Whenever you are in need of service the chances are that you have a brand that you will use. For example, if you are going to eat out, you will look up a restaurant’s reviews on Facebook and their Google ratings. If you are bored at work or during your commute, you will check your Instagram feed and stories.
While this might seem like an ordinary behavioural quirk, the brand’s people trust is those that keep checking out the trends and providing the solution to a need. For this reason, you will need to engage in digital marketing to remain competitive.
In this article, we will look at the top digital marketing trends in Hong Kong for 2020 and beyond. One thing that cuts beyond all industries is that you need to understand your customers in order to create the appropriate digital marketing campaigns in Hong Kong.
Customisation and Personalisation
The online space has changed, and businesses have to personalize their digital marketing campaigns to each client or user. Using a customer’s first name is no longer enough. Personalization has changed in the last few years, and it has gained a new depth.
For this reason, you will need to provide personalized content using refined email segmentation and collecting customer data at every step of the sales process. The important thing is to make each person feel important when they are interacting with your brand online.
Use of artificial intelligence and machine learning has helped transform the tools used to collect customer data. For example, complex data analytics and cross-platform data mining have enabled brands to suit their campaigns to each customer.
With that said, personalisation is the basis for establishing an emotional bond and customer loyalty.
Influencer Marketing
Traditional marketing campaigns no longer have the same clout as they did. In the digital sphere, inclusivity and authenticity are what drives people to make a purchase. For this reason, you will need to engage influencer marketers to have a better reach and interact with your target audience.
Influencers typically have an avid network of followers that relate to their stories and trust their opinions. The reason you need them is driven by the ever-growing population of target audiences born during the digital boom.
According to Econsultancy, at least 65% of the people today rely on social media to discover and select products. This turn of events has gone on to influence the type of content that brands give to the influencers.
Use-Generated Content
As they struggle to win customers gets more competitive, it will take a great story to capture your target audience. Unfortunately, customers today are passing over branded content since they have grown an apathy to ads. One way to view this problem is that more than 95% of people skip ads on YouTube.
User-generated content is one of the best ways to mitigate the problem. Content generated by consumers will most likely get the average consumer to interact with it. The average customer today wants to experience a real human connection to the brand before they make the decision to buy from you.
Modern consumers browse through digital and special media news feeds on mobile devices in search of new and interesting content. This is one of the reasons why most people trust product review videos on YouTube instead of watching the brand’s official channel. If the user-generated content is appealing and relevant enough, the viewers are more likely to click on promotions and offers.
With that said, the success of this trend is based on actual consumers providing authentic views and experiences about your brand. User-generated content should not be confused with influencer marketing. https://www.researchgate.net/post/Whats_the_difference_between_User_Generated_Content_WOM_and_Influencer_Content
Localisation
The digital sphere is big and diverse, and most brands fail because they do not have a localised digital strategy. You will need a clearly defined set of brand values and an understanding of the target audience when creating your local digital strategy.
After this, you can then start creating your digital marketing campaigns in Hong Kong and collaborating with local influencers on the social channels where your target audience access it the most. Here is a systematic process to help you localise your brand’s digital marketing for Hong Kong:
Choose the Target Languages
In Hong Kong, Chinese and English are the official languages, but many of the locals speak Cantonese, a Chinese dialect. For this reason, your location-based marketing campaigns need to accommodate the needs of the target audience.
With that said, you need to produce content in English coupled with Cantonese. Choosing the right combination will make your digital marketing in Hong Kong more relatable.
Emphasise on the Brand Values
Brand values are what separate brands in a competitive market. For example, Coca Cola and Pepsi both produce soft drinks, but their values are different, making coca-cola more successful than Pepsi. Brand values can include anything from an emphasis on socialization, disruptive growth, or individual career building.
Before you roll out your localized digital marketing campaigns, ensure that you create a set of values that will represent your brand. After this, localize them to Hong Kong by presenting them in a language your target audience can understand.
Have Distinct CTAs
It is important that you define the purpose of your localized marketing early in your campaigns. This means knowing whether you intend to create brand awareness or to sell more products.
Your CTAs should reflect the purpose of your current digital marketing campaign and they should be localized into local languages. For this reason, you need to know where to place them for more engagement.
Videos
Over the years, digital marketing has moved from text-based content to images, and now it is video. Consumers today want video, and some of the most popular and successful brands have accounted for video in their content marketing strategy.
This means that you need to make use of YouTube and other video sharing channels. However, you will also need to make shorter videos for social media that deliver your intended message in a short time.
With that said, you do not necessarily need to invest in high-end video equipment. You can take a casual and more personalized approach that resonates with your target audience.
With that said, the use of videos for digital marketing in Hong Kong has changed a lot. Here are some of the things to consider:
- Personalised videos – As many as 72% of consumers say that they will only engage with personalised marketing messages and 60% of marketers are personalising their marketing campaigns to improve the quality of their leads
- Collect as much data as possible about your target audience and create buyer personas. This will help you target the right audience and at the right time
Many digital marketers have resulted in short-form videos due to the reports that the human attention span is shrinking. However, this is bound to change. While shorter videos are easy to consume, they are not the best for brands looking to form an emotional connection with their consumers.
Moreover, the average user spends 88% more time on a website with video content, and this shows that long-form video content is the way to go. You will be able to tell your story in a memorable way.
Social Shopping
Social media is no longer a simple engagement tool, but it has been transformed into shopping platforms. Every day, products and services are sold via social marketplaces such as the Facebook marketplace. While most brands are still stuck with the e-commerce website, shopping dynamics are about to change.
Statistics show that as much as 54% of social media users use the platforms to explore products, with close to half of them showing intent to buy. For instance, with Instagram Checkout you can enable shoppable posts within your social strategy, which significantly shortens the buying journey.
Social shopping allows you to simplify and shorten the customer’s buying experience. Your top priority should be to keep the checkout process as easy as possible.
Voice Search
Voice search is quickly gaining traction thanks to the emergence of voice-activated technologies and products such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. This has led to search engines to consider voice search as a relevant ranking factor.
Businesses today need to adapt their content to benefit from voice search, they also have to use artificial intelligence to go beyond voice search and into voice commerce. For this reason, you will need to ensure that your content meets the criteria for voice search.
Content Collaboration
We are seeing more content creators collaborate to ensure that they produce relevant and valuable content for a variety of people. For this trend to work in your favour, look out complementary businesses, and work together to create content for both of your target audience.
The chances are that their target audience will become your customers and vice versa. Moreover, you could get the services of a professional digital marketing agency in Hong Kong, and the professional will help you understand your goals and formulate the best ways of achieving them.
Final Thoughts
While digital marketing in Hong Kong is fluid and is a well-oiled machine, you will need to implement the latest and relevant trends. This will ensure that you get better brand positioning and a stronger reputation in the coming months.