Source: Yangcheng Evening News
Text/Yangcheng Evening News reporter Qi Yaoqi Photo/Provided by the interviewee
In recent years, the Southeast Asian market, a "new continent" of e-commerce, has been noticed by more players. As the second largest e-commerce market in Southeast Asia, Thailand is a "blessed land" for many sellers. When the Southeast Asian market grows to a standardized and orderly stage, refined operation, compliance, and branding will become the competitiveness that Southeast Asian businesses need to develop.
In March this year, a company from Guangzhou entered Thailand, which is Titan Technology. Its business base officially landed in Bangkok, and together with a team composed of e-commerce experts, market operation elites and local live broadcast experts, it provides professional TikTok Shop e-commerce operation strategies and services for cross-border e-commerce customers through more original insights, and achieves new heights of business growth.
Digital tools pave the way for brands
In recent years, the growth rate of digital marketing spending of Chinese enterprises overseas has remained at a high level, and the scale has continued to rise. According to eMarketer data, Chinese enterprises will spend $34.4 billion on overseas digital marketing in 2023, a growth rate of more than 25%. The report predicts that the scale could exceed $51.1 billion by 2025.
Li Shuhao, founder and CEO of Titan Technology, said in an interview with a reporter from Yangcheng Evening News that branding in digital media coverage is a fundamental way. First of all, the complexity and information gap of the overall overseas environment are far greater than those of domestic e-commerce, which relies on digital media coverage, which can be gradually screened and analyzed to simplify this process. In this process, it is hoped that consumers will have more understanding of the product content, so as to generate more feedback on the company itself and promote branding.
To build a brand, you need a large amount of high-quality content: copywriting, materials, celebrities, planning, cross-border cooperation, special effects, creativity, shooting, and scripts. At the same time, it also faces local challenges: religious customs, local user preferences, global live-action studios, local promotion channels, foreign anchors & dubbing, language and culture, etc. All of this can leave the process of building a brand difficult for companies to rely solely on their own capabilities, so it's important to look to external digital tools.
Li Shuhao gave an example: Bilibili has encountered great difficulties in integrating into foreign cultural formats and mining local UGC content and audiences. To this end, the company uses digital media SaaS management tools to help Bilibili tailor its channel growth strategy in Southeast Asian countries and optimize the data growth curve of TikTok, Google and Kwai. After some efforts, more than half of Bilibili's data growth on the TikTok platform comes from the empowerment of Tidong's platform, and the user reach effect is also at the forefront of the industry.
Pinduoduo's cross-border e-commerce platform Temu also has a similar experience in going overseas. Through the precise placement of digital advertising, Temu quickly rushed to the top of the free app download list in North America in less than two months, gaining more than 100 million users around the world, and promoting products made in China to reach the North American market. Behind the positive change, digital transformation has become an important way to build brands.
The localization of social e-commerce has become the key
According to rough statistics, after the epidemic, the user time of global consumers on social platforms has increased by three to four times, and the time spent on social platforms has almost become the largest time spent by global consumers except for work. Behind the monthly active user data is the gradual development of the cognition and mentality of consumers around the world on social platforms.
According to a survey conducted by Titan Technology, at this stage, 48% of Thai consumers prefer social channels when exploring shopping inspiration and searching for products, which is very close to traditional retail e-commerce. Different from the previous shelf e-commerce, the core logic of social e-commerce is based on digital media, content recommendation, and information to find people. This is what Titan Technology is doing now and in the future.
According to a report released in January this year, Chinese sellers have shifted from focusing on cost advantages to paying more attention to brand value and user experience. If you want to deeply link local consumers and achieve brand premium, "localization" is imperative.
In the era of content social networking and interest e-commerce, the production of content that impresses consumers has become the key, and globalization is bound to face local problems such as cross-language and cross-culture. "Our goal was to localize, and apart from a few of the initial team members, the rest were almost all local." Jensen, head of the Thai business of Titan Technology, told reporters. Compared with Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia, which are mainly English-speaking Southeast Asian markets, Thailand is a small-language country, and local language support is needed for everything from live streaming sales, short video drainage, e-commerce product listings to e-commerce customer service communication. Through in-depth localization and live broadcast operation capabilities, the Thai business base of Titan Technology provides 1-to-1 customized services, and finally opens up the situation.
Artificial intelligence quickly boosts productivity
Li Shuhao said that the current generative artificial intelligence technology for digital media coverage of almost the most application scenarios, the use of AI technology can produce high-frequency content, with the support of this technology, the future of digital construction services will also extend to the brand and content.
For example, beauty customer SACE LADY once had a pain point, during the promotion period, it was necessary to carry out excessive advertising, and manually building advertisements was a common means, but it would consume a lot of manpower and time costs, and errors and omissions were also prone to high occurrence, which greatly affected the advertising effect and promotion efficiency. To this end, Titan Technology has developed the function of importing ads in batches by integrating TikTok for Business's API solution into its SaaS platform, improving the efficiency of brand creation and editing when placing video shopping ads. At the same time, it also provided customized technical solutions for customers, developed the function of batch authorizing TikTok posts, and supported batch modification of ads, which significantly improved the efficiency of SACE LADY in managing ad creatives during the big promotion, and ultimately saved 80% of the time spent on ad building.
There are also pain points in the marketing of Honor mobile phones, that is, to show the futuristic sense of new products, the complex live-action shooting process, and the problems of long and costly post-processing. To this end, Titan Technology integrates the imagination of future smartphones and links up with experts to formulate AIGC content marketing strategies. Artificial intelligence technology is used to produce content, replace live-action shooting, and visualize new technological concepts such as digital bags. In the end, it received more than 300,000 impressions and more than 30,000 interactions in a single week.