Vietnam Digital Marketing Fundamentals Vol 1

4 Digital Marketing Overview 5 $36.6B was the Digital marketing spend in US 2012 6 China landscape dominated by locals 8 Singapore: $100M Online Spend in 2011 10 Digital marketing i

Table of Content

Introduction 1

Who am I? 2

Who this book is for? 3

How this book is structured? 4

Digital Marketing Overview 5

$36.6B was the Digital marketing spend in US 2012 6

China landscape dominated by locals 8

Singapore: $100M Online Spend in 2011 10

Digital marketing in Vietnam 11

Potential in Vietnam 13

31M internet users in Vietnam 14

Agency world in Vietnam 17

Big Agency Group in Vietnam 19

Other Agency Groups 21

Local agencies, ad networks and others 24

Jack of all trades 28

Digital Marketing Career 30

How to learn Digital Marketing 33

The Big Picture 38

Owned, Paid and Earned Media 39

PC Assets 42

Getting the basics right 43

Development plan 46

User experience 55

Reference 65

Mobile Assets 66

Post PC era is here 67

Mobile options for Brands 69

Reference 76

Social Media Assets 77

What is Social Media? 78

Facebook domination in Vietnam 79

Channel Recommendation 81

Guiding principles 83

Facebook fanpage 90

Measuring success 99

Reference 106

Digital Analytics 107

What is Digital Analytics 108

Definition 109

Different Analytics Tools 111

Free Offsite Tools 114

Paid Offsite Tools 118

Listening Tools 123

Effective Analytics Strategy 128

Google Analytics Overview 135

Reference 137

Display Advertising 138

What is Display Advertising? 139

How to plan a Display Campaign 140

Google Display Network 148

Facebook Ads 151

Real Time Bidding 156

Tracking different media campaigns 158

Reporting and Optimization 161

Reference 164

Search Marketing 165

Demand Capture Channel 166

When to use it? 173

How Paid Search works? 181

How SEO works? 187

SEO Cheat Sheet 195

Working process for PPC and SEO 200

Performance Evaluation 201

Common Myths 204

How much does it cost? 207

Reference 210

Digital Strategy 212

Brief 214

Research 216

Ideation 218

Evaluation 223

Campaign Development 225

Conclusion 227

First Edition

Intentionally Left Blank

Introduction

About Chandler Nguyen

I was lucky I found what I love to do early in life In 2003/2004,

a friend introduced Google Adwords to me I still remember, the

first ever book that I read on this subject was “The Definite

Guide to Google Adwords” by Perry Marshall Initially I started

as an affiliate marketer without even knowing what it was, a

friend needs sales leads and I used Adwords to generate them

After that I worked for an agency focusing on SME segment in

Singapore I helped the agency to set up the Google Adwords

program at the time Yahoo still sold Yahoo Search Marketing on

a CPM basis per keyword

Then I moved to a regional agency started in the UK, when they

first set up their office in Singapore in 2007 Here I had the

op-portunities to work with the global / regional brands on

Perform-ance Media marketing After a few years, I came back to

Viet-nam to cofound a digital agency from scratch

I have been very lucky, to be able to work with wide range of professionals from various industries and company sizes, from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, the

US, UK, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, mainland China etc

I have worked with companies like Shangri-La Hotel & Resort global account, Millennium & Copthorne global account, Hong Kong Disney Land global, Club Med Asia Pacific in hotels and resorts; Apple in 13 countries, Avis in car rental, Citibank re-gional account, HSBC, ANZ, Standard Chartered to local banks

in Vietnam like Techcombank, ACB, Vietnam Airlines, Tan Hiep Phat Group, Mead Johnson, Sapporo beer etc Some of the cli-ents are from “dark market” industries like Tobacco (JTI), Dia-geo

As for why I write this book, I hope I could contribute a bit to the Digital marketing industry in Vietnam I know my experience is very limited so many things in this book could be wrong/

debatable This is partly why I publish this book as an ebook so that from reader’s comments, I could quickly make changes Feel free to share your comments/feedback through

chandlerblog@gmail.com

Section 1

Who am I?

This ebook is about Digital marketing in Vietnam, written for the

following audiences:

• Fresh Graduates who are looking for opportunities in Digital

Marketing Industry

• Digital marketing professionals with 2-3 years of experience

in one specific area of digital

• Traditional Marketers/Account Managers who want to learn

more about Digital Marketing

• Traditional agency owners in Vietnam

• International agencies who want to explore Vietnam

• International providers who want to understand more about

the local market

Why I am writing this ebook in English and not Vietnamese?

