Can Internet Marketing work in Asia?

I had a great chat with a few corporate citizens of the internet marketing industry. They have been struggling real hard in this declining economy when asian companies are only starting to embrace the internet as their next strategy.

To my biggest surprise, it seems to me that these corporate citizens are not just not “there” yet in terms of their experience in marketing online. They don’t really get the feel of making money online by marketing products and services online. Well, anyway their business model is still revolving around the traditional way of marketing. Which means they are doing strategic partnership with their suppliers, they also make their money from the leads generation through all sorts of media. This is definitely not surprising to me that they have to do it this way. That’s because Asia is still not really ready for the internet business as a whole yet. The consumers may be increasing a little because of the cheaper access with their mobile phone and mobile internet.

In the very true internet marketing world, all of us are very likely working in a one-man business. So much so that it is making me feel more and more anti-social because i don’t feel the pressure to know more people when i get to attend any business networking sessions. In fact, i’ve attended countless of them in the past for my past businesses.

For the ones who are more ambitious online, they will have to set up an office to employ talents to start and to maintain the money-making websites. People like myself, i’m sick of setting up my own office already. I would rather outsource wherever i can, keeping myself as portable as i can to my mobile phone as my key to the internet businesses. But of course, when i have to write reviews, it may not work with my Nokia N95. My laptop has to come into play.

As the economy is getting into uncertainty, we get to hear more and more companies retrenching employees. But we cannot stop marketing activities.. Or else it may be disastrous. It turned out that internet marketing is the wise choice.. But do remember that asia as a whole is not as savvy online as countries like philippines, singapore, india and even hong kong. You can be surprised that malaysia may not be ready because of their limited broadband access. Indonesia is also another. Thailand may still be quite ok. Vietnam is rising for sure too.

You may get to see most of the audience could be from the new generation which maybe younger that age 30. Not all companies can target that young age group for sure. Some companies should be enjoying great cash flow from the free flow of traffic from the search engine.. Paying for every click is also a good testing platform to see how many people are using google search engine.

In terms of products, it may not be suitable for now because delivery is both redundant and costly. People may want to buy but they cannot have instant gratitude of receiving the product. And that can be costly to deliver. It can be redundant because shops are quite accessible and we can handcarry ourselves…

In my opinion, services and digital products are the most feasible business to do online. People can get instant gratification. It’s easy to render our service upon payment.