Digital Marketing in Hong Kong at a glance

As to compare with US, digital marketing in Hong Kong is not that advance.  Although cell-phones penetration are among the highest in Asia, a lot of digital marketing concepts like sales funnel, inbound marketing, marketing automation still not that well-known.

According to Google, only 50% of Hong Kong’s small-medium businesses agreed that digital is fundamental to their business.  This slow digital adoption by SMBs could explain why digital spend is much lower in Hong Kong than its neighbors.

As Hong Kong is very convenient in getting  Depending on company scale, Most of the digital marketing strategy in Hong Kong are more focus on the traffic side, only few of them will involve in conversion’s side.

We are going to show you some of the existing marketing platform, strategy that digital marketers in Hong Kong are using.

Fewer Marketing Platform

As to compare with US variety of marketing platform, Hong Kong‘s major social media platforms are Facebook and IG.  As from a research done by The egg, the most popular digital activities are social media, search and video

Facebook Marketing

Facebook is the dominating marketing platform for all industries in Hong Kong.  Basically, you can see variety of products selling there.  Facebook used to be one of the most effective marketing platform, with the decrease of organic reach,  advertisers need to spend more for getting similar results as before.

Content is still King among social media platform, we can see that there is a lack of content writers or curators at the moment.   However, stickiness of audience in this platform is quite high and time spent there cultivating is well worth it.

SEO

Google is still the most dominating search engine in Hong Kong where people go there for different intents.  Company that provide solution to any specific problems must not ignore it.  Although SEO is long in the digital marketing industry, unlike Facebook, SEO is still not well-known among different companies.

In general, management level in Hong Kong would prefer instant return for any digital investment, as SEO takes a bit time for getting positive ROI, sometimes it hinder them for taking actions. For digital marketing, there is a bit market share for SEO agency in HK.

Yahoo and Bing still have some usages, and obviously the user age group are higher than that in Google.  Because of the earlier adoption in Hong Kong Market, we can see that some people still using Yahoo as their homepage.

Voice search is not that common in Hong Kong Market at the moment, but we can see the growing trend.  However, since Cantonese is different from Mandarin, voice search optimization may not be carried out directly on the site.

SEM

Most of the Hong Kong digital agency will help customer carrying out search engine marketing (SEM) campaign.  In general, most of them charged based on the percentage of total ad spend, ranging from 14 – 20% of total ad spending.

Blogger and KOL Marketing

Before the rise of KOL, blogger is dominating, especially in the parenting, beauty field.  Today, KOL marketing is one of the way where big brands allocating more budgets on.  As from my experience, price are varies based on the popularity of the KOL and the job nature, ranging from few thousand to more than twenty thousand Hong Kong dollar per post.

Forum Marketing in Hong Kong

Forum Marketing used to be one of the most effective ways for marketing in Hong Kong.  A lot of companies used forum as a softer way to deliver marketing message, including creating threads that provide customers testimonial and so on.

This method is especially well-known for cosmetic industry and medical-related industry.  As you all know, medical-related industry are not allowed to carry out any advertising activities, such soft promotion maybe the only way that they can do.

At the moment, there are only 3 -4 famous forums in Hong Kong, including Lihkg, HKdiscuss.com, HKgolden and Uwants, and most of the digital agency will keep monitoring and publishing posts on these three forums.

Tips in picking the right digital marketing agency

In Hong Kong, there are tons of digital marketing agency which claims they can provide you full scope of services.   Simply do a search with queries “”online marketing agency”, “marketing agency HK” or “marketing agency 香港”.  You will get more than dozen of it.  Some of the big names includes Fimmick, New Digital Noise.

Funny Thing:

As we usually find that people search online marketing agency with the queries  “Marketing Agency 的中文怎麼說”.  Indeed, it is really rare to name it in Chinese.

However, the truth is, some of them are just outsourcing their work to different parties.  As a SEO sub-contractor myself for 3 major digital agencies in Hong Kong, I can told that if you want to get the best service provider, you may need to test it one by one.

As digital marketing is very board, the first think you need to consider maybe what service you are really looking for.  Maybe your company require a strong social media company that can help you spreading out marketing message via different social media platform or you may simply need lining up KOLs for your branding.  You may need to consider what business nature and target audience you are going to reach.

You also need to consider the budget for your whole marketing campaign, as you may know, it will highly affect the quality of the agency.  Remember that “Price” somehow equals to “Quality”.

Another tips for choosing online digital agency is to avoid one-man-band, usually, you will find them in low price, but the problem is, you will not get enough support if you are facing any urgent situation.

In fact, the best way to observe how a digital marketing company perform will be watching what they are doing for themselves.  If they claims they are the best in Facebook marketing, why don’t you take a look at their Facebook performance?   Usually, it can reveals the job quality and it saves you tons of money doing this simple observation.

Conclusion

Based on the above observation, you may allocate your marketing budget accordingly, we suggest company in Hong Kong try to carry out a small budget campaign, as this can let you have an idea on where the audience or target customer located.  After getting your winning campaign, you can easily scale up to maximize your return.