While it’s true that writing in Vietnamese would reach a wider

audience However, it is my firm belief that if you want to excel

in Digital marketing, language skill is something you have to master, English is a necessity Also the majority of the reference materials referred to in this book are in English

Section 2

Who this book is

for?

This is the summary of all the topics being covered in this book

Part 1

For the first 4 chapters, we are going to review the digital

mar-keting landscape in the US, China, Singapore and Vietnam It is

important to understand where we are and where Digital

market-ing stands in the marketmarket-ing mix in Vietnam

Next we look at the agency world to understand who the big players are Then we discuss about the potential of Digital mar-keting in Vietnam

Before learning more about any subject, it may be helpful to look at the career path, what your options will be like if you mas-ter the subject

Next we talk about different ways that you could learn Digital Marketing

Part 2

This is it At this part, we deep dive into Digital Analytics, Owned Media (including desktop assets, mobile assets and so-cial assets), Paid Media (Display and Search)

At the end there is a chapter on general principles to build a good digital strategy

Section 3

How this book is

structured?

2 A quick overview of the

digital spend across more mature markets like US, China, Singapore and of course Vietnam

Digital marketing

overview

According to IAB, the internet advertising revenue in the US

grew 15% in 2012 compared to 2011 Total revenue for 2011

was $31.74 Billions

Search marketing and Display media (Display banner, Rich

Me-dia, Video Ads, Sponsorship) are still the most popular ad

for-mats, which contributed nearly 78% of the spend

in 2012

Coming from a much smaller base, Mobile mar-keting spend increased close to 111% in 2012 to command 9% of the spend

Internet advertising spend outpaced all other advertising mats except for Broadcast Television

for-Reading the definition of Display Banner ad format and sorship ad format, one would guess that Facebook ads were counted in this category

Spon-Search marketing naturally includes paid search ads, tual targeting text ads, paid inclusion and search engine optimi-zation

contex-One thing stood out was that if a much more matured market like the US saw a revenue increase of more than 15%, one would expect markets like Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia or Vietnam to increase at a much faster pace to be worthy of in-vestment

Section 1

$36.6B was the Digital

marketing spend in the

US in 2012

Below is the advertising format share of revenue over time

As you can see, Search Engine Marketing remains stable over

time The same with Display Banner Mobile is on a rapid rise,

while Digital Video is increasing but at a much slower pace

Rich Media percentage is dropping rather rapidly together with

Classified

If you want to read the full report, please refer to

http://www.iab.net/insights_research/industry_data_and_landsc

ape/adrevenuereport

Why is it important to understand this?

Well, the US is many years ahead of Vietnam so one thing is by looking at this, we could make an educated guess of how things will pan out in this region Of course you have to consider the different in internet usage behavior amongst other things

There are over 500 million Chinese internet users (according to

CNNIC) double that of the US However, the penetration rate is

quite low, at 38.3%, suggested that there is huge room for

growth

Source: CNNIC China

As for mobile internet users, the number is getting huge as well

Source: CNNIC

Doing Search Marketing in China is of course different from other markets since Google/Yahoo are not the dominant search engines there but Baidu Baidu Search Engine Result Page is significantly different compared to Google

Popular Internet services in China are mostly dominated by cal players, not International players like what is happening in many other countries We have Baidu for Search, Sina Weibo for Social, Tmall instead of Amazon etc

lo-According to article from Adage, GroupM China estimated an increase of 40%+ for Online spend in China in 2012 This seems to be consistent with other reports from iResearch De-tailed reports on the break down of ad spend for each ad format are currently not available to China This is not surprising since

Section 2

China landscape

dominated by locals

data transparency in China lags far behind that of the US, UK

or other mature markets

The main reason I include something about China in this ebook

so that if you are tasked with developing a Digital marketing

strategy in China, please be aware that it is very different from

the West, from Singapore or Vietnam If nothing else, the size

of the market alone makes it a completely different game

From technology and digital marketing standpoint, I would think

that China model would be more suitable to Vietnam as

com-pared to Western models

According to report by IAB Singapore, the online spend in

Sin-gapore surpassed US $100m mark for the first time for the year

end 2011 I couldn’t find the public report for 2012 so we have

to make do with 2011 data

Online spend was at about 8% of the total advertising market,

which makes advertising market around $1.25B

While the percentage of online spend vs total advertising

mar-ket for Singapore is higher than that of Hong Kong, the number

is considerably lower compared to US (18%), UK (33%),

Austra-lia (19%), Japan (21%) This suggests that there is again a

huge room for growth

The annual growth rate for Online spend in Singapore during

the past 2 years stayed at around 20%+, which was only on par

with the growth rate of the US and UK This is, in my opinion, a

disappointing growth rate because Singapore started from a

very small base

From Campaign Asia and PwC, digital marketing is expected to grow between 8% - 13% per year from 2012 to 2017

