This article does not aim to answer all the questions and curiosities related to Digital Marketing. I would like to clarify some details that refer to some FAQs I am receiving regarding the implementation of Digital Marketing in Cambodia. Living and working in the capital, I have a clear vision of how digital marketing is perceived in Phnom Penh and the province.

From my point of view, I have always talked about Digital Marketing Plan as an integrated solution to promote and communicate services and products through new systems and devices. Internet connection, data analysis, understanding of target users have always been in my range since I work as an SEO expert and I deal with social media marketing.

I must say that it was very strange when I moved from Italy to Thailand in 2012 and everyone was talking about Facebook marketing as if it were all that could happen in term of online marketing. Most people ignored any other channel and, above all, they were losing attention to the importance of the best digital asset ever: your website. This scenario has changed a lot. Today most of the Thai internet users are aware of what an online marketing strategy is and they use Facebook marketing no less than Google Ads, YouTube and mobile advertising and other available channels.

What about Digital Marketing in Cambodia? After a few years of Facebook boom which remains the first network used all over the country and until now the easiest to access and manage from any smart phone, other social media such as TikTok and advanced chats such as WeChat (widely used by the Chinese), Line and Telegram, become very popular among Cambodians of all ages. Finally, it have been registered a greater use of Google My Business for the creation of Google Map and therefore geolocation of business with all the associated advantages of becoming easily available and reachable.

Furthermore, since November 2020, the Cambodian government is working to develop regulations about e-commerce. The purchase of goods online has until now been a sort of “online freestyle” mainly based on Facebook, today also followed by TikTok, where local vendors using the power of live streaming, sell their products in real time, receiving money via Wing , local banks, cash on delivery etc. Many scams of course, many Facebook pages that remain open for the time to “empty the warehouses” if we can say it like this, many unethical vendors who do not change products if they are wrong or defective, etc. So surely online sales, once the rules and systems will be established, could be enormously successful. What we have seen spontaneously happening up to now through Facebook is only a small anticipation of the true potential of online sales.

All this “digital progress” connected to the well-known digital transformation underway from the capital Phnom Penh to rural areas, and no less all this emphasis on the use of social media, took place in the most of cases without leaving time to understand exactly the why and the what about these channels. Above all, it happened at an incredible speed which is stimulating on the one hand, but also very frightening.

Why should digital transformation be somehow frightening?

Because a transformation is a positive phenomenon, if those who undergo it are aware of what exactly is happening and hold the reins, or – if nothing else – they know the consequences.

Going upstream, the questions had to be:
1) Are we sure that all the people who have bought a smart phone, are aware that from that moment they have become traceable, analyzable and data sources for emotional and behavioral statistical?
2) Are we really sure that all these people are aware that they could be part of databases that can be resold by their owners and that can be used by marketing agencies to target their campaigns?

Here we link to some topics that have been in the buzz for some years and are now strongly linked to digital marketing: Big Data and data-driven tools.

What is the data? The data is identifiable as a grouping of facts. This information can be numbers, photos, videos, words, measurements, operations, and much more…

Big Data refers to the huge amount of data above, collected by digital systems that can range from what we release during subscriptions to online programs, responses to surveys anywhere, the information we involuntarily release when we speak on Messenger or other chats by responding to chat bots questions, data recorded in Facebook and other social media about our age, our interests, about the likes or what we release in posts, about the data contained in our comments, about what we watch on YouTube, what we look for online in the various channels and much more.

So let’s talk about the immense quantity and granularity of the data that is collected every second by systems called “statistics” or “insights” which are integrated into all the digital channels we use every day.
Facebook collects data, including from private conversations. The company that made the smart phone we’re using is collecting data. Google and all search engines collect data. Every time we use a Google tool such as Gmail or YouTube, our online behaviors are in a someway recorded. All the apps we use on the computer or other devices collect data.

Only a part of all the data we are talking about are visible or available from the statistical tools that the social media and web servers make available to us.

“The contemporary age has been aptly regarded as ‘an era of ubiquitous dataveillance, or the systematic monitoring of citizen’s communications or actions through the use of information technology’. It is also an age of ‘big data’ or the collection of data sets. These data sets are capable of being searched; they have linkages with other data sets; and are marked by their exhaustive scope and the permanency of collection. The challenge which big data poses to privacy interests emanate [sic]from state and non-state entities.”

Read full article “The Dark Side of Big Data”….

 

Now let’s try to imagine that this data is collected based on characteristics such as age, gender, region in which we are located, and on the activities we have carried out such as how many times we have used YouTube, what we have watched, how long we have been there each day (just to give some simple examples). The information I mentioned above is collected in databases, some public and some private.

So data analysis in marketing should lead us directly to the people who are already interested in our service or product. Knowing our audience is essential in order not to waste time and money. Identifying the target user before starting any marketing campaign is the basis of its success. Reaching the target user is the goal of our campaign.

In a way, using properly Facebook Business Manager, it is possible to select your target based on a series of numerous features that we can select. In this case, the interface we use is visual: we select the options made available and hence we create our audience for the sponsored links within Facebook.

If you want to dig deeper about your target user, it is possible to access data by exploiting what is available in data platform, or, if we ourselves are collecting data, we could use them to retarget marketing campaigns or launch new products with the advantage to focus on a very well selected target audience.

Who deals with retrieving this information from databases, from insights but also from searches performed in a classic way or using specific tools and then organize all this information by drawing conclusions and making predictions about what a certain activity could lead to before putting it into action is identified as data analyst.
The return of database queries to the monitor often occurs in the form of strings. This information is presented in the form of infographic (visual presentation) using specific software and apps.

The data collection also develops after our initial research. This is the main reason why the data analysis should take place for the entire period of our marketing activity and not just in the initial phase.

At a certain point in the marketing campaign, the data could guide us towards new choices and avoid path errors.
Data-driven thinking, as well as data-driven marketing, are connected to the identification and understanding of data before implementing a choice or strategy.

Data-driven decision-making is defined as using facts to guide business strategy.
No matter how valuable data-driven decision-making is, data alone will never be as powerful as data combined with human experience, observation, and sometimes even intuition.

I conclude this insight by saying that any business has always needed data to improve its processes, identify new opportunities and new trends. Many of this data that once came only from dusty corporate archives, or files more or less organized on corporate servers, can now be part of public or private databases. Whether this release of data is conscious or unconscious, this could be the subject of some debate.

This clearing and understanding of data for marketing purposes, as well as the collection of the same, should be governed by precise criteria, based primarily on respect for privacy.

While in Western countries this topic have been already the subject of trials, criticisms and various types of actions, for the moment in SEA there are still no very precise rules.
Surely any business needs to control its data in order to improve its performance and make informed decisions and data-driven Digital Marketing has a lot of great advantages. Ethics and common sense should be the basis of any digital marketing agency or digital marketing expert performance…