Asia: Opening Doors for Digital Marketers

As per the projections from Forrester Research, up to 43 percent of the world's online population will reside in Asia by 2013. This will result in the numerous online marketing developments in Asia, thus making this area central for digital marketers! Now is the time when digital marketers need to sit up and work out their best strategies about digital marketing trends, including search, mobile, social media, e-mail marketing, and analytics.

The emerging face of Asia's digital markets has made the world sit up and notice the changing scenario that this region presents. Asia boasts of unprecedented rise in the web users who access internet for a wide range of activities. This can include anything from information search to social networking and from ticket booking to writing mails.

The figures published by Forrester Research shows that almost 17 % percent of the global online population will be residing in China by the year 2013. China will also account for 1.3 billion mobile subscribers and 957 million mobile Web users by 2014. These figures shows that by 2010 more people in China will be accessing the Web on their cell phones than the entire population of the U.S. in 2010!

As per Asia Pacific Digital Marketing Yearbook, last year in 2009 internet users in Asia Pacific had spent more than 5.6 trillion minutes online. In doing so, they had bought almost $7 billion in virtual goods. India recorded year-on-year increase of 42 percent in 2009! The internet population in India grew to almost 71 million, which included 51 million active users. Also, maximum searches for products such as mobile phones and laptops are originating from India. A small country like Japan also has around 21.8 million social network users. There are more than 10.6 million Facebook users in Philippines, which is ranked eighth in the world in terms of countries with highest number of using the social networking site.

These and many more such encouraging data have made it apparent that marketers now need to focus their attention to Asia in order to make full use of the increasing online marketing opportunities. Marketers can now use efficient and effective digital marketing medium to reach consumers. This medium allows marketers to enter into a two way dialogue with the customer. Now it has become easy for marketers to get an insight into consumer’s interests and obtain an economical link with the current as well as potential customers.

What makes Asia truly amazing is its diversity. Over 2000 spoken languages, incredible wealth yet unforgiving poverty, political models including monarchies to democracies to authoritarian governments, and numerous religious traditions give Asia a unique identity. Yet, this otherwise stunning diversity is nothing but highly fragmented markets when seen from a communication professionals’ point of view. For any company, communication across such a diverse landscape is a challenge that must be faced. One who is able to manage this will surely be the king of digital marketing world of Asia!