Search Marketing contributed about 35% of the total online spend while display commanded about 50% The rest went to Classified and Directories

From an agency perspective, Singapore is the HQ for many ternational agencies Many regional companies plan their re-gional budget out of Singapore as well while letting individual country level to decide how they would want to do with these budget Of course how much control the local team has over their marketing budget would vary widely from one company to the next

in-In my humble opinion, Singapore is a highly competitive place with more agencies than clients to serve Also the local market is small so local spend is limited as compared to other markets in the region

market-Section 3

Singapore: $100M Online

Spend in 2011

A slow drive thus far but the pace is

picking up

It has been a long and slow drive for Digital marketing in

Viet-nam The growth rate was nothing like what marketers hoped

for

The total market size in 2011 according to VAA (Vietnam

Adver-tising Association) and TNS was between US $725m - US $1b

It would be safe to say that the overall market size is around

$1b (+-15%)

2012 was a very difficult year for the Vietnamese economy as a

whole and advertising industry was severely affected as well

2013 so far seems to be a good year for Digital marketing since

marketing budget is being shifted from traditional channels to

$30k - $150k for digital channel alone for a 2-4 month paign depending on the scale and the marketing objectives

cam-Finance industry has not been as active as FMCG when it comes to digital marketing However, some international banks started to heavily invest in digital marketing

As for ad formats, since the dawn of the internet in Vietnam, play Banner has always had the majority share of the ad spend While email marketing is one of the most effective channels when done correctly, the use or rather misuse of it in Vietnam has given email marketing a bad name The same situation hap-pened with SMS marketing, too much spam has given SMS marketing a very bad reputation

Dis-Search Engine Marketing only started to be used more often in the past 2-3 years with some success, more popular amongst SMEs as compared to MNCs or big local brands

Section 4

Digital marketing in

Vietnam

In 2011, it was social media which became talk of the town For

2012 it was Mobile marketing 2013 is the year of social media,

mobile marketing, content marketing again

While there are plenty of myths and misconceptions in the

mar-ket place, there is no authoritative industry body that could

pro-vide good enough case studies, proper best practices to guide

social media or mobile marketing IAB Vietnam was born but

died shortly after that Technically we have Vietnamese

Advertis-ing Association (VAA) and Ho Chi Minh Advertising Association

(HAA), however, the information available online is very limited

from these associations I did not come across any reliable

re-search browsing through the two sites The sites’ content are

poorly maintained as well

To explain the low spend for Digital marketing, TNS regional

MD for Vietnam & Malaysia Ralf Matthaes wrote in one report

“Vietnam has literally grown up in the Age of the shifting media

landscape.These early adopters are not relying on TV

necessar-ily for their product information, but rather going online and

cre-ating blogs to become Brand friends and champions.

Unfortunately due to the conservative nature of both

interna-tional and local companies, many opportunities are being

missed and agencies are having major difficulties convincing

their client base that new media mediums play an integral,

al-beit none integrated role in mass communication.

Hopefully by 2021, when today’s young users are running these companies, advertisers will finally follow consumer sentiment.”

3 Vietnam has the largest

online population in Southeast Asia, with time spent online exceeds 2 hours daily in big cities Potential in

Vietnam

1 Online penetration rate is at 33%

2 Time spend online is around 2 hours daily

3 Research online

4 Smartphone proliferation

5 E-commerce is growing strong

Online penetration rate of 33%

It is of no secret that the current online penetration rate in nam is around 33%, with more than 31 million internet users out

Viet-of about 90 millions people (data from the Ministry Viet-of tion and Communication)

Informa-Online penetration in big city like Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh is more than 50%

From volume point of view, we have more internet users in nam than any other countries in Southeast Asia except Indone-sia Our internet population is bigger than population of Austra-lia and New Zealand combined

