Top 10 marketing trends for Asia 2017

Whether you are in Tokyo, Taipei, or Singapore, you know that Asia as a whole is lagging behind in the adoption of marketing technology and marketing automation, as much as ten years in certain areas. Nevertheless 2017 will be the year it catches up big time.

1. AI adoption will begin, starting with chatbots. Even though as of December 2016 I still don't know of a single Asian enterprise that has embraced artificial intelligence in marketing, next year marks the beginning of Asian AI. Mark my words. The first chatbot startups are springing up and interest is growing in AI-driven marketing automation. Words like Hubspot, Hootsuite, and MeetEdgar are being mentioned, and at least one company I know is testing Marketo. Asian businesses seem to be a little wary of automation in marketing, thinking that these systems will eliminate too many jobs. That is not the case at all. Marketing automation allows you to generate and follow up on many more leads than a single marketer can. The real trouble is that automation threatens not the marketing team but the sales teams, and blurs the line between them. In Asian companies Sales rules the roost and has the ear of the boss. That's why it's taking so long for companies to adopt new technologies and why Asian companies keep falling behind in marketing tech.

2. Voice search marketing. Sales of AI driven voice assistants are booming in America and Europe. Whereas with text search you can afford to be in second and third place in the results page, in voice search only the top spot will get attention. This will finally force Asian companies to fork out for outsourced professional SEO.

3. Traditional SEO will die. It already is. Forget keywords and H1 tags. Google is increasingly putting AI to the front of the queue, meaning that almost everything you know today about SEO will become irrelevant. The new way to do SEO is to look at the top ranked sites and reverse-engineer them to find what Google's opaque AI knows about them. However you do it, companies without ongoing SEO (that means most of Taiwan's exporters for example) will drift to the bottom of the pile.

4. Obsession with truth in marketing. Fake news and increasingly fake data will cause a disturbance in the force so great it will make governments and companies alike shudder. Unscrupulous marketers have begun to manipulate AI with fake sources, and it will take many years to sort this mess out. With a general lack of ethical standards among Asian hackers, expect companies to fall prey to blackhat tactics that still ultimately rule them out as reliable business partners.

5. Facebook will eat up a large part of your ad budget. Facebook has won the social wars outside China. The number of users and posts means that you will spend increasing amounts not just to gain new followers but also to keep your posts showing to existing followers. We don't like it but there is no way around it. Asia is FB-crazy. Taiwanese spend 80% of their online time on FB. For marketers, best practice is to create your own audience with a long term view rather than spending all the money on (mostly badly designed) ads.

6. Proliferation of gated communities. As Facebook gets busier and ads proliferate, users will retreat to the safety of private groups, putting them beyond the reach of marketers and their bots. Oh yes. Expect to see bots taking over larger swathes of Facebook as we move into 2017.

7. Line will remain a chat tool first and a marketing tool last - line, Asia's answer to messenger, has taken over Asia outside China, yet it's foray into marketing has been a disaster. That stems from a total lack of understanding of consumer behavior and greedy picking of the low-hanging fruits on behalf of line management, but even more so from the fact that AI-driven marketing is much more effective and cheaper. Line does have no AI resources, which means whatever it tries in 2017 will be too little too late. Expect "LINE" the movie rather than "LINE" the e-commerce giant.

8. Account based marketing will finally be a thing in Asia. While ABM is now the norm in Europe and the US, Asian companies have completely missed the boat because sales teams and marketing teams do not talk to each other. In Asia, Marketing is the ugly sister of Sales, and as soon as a lead lands with sales, marketers are out of the loop. As business declines, companies wake up to the fact that they are doing something fundamentally wrong and traditional sales tactics have stopped working years go. In 2017, ABM will become a thing in Asia, but due to the usual incompetence of management when it comes to marketing-driven strategies, most companies will fail to implement it successfully and go under.

9. Video Fail. Every marketer will tell his or her boss that they have to invest in video content. Stingy company bosses will invest too little and produce crappy videos nobody can bear to watch.

10. Asian companies will finally understand what inbound marketing is and start adopting enterprise-wide rules to incorporate inbound strategies. These rules will be too stringent, their implementation too slow, the inbound actions too conservative and the KPIs too irrelevant to make a dent. Companies will still shy away from creating and owning digital assets for long-term success.

All in all, 2017 will be a good year in Asian marketing. At least for consultants like myself.