Vietnam Digital Marketing Fundamentals Vol 1

Table of Content
Introduction
Who am I?
Who this book is for?
How this book is structured?

Digital Marketing Overview
$36.6B was the Digital marketing spend in US 2012
China landscape dominated by locals
Singapore: $100M Online Spend in 2011
Digital marketing in Vietnam

Potential in Vietnam
31M internet users in Vietnam

Agency world in Vietnam

1
2
3
4

5
6
8
10
11

13
14

17

Big Agency Group in Vietnam
Other Agency Groups
Local agencies, ad networks and others
Jack of all trades

19
21
24
28

Digital Marketing Career

30

How to learn Digital Marketing

33

The Big Picture

38

Owned, Paid and Earned Media

PC Assets
Getting the basics right

39

42
43


Development plan
User experience
Reference

46
55
65

Mobile Assets

66

Post PC era is here
Mobile options for Brands
Reference

67
69
76

Social Media Assets

77

What is Social Media?
Facebook domination in Vietnam
Channel Recommendation
Guiding principles
Facebook fanpage
Measuring success
Reference

78
79
81
83
90
99
106

Digital Analytics
What is Digital Analytics
Definition
Different Analytics Tools
Free Offsite Tools
Paid Offsite Tools
Listening Tools
Effective Analytics Strategy
Google Analytics Overview
Reference

Display Advertising
What is Display Advertising?
How to plan a Display Campaign

Google Display Network
Facebook Ads

107
108
109
111
114
118
123
128
135
137

138
139
140
148
151


Real Time Bidding
Tracking different media campaigns
Reporting and Optimization
Reference

Search Marketing
Demand Capture Channel
When to use it?
How Paid Search works?

How SEO works?
SEO Cheat Sheet
Working process for PPC and SEO
Performance Evaluation
Common Myths
How much does it cost?
Reference

Digital Strategy
Brief
Research
Ideation
Evaluation
Campaign Development

Conclusion

156
158
161
164

165
166
173
181
187
195
200
201

204
207
210

212
214
216
218
223
225

227


First Edition

Intentionally Left Blank


Introduction

1


Section 1

Who am I?

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 opportunities to work with the global / regional brands on Performance Media marketing. After a few years, I came back to Vietnam 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 regional 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 clients are from “dark market” industries like Tobacco (JTI), Diageo.
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

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Section 2

Who this book is
for?

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.

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
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Section 3

How this book is
structured?

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

Overview

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

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

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

Part 2
This is it. At this part, we deep dive into Digital Analytics,
Owned Media (including desktop assets, mobile assets and social assets), Paid Media (Display and Search).
At the end there is a chapter on general principles to build a
good digital strategy.

Part 1
For the first 4 chapters, we are going to review the digital marketing landscape in the US, China, Singapore and Vietnam. It is
important to understand where we are and where Digital marketing stands in the marketing mix in Vietnam.
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Digital marketing
overview

2

A quick overview of the
digital spend across more
mature markets like US,
China, Singapore and of
course Vietnam.


Section 1

$36.6B was the Digital
marketing spend in the
US in 2012
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 Media, Video Ads, Sponsorship) are still the most popular ad formats, which contributed
nearly 78% of the spend
in 2012.
Coming from a much
smaller base, Mobile marketing spend increased
close to 111% in 2012 to
command 9% of the
spend.

Internet advertising spend outpaced all other advertising formats except for Broadcast Television.
Reading the definition of Display Banner ad format and Sponsorship ad format, one would guess that Facebook ads were
counted in this category.
Search marketing naturally includes paid search ads, contextual targeting text ads, paid inclusion and search engine optimization.
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 investment.
6


Below is the advertising format share of revenue over time.

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.

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
/>ape/adrevenuereport
Why is it important to understand this?
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Section 2

China landscape
dominated by locals

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
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 local 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...

Source: CNNIC China
As for mobile internet users, the number is getting huge as well.

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. Detailed reports on the break down of ad spend for each ad format
are currently not available to China. This is not surprising since
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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 compared to Western models.

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Section 3

Singapore: $100M Online
Spend in 2011

According to report by IAB Singapore, the online spend in Singapore 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 market for Singapore is higher than that of Hong Kong, the number
is considerably lower compared to US (18%), UK (33%), Australia (19%), Japan (21%). This suggests that there is again a
huge room for growth.

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 international agencies. Many regional companies plan their regional 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 my humble opinion, Singapore is a highly competitive marketplace 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.

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.

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Section 4

Digital marketing in
Vietnam
A slow drive thus far but the pace is
picking up
It has been a long and slow drive for Digital marketing in Vietnam. The growth rate was nothing like what marketers hoped
for.