Viet-Another report from comScore “2013 South East Asia Digital ture in Focus” showed that Vietnam had more internet users than any other countries in Southeast Asia (age 15+, at home and at work only)

Fu-In Vietnam, we still have a large population of users using net cafe

inter-Time Spend Online exceed 2 hours daily

According to research done by Cimigo, on average internet ers in Vietnam spend about 2 hours online everyday That is a

us-Section 1

31M Internet users

in Vietnam

huge number From media channel perspective, time spent

on-line right now is second only to TV Time spent onon-line outweighs

Print, Magazine or other channels

Research online, buy offline/online

In big cities like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh, it is very typical for

con-sumers to research online before making their decision online

For example, before sending kids to day care school, moms

ask friends and relatives for recommendation of course, but

they also visit webtretho and search online to see what other

parents are saying about a particular school

Smartphone proliferation

From Thanh Nien newspaper, “Simon Kemp, managing director

of the We Are Social office in Singapore, as of August (2012), smartphone penetration in the country was 16 percent.”

Another study done by “Ericsson ConsumerLab” showed that the smartphone penetration rate in Vietnam was expected to jump from 16% in Aug 2012 to 21% in early 2013

Reports from Accenture showed that “Smartphone sales are pected to grow in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand at com-pound annual growth rates of 37 percent, 31 percent, and 27 percent, respectively, from 2011 through 2016.”

ex-As this trend continues, the total time spent online across ple screens by consumers in Vietnam is going to increase rap-idly More time spent online means less time spent for other channels like TV, newspaper, radio, out of home etc

multi-E-Commerce started to pick up pace again

E commerce is vital to the development of digital marketing You may ask why? It is because marketers need to quantify the Return on Investment of their marketing spend per activity

Right now, while the overall picture is quite complex with ent attribution model like Across different online channels, From

differ-Online to Store (offline), Across multiple screens (computer,

smartphone, tablet); it is my personal guess that once we

Ecom-merce is growing quickly in Vietnam, the digital spend will

sky-rocket

From VECITA, TechinAsia and Thanh Nien Newspaper “The

lat-est report from VECITA, the Vietnam E-Commerce and

Informa-tion Technology Agency, states that Vietnam’s e-commerce

sales hit $700 million ($354 million of that registered officially on

VECITA) at the end of 2012 By the same report, VECITA

pre-dicts that this number will reach $1.3 billion by 2015.”

This is already huge and fast growing

Digital marketing spend potential

From comScore 2013 South East Asia Digital Future in focus

“According to ZenithOptimedia's Advertising Expenditure

Fore-casts, APAC is already the largest advertising market outside

North America Internet ad expenditure is set to overtake that of

newspapers by the end of 2014 By 2015, online advertising will

account for 21.9% of all adspend”

4 This section covers the

agency landscape in Vietnam

Agency world in

Vietnam

Digital agency world in Vietnam

I  would like to list down as many as I could different Digital agencies operating in Vietnam The barrier to entry for Digital Marketing agency is low so there are literally hundred of agencies in Vietnam, from one man shop to 100-200 hundreds of employee

Note: My comments (if any) about these agencies are strictly coming from my limited understandings and may not be the true tion Overtime, these observations may be wrong since many things could change

reflec-Please note that the below categorization is far from correct because majority of the agencies claim that they are doing everything and they are all full service agencies Also agency could change from time to time as well The purpose of me putting a list together so that you could have a broader view of the agency world in Vietnam

WPP with 23 offices in HCM, 6 in HN

WPP group has a strong presence in Vietnam, if not the

strong-est presence among international agency groups in Vietnam

With 23 offices under the group in Ho Chi Minh alone, WPP

group does cover a lot of ground However, they don’t own

100% of these agencies I guess Many of the agencies below

are not Digital agencies but since it belongs to WPP, I just put

them here for reference

The below are from WPP’s own website:

• Ogilvy & Mather

• Ogilvy Public Relations

• Ogilvy & Mather

• Ogilvy Public Relations

• Smart Media

• TNS

From Digital capabilities point of view, in my 2 cent, only

Ogilvy-One (essentially Who Digital team) and GroupM have some

digi-tal capabilities in-house While GroupM mostly do media

plan-ning and buying, limited Search Engine Marketing work,

Ogilvy-One mostly do strategy & production work & Social Media

From my limited knowledge, Y&R and Wunderman handle

Coca cola and Nokia accounts However these clients normally

just adapt regional campaigns to Vietnam Nokia is going

down-hill fast so we haven’t seen much buzz from their online

initia-tives this year 2013

Update from Mina Menon: “Y&R and Wunderman operate der one YR Group umbrella in Vietnam and have offices in Ha-noi as well Together, we have all the digital capabilities of a full-fledged Wunderman office, and the integrated marketing ones

un-of a Y&R un-office Apart from Nokia, our clients include Emirates, Colgate-Palmolive, Ovaltine, Nutifood and Ford Of these,

