TNS: Five major changes are happening in the marketing industry in Asia Pacific

As consumers increasingly shift their focus to social media, how should marketers respond? TNS's latest Market Monitoring Report 2016 summarizes five major trends in the marketing industry in the Asia-Pacific region.

1. Customer relationship management has become the top priority for marketers

Once upon a time, the goals of marketing work were clearly defined: to build brand influence, discover market gaps, and ultimately help increase sales.

But now their work is focused on tracking consumers: tracking every touch point used by consumers, that is, the various physical and virtual channels through which they interact with the brand (such as stores, outdoor advertising, TV commercials, social media accounts, after-sales service hotlines, etc.), and serving the various needs of consumers at as many touch points as possible, including consumers' pre-sales research, purchasing behavior and after-sales service.

Their responsibility has become to manage the entire process of consumer contact with the brand, from initial brand awareness, purchase decision, brand and product experience, to consumer loyalty and recommendation tendency. They not only have to win new consumers, but also manage the consumer experience.

The results of the Market Monitor 2016 report clearly show that customer relationship management is now the number one priority for marketers in the Asia Pacific region.

The top five priorities for the marketing department are:

1) Consumer relationship management

2) Increase brand awareness

3) Helping the marketing department transform

4) Obtain information from data to help make decisions

5) Find and define new sales opportunities

6) Automated marketing and programmatic buying

2. Marketers track consumer experiences on social media

As social media continues to grow, it has become an increasingly important part of the consumer experience process. They are not only a new platform for building brands, but also can facilitate sales, provide customer service, and enhance user loyalty.

In their daily work, marketers have also changed with the trend. This includes increasing brand awareness through social media advertising (38% of people use it), using social media influencer marketing to increase the proportion of brand consideration (26%), launching organic marketing campaigns based on existing fans (39%), and selling through social media platforms (38%). In addition, the most commonly used channel for customer service is now also social media platforms.

3. Explore ways to optimize social marketing spending

As social media continues to grow in importance, marketers are increasingly considering how to best use their marketing dollars on social media. They know that consumers are spending more and more time on social media, but social media is also a highly fragmented field, and they are trying to apply the same tools they used to apply to traditional media to social media.

Still, ad spending must keep up quickly with consumers. 38% of marketers surveyed said they spend money on social media, compared with 35% on TV. As marketers delve deeper into digital touchpoints, this percentage is set to rise.

Mobile is another area of ​​marketing that has been highlighted. As interactions on social platforms are often achieved through mobile phones, the importance of mobile devices as touchpoints will grow very fast, and the current marketing expenditure ratio has not kept up. However, the "Market Monitoring Report 2016" also pointed out that since there are still a large number of consumers in Asia Pacific who still use non-smartphones, marketing plans must also take this group into consideration. SMS (used to send promotional information) is the second most frequently used media touchpoint in Asia Pacific, second only to public relations activities.

4. Marketers see social media as a source of insights

If your target audience is increasingly addicted to social media, it makes sense that it would be a great source of insight into consumers. Nearly half (46%) of marketers say they use social media monitoring as a source of insight for marketing decisions and planning, more than any other channel.

Consumer insights from social media are used to determine product development (36%) and to mine consumer intelligence (27%), but the most common use is to measure the effectiveness of advertising waves. Social media monitoring is now the most commonly used marketing performance indicator in Asia Pacific: 40% of marketers use it as a measure of the success of marketing campaigns, compared to 33% who cite market share monitoring and 32% who cite brand and advertising tracking.

But this also raises the question: Is monitoring social media alone enough to obtain complete and sufficient data to guide strategy formulation and advertising planning? Although social media data has suddenly become a metric that everyone quotes, it is still far from mature as a reliable source of marketing insights.

The value of social media data can only be fully realized when it is viewed in the context of the whole. For example, brands can use information on social media to understand how consumers accept their latest advertisements. If there is a deviation from the expected effect, they can take timely action to fine-tune the advertisements that are still running.

To gain truly meaningful consumer insights, brands must look beyond superficial social media performance data and combine them with other indicators, such as the reasons that induce positive or negative experiences, or brand attribute indicators. Only in this way can companies fully understand why the brand performs the way it does.

5. Explosive growth of contact points makes marketers exhausted

As consumers’ media touchpoints become increasingly complex, marketers in Asia Pacific are generally reporting feeling overwhelmed: only about a third (34%) of respondents say they are able to keep up with all touchpoints.

The more developed the media ecosystem, the higher the Internet penetration rate, and the more advanced the digital lifestyle, the greater the pressure marketers feel: because they don’t know which touchpoints to choose. In Singapore and Japan, only 29% of marketers said they can manage the touchpoints at hand, while in South Korea, the proportion is only 28%, and in New Zealand it drops to 24%.

The results of the Market Monitoring Report 2016 show that marketers have various ways of managing touchpoints. 22% adopt a "sprinkle pepper" approach, that is, spend money on as many touchpoints as possible; 41% only spend money on channels they are familiar with; and 37% are experimenting with new touchpoints while making good use of familiar touchpoints. TNS's touchpoint research proves that on average, 20% of all the touchpoints used by a brand will produce 80% of the results.

Summarize:

Marketers in the Asia-Pacific region are going through a difficult period of transformation: consumer behavior is changing, the media landscape is changing, and their own job definitions are also changing. Faced with the entire Asia-Pacific region getting deeper and deeper into the web of social media, marketers have to make decisive transformations as soon as possible.

Many people believe that the key to this transformation is to increase monitoring of social media. However, senior marketing executives and marketers from more mature markets know that this is far from enough: looking at comments and forwarding data alone is not enough to see the overall picture they need, especially now that there is still a lack of effective communication between departments in large companies. Social media data must be integrated with data from other channels to understand. This will be a new challenge and new opportunity for market researchers.

Source: TNS