Digital marketing spend is between 510%
Overall the consensus amongst digital marketers in Vietnam is
that the percentage of online spend is between 5%-10% of the

total advertising budget. FMCG is the industry that spends the
most online. Leading FMCG brands would spend on average
$30k - $150k for digital channel alone for a 2-4 month campaign depending on the scale and the marketing objectives.
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.

2012 was a very difficult year for the Vietnamese economy as a
whole and advertising industry was severely affected as well.

As for ad formats, since the dawn of the internet in Vietnam, Display 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 happened with SMS marketing, too much spam has given SMS
marketing a very bad reputation.

2013 so far seems to be a good year for Digital marketing since
marketing budget is being shifted from traditional channels to
Digital.

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.

The total market size in 2011 according to VAA (Vietnam Advertising Association) and TNS was between US $725m - US $1b.
It would be safe to say that the overall market size is around
$1b (+-15%).

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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.

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

While there are plenty of myths and misconceptions in the market place, there is no authoritative industry body that could provide 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 Advertising 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 research 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 necessarily for their product information, but rather going online and creating blogs to become Brand friends and champions.
Unfortunately due to the conservative nature of both international 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, albeit none integrated role in mass communication.
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Potential in
Vietnam

3

Vietnam has the largest

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


Section 1

31M Internet users
in Vietnam

Online penetration rate of 33%
It is of no secret that the current online penetration rate in Vietnam is around 33%, with more than 31 million internet users out
of about 90 millions people (data from the Ministry of Information and Communication).
Online penetration in big city like Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh is more
than 50%.

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

From volume point of view, we have more internet users in Vietnam than any other countries in Southeast Asia except Indonesia. Our internet population is bigger than population of Australia and New Zealand combined.
Another report from comScore “2013 South East Asia Digital Future in Focus” showed that Vietnam had more internet users
than any other countries in Southeast Asia (age 15+, at home
and at work only).
In Vietnam, we still have a large population of users using internet cafe.

Time Spend Online exceed 2 hours

daily
According to research done by Cimigo, on average internet users in Vietnam spend about 2 hours online everyday. That is a
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huge number. From media channel perspective, time spent online right now is second only to TV. Time spent online 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 consumers 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 expected to grow in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand at compound annual growth rates of 37 percent, 31 percent, and 27
percent, respectively, from 2011 through 2016.”
As this trend continues, the total time spent online across multiple screens by consumers in Vietnam is going to increase rapidly. More time spent online means less time spent for other
channels like TV, newspaper, radio, out of home etc...

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 different attribution model like Across different online channels, From
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Online to Store (offline), Across multiple screens (computer,
smartphone, tablet); it is my personal guess that once we Ecommerce is growing quickly in Vietnam, the digital spend will skyrocket.
From VECITA, TechinAsia and Thanh Nien Newspaper “The latest report from VECITA, the Vietnam E-Commerce and Information 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 predicts 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 Forecasts, 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”

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Agency world in
Vietnam

4

This section covers the
agency landscape 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 reflection. Overtime, these observations may be wrong since many things could change.
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.

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Section 1

Big Agency Group
in Vietnam

• JWT
• Kantar Media
• Kantar Worldpanel
• Maxus

WPP with 23 offices in HCM, 6 in HN
WPP group has a strong presence in Vietnam, if not the strongest 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.

• MEC
• MediaCom
• Millward Brown Vietnam
• Mindshare
• Ogilvy & Mather
• Ogilvy Public Relations

The below are from WPP’s own website:

• OgilvyAction

• Asatsu - DK

• OgilvyOne Worldwide

• Bates

• TNS

• G2

• TNS Media

• Grey

• Who Digital

• GroupM

• Wunderman
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• Xaxis
• Y&R
6 offices in Hanoi:
• JWT-G
• Landor Associates
• Ogilvy & Mather
• Ogilvy Public Relations

Update from Mina Menon: “Y&R and Wunderman operate under one YR Group umbrella in Vietnam and have offices in Hanoi as well. Together, we have all the digital capabilities of a fullfledged Wunderman office, and the integrated marketing ones
of a Y&R 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 relationships creating campaigns locally. Coca-Cola has a roster
of agencies in Vietnam that they work with depending on the
project and Wunderman is one of them”

• Smart Media
• TNS
From Digital capabilities point of view, in my 2 cent, only OgilvyOne (essentially Who Digital team) and GroupM have some digital capabilities in-house. While GroupM mostly do media planning and buying, limited Search Engine Marketing work, OgilvyOne 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 downhill fast so we haven’t seen much buzz from their online initiatives this year 2013.

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