Nokia, CP and Ford are global alignments, the rest are local lationships creating campaigns locally Coca-Cola has a roster

re-of agencies in Vietnam that they work with depending on the project and Wunderman is one of them”

Until 2013, Omnicom didn’t have a strong presence in Vietnam

I guess However it seems that starting this year, 2013, Vietnam has received more focus from Omnicom Media and the digital team is having more specialists compared to previous years

• Starcom MediaVest Vietnam

• Publicis Vietnam

• Saatchi & Saatchi Vietnam

• Leo Burnett Worldwide

• Vivaki Vietnam

• Performics This would be the main Digital arm for Publicis

Group in Vietnam

From what I heard while Performics doesn’t have a big team,

they handle some of the bigger digital account in Vietnam and

their capability in Search Engine Marketing is quite good They

are one of the few agencies in Vietnam using Marine I guess

They outsourced Social media, production and other work to

other agencies

Interpublic

• Draftfcb

• Initiative: media services, communication planning

• Lowe + Partners: Advertising, CRM/Direct Lowe outsourced

the majority of their digital work out, they play the role of the

brand agency and project management only

• UM - Curiosity works: media services, communication ning

or Vivaki

Aegis probably has two affiliates in Vietnam, one is VMC, which

is Carat’s partner and another one is Emerald Marketing, which

is Isobar’s partner It’s unclear, however, that there is any

invest-ment from Aegis into these two companies or their relationship

is at independent partner level

Dentsu

Dentsu has Dentsu Alpha, Dentsu Media and Dentsu Vietnam

However, they still outsource majority of the digital work out like

Social media marketing, production, search engine marketing

etc And mostly do media planning in-house

Dentsu completed their acquisition of Ageis globally not too

long ago so it’s unclear what would be Dentsu’s strategy for

Digital marketing in Vietnam

Other Japanese/Korean agencies

There are Hakuhodo, Chuo Senko or Asatsu DK, Daiko

Viet-nam However I don’t think they do a lot of digital work in-house

also

CyberAgents, Mediba and a few other companies set up their

rep offices and invested in a few local agencies

• Mekong communication: through their official partnership with

Cheil Wordwide, I guess you could consider them strongly

re-lated Mekong has partnership with other companies like

Em-erald and DNA as well but I haven’t heard any official

an-nouncement, just rumor from the street

Search Engine Marketing agencies

These are Google Small and Medium Business (SMB) partners:

For Google certified partners, you could find them using Google

Partner Search

There are so many Google Certified Partners in Vietnam now

so I won’t list down any names here

It is important to note that Google welcomes any agencies who

want to be Google certified partners as long as they have at

least one employee who is a current Google Qualified Individual

and the media spend for 3 consecutive months with Google is

more than US $10k

If you want to find out who is Google qualified individuals in

Vietna, please use this link You could search for qualified

indi-vidual from each country and based on different certifications

(search advertising, Display advertising, reporting and analysis,

Google Analytics qualified individual etc…)

Search Engine Optimization Agency

I am reluctant to put together this list because from my limited

experience I don’t think our capability in this area is strong in

Social media / PR agencies

• Click Media: it is known for a while now that Click Media and Sofresh are well under way to be acquired by GroupM It makes sense because Unilever represents a big part of GroupM/Mindshare media business in Vietnam and Click Me-dia and Sofresh are doing Social media + Production work for Unilever as well

