use. However, flooded email inboxes and social media profiles have caused unsubscribes to go up, increasing the need for a segmented strategy that sends only the most relevant content.
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