By its very nature, marketing always follows the most recent trends in order to target customers in the right way. When talking about marketing strategy, the change adopted, technologies used, and the rate of change varies depending on the industry the company operates within and who their customers are. However, since the boom of the internet and mobile usage in the late 20th century, no matter what the brand and what industry they operate within, many are racing to produce content for their social media.
You may wonder, how significant is the effect of internet and mobile usage on marketing? In 1995 the world’s internet usage was 0.4% of the world population. Today it has reached 54.4% (Internet World Statistics, 2017). This means that if brands do not use internet and mobile in their marketing campaigns, they are missing out on the opportunity to target more than half of the world’s population.
And for Asia, the numbers are even more staggering. 50% of the world’s internet users are in Asia (Internet World Statistics, 2017). Asia has the highest number of digital users. 24% of the world’s digital users are in East Asia, 16% in South Asia, and 9% in Southeast Asia. While other regions, for example, Western Europe has only 6% users, North America 8% users, and Central America 3% users (Hootsuite, 2017).
So, online marketing in Asia is a no-brainer, right?
The world of online marketing indeed comes with many advantages such as low cost, worldwide audience, measurability, and long-term exposure. But with this comes high competition, and savvy customers expect more and better performance from online brands. Thus brands are racing to produce the most eye-catching, memorable, and engaging content. And what is the best way to do this? Branded visual content is the answer. In the graph below you can see how the creation of engaging, branded, bespoke content has become a top priority among B2B content creators.
Infographics, videos, and GIFs are considered to be the most engaging types of visual contents to use.
According to Smith (2017), there are 2 million blog articles posted every day and it’s already too much content to be read. Additionally, Freeman (2017) has said that to have a successful business with big opportunities for scaling, you must never neglect your online marketing strategies. Infographics, videos, and GIFs are great but it can come at a great cost or need of resources that not all companies possess. Based on our experience, there is another type of visual content which is highly effective, namely branded content. To learn more about branded content, stay tuned for the next article in our visual content series!