• King Bee Media

Sof-It would be interesting, however, to see over time whether the

relationship and status of the core Sofresh team would be like

Who Digital and OgilvyOne There are not that many people

from the core Who Digital team at OgilvyOne after 2 years from

• Left Brain Connector

• Red Brand Builder

• Notch: many people from Notch left and set up a couple of

agencies (DNA, Echo etc…) Notch recently joined with

River-Orchid group to form a new entity as well

• Golden Digital: from what I heard, Tony Truong, which was

one of the founding members of Golden Digital left the

com-pany not too long ago

• Quo Global

• Climaxi

• IO Media: the majority of the previous core team left to join

other agencies

• Cheil Vietnam: through their partnership with Mekong

Com-munication I guess these two companies are strongly linked

Generalist are common

“Jack of all trades, master of none.” This is the common

prob-lem with the majority of Digital agencies in Vietnam

Everyone is saying they are offering full digital services from

strategy, creative to execution, from Search engine marketing

to Email marketing to Social Media etc… However, the plain

cold truth is that we do not have enough specialists in Vietnam

for so many firms to offer everything in-house

Besides, It does not make business sense to have every thing

in-house as well because the overall budget is often quite

small

This generalist approach from the agency is partly because big

clients often want to work with a few contacts and ideally only

one or two firms

Agency could differentiate itself by becoming a specialist in a particular service,   going after certain verticals, only working with other agencies as a sub contracts and many other ways

It is important to take note of the client segment (SME, MNC, local clients) that an agency serves i.e how many percentage

of its clients are small and medium businesses and how many percentage are MNCs/big local brands

Agencies who serve SMEs (small and medium enterprises) or SMBs (small and medium businesses) are not sufficiently equipped to work with MNCs or big local brands The business development or the Director of the agency may paint very ap-pealing pictures However they are not the one who carry out the execution SME world and MNC world are miles apart

The nature of SME agencies is that under normal stances they only employ relatively junior employees because SMEs’ objectives, budget, decision-making, working culture are not that complex SMEs do not often work with complex market-ing plan that involves multiple channels (offline and online) or having their own creative agency, PR agency etc…

circum-English fluency is another major concern facing “specialists” from SME agencies and even bigger agencies Next would be communication skill and I am talking about the basic communi-

Section 4

Jack of all trades,

Master of none

cation skill so that both parties would be able to understand

each other in English/Vietnamese

Another point worth mentioning is the difference between

work-ing with government-owned firms, private firms and foreign

firms in Vietnam While relationship plays an important role

eve-rywhere in Vietnam, with government-owned firms, that is even

more prominent The sales cycle for government-owned firms is

hence very long, anywhere from 3-12 months

Working culture in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh is very different from

each other as well Generally sales cycle in Ha Noi is longer

compared to Ho Chi Minh (2-3 times longer on average) The

majority of MNCs are in Ho Chi Minh so they set the working

scene in Ho Chi Minh as compared to government-owned firms

setting the scene in Hanoi

5 There are many choices

from working for agencies, direct clients, technology vendors, publishers, or even your own company! Digital Marketing

Career

There are a couple of options for you

Agency Side

From the previous chapter, you would know many types of

agencies and a few names in each category already

In general, you could go deep and narrow, becoming a

special-ist like Search Engine Marketing Specialspecial-ist, Media Planner,

So-cial Media Expert or go wide and shallow, following the account

management path, or business development

In many agencies, the account manager or project manager,

would be the interface between the client and the operation

team inside the agency Beside project management skill and

client service skill, I think it would be better if the account

man-ager understands digital marketing and different channels

within digital They would do a much better job that way

In any cases, for most agencies, you would start from entry

level to senior executive, to manager, senior manager, director,

vice president etc

Below is an example of a job description (JD) from agency side

Head of Paid Media

The Head of Paid Media is responsible for managing all the day

to day Paid Digital media planning and buying for the agency

This includes Premium Portal Buy, Ad Networks, Google &

Ya-hoo Paid Search, Google Display Network, Facebook Ads, and Mobile Ads (as well as all other paid media channels that

emerge over time)  

The Head of Paid Media manages, mentors and motivated the junior paid media staff and leads by setting a strong example

en-• Manage all financial closure of media planning and buying tivities with the finance department directly and with the me-dia partners

ac-• Develop clear, concise digital media reports for all active paigns

cam-• Provide campaign optimization, recommendations based on

a strong analytical foundation with data from different ics tools

analyt-• Develop and constantly update best practices in the areas of

digital ad serving and performance monitoring

• Provide management and training to the junior staff

From Salary range point of view, there is no benchmark You

could try to look at the salary survey published by TalentNet or

any other head hunting firms However Digital Marketing is a

niche field and I haven’t come across a good salary survey for

digital yet

From my own experience, there are some guidelines below:

• Generally the pay in Ho Chi Minh would be 1.2 - 1.5 times the

same level in Hanoi

• Entry level (executive): $250-$400

• Senior executive (minimum 2-4 years of experience): $350 -

$800

• Manager level: $900 - $1500

• Senior manager level: $1500 - $3000

• Director: $3000 - $5000

Client Side & Publishers & Technology Provider

The truth is I have never worked in the client side or publisher

or technology provider so the below is rather limited

The main point here is that there are demand for digital ists across segments

special-Working on the client side (from what I was told) is significantly different in comparison to the agency side For one thing you will only work with one client, your own company You will be asked to come up with the request for proposal, media brief to brief the agency, or come up with marketing plan for the whole year etc Sales target is something you will be pressured with for any campaigns that you want to run internally or with exter-nal agencies

If you work for publishers or technology vendors, you could play the role of either business development or account manager or operation (account optimization like Google, Yahoo) If you are from business development/ account manager side, your job would be to develop the relationship, understand the needs of agencies, direct clients and propose a suitable plans/ technolo-gies to them However, since your option is limited to the prod-ucts that your company sells, the plan that you come up with won’t vary much Of course, there are outliners like Zing or Goo-gle where Zing starts to become a full service agency and Goo-gle offerings span across Search, Display and Video

From salary point of view, it really depends on the type of ganization that you join

or-6 On the job training is one

of the best way to learn Digital marketing because

of the lack of professionals and too many myths or

misunderstandings in the marketplace

How to learn Digital Marketing

Marketing before Digital

In my opinion, many people get it the other way around It’s not

about the digital tactics, the tools or any fancy, over-hyped new

medium, first it is about a Solid Marketing Strategy that either

brings in sales or increase brand awareness No amount of

hard work, of new tools, new channels would save a campaign

from the wrong strategy and poor market understanding

It just so happens that there are many internet users and the

amount of time they spend online is significant so marketers

could reach/engage them potentially more efficiently

There are so many books on marketing so I am not going into

too many details here

Consumer Insights are key

Always start with consumer insights and never forget them

along the way during brain storming or brain writing, strategy

planning, KPI setting, media planning and buying, execution,

op-timization and reporting Do field work, try the product out, go to

the store, experience it If you never bought milk powder for a 6

month old baby, go and ask people who do

We need to understand who our “consumer” is:

• How old they are?

• Are they male/female?

• Where do they live?

• What kind of education do they have?

• How much expendable income could they afford?

• Are they married? Do they have kids?

Watch out for any biases you may have or trying to target a too generic audience For example, more often than not, you do NOT want to target all countries in the world for your Paid Search Program Similarly, it is unlikely that you want to target all areas (rural and urban areas, mountainous area and big cit-ies) in Vietnam for your campaign

As for insights, there are many insights about the target

audi-ence that you want to know

• How do they often buy your product? Where can they buy it?

• What factors influence their behavior? What are the barriers you face in persuading them to try your product/ to think differ-ently about your products/ to even stop for a sec and see/ read what you have to offer?

• Could Digital channel influence the behavior somehow?

• How do your customers often know about new brands, new products in your industry?

• How do they want to communicate with brands?

We have a whole section on Digital Analytics, which covers

tools that could help you get some insights about your target

audience or your competitor, market place

Where to learn?

There are a couple of options for you If you are still in the

uni-versity, you could check to see if your school offers any courses

in Digital marketing

Universities in Vietnam, especially International Universities

(RMIT for example) start to cover digital marketing materials in

their generic marketing course Some major local universities

start to offer courses in digital marketing as well I have never

audited any of these courses so I would not be able to

com-ment on them I would imagine it is not easy to find GOOD

lec-turers with real life experience who could teach digital

market-ing courses though

If your university doesn’t offer digital marketing course or you

are fresh graduate or you are working, you could sign up for

night classes at different schools like:

I will not be able to recommend any school publicly because it

is subjective My advice to you if you want to go down this road

is to audit their classes at least 1 or 2 sessions before ting your money It is of my personal belief that no matter which school you choose, it is all up to you to get the most out of it and self learning is far more important

commit-Of course, if your purpose is just to get a paper saying that you participated in a digital marketing course then just go ahead and choose any school

Self Learning & On the Job Training

Since we do not have many professionals working in the try, the chance that you find good lecturers with real life experi-ence is quite smaller I think Coupling with the fact that not many professionals who are good at what they do, could teach well or want to teach, I think Self Learning and On the Job train-ing is the best option at this point in time

indus-Because of this reason, I try to include as many reference links

in this ebook as possible so that you could learn more if you