Is Myanmar ready for Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing, Social media marketing, Internet marketing are the new marketing buzz words of the developed countries around the world. Now, Myanmar is catching up (slowly & steadily) in this online arena after visit from Google’s Eric Schmidt and Facebook making its advertising service available in Myanmar. But are we ready for this upcoming industry with the high exponential growth?
Out of 55 million populations in Myanmar, the “Guesstimation” of population with internet access is less than 4%. However, starting from 2012, there have been major changes in Myanmar telecommunication and there was strong surge in mobile phone subscription which usually come with internet service. Even though it is as slow as turtle (the infamous Burmese metaphor for internet speed), more people are accessing internet in Myanmar.
Digital Culture
For a country that survived on 52 kbps dial-up connection (for those who don’t know what 52 kbps dial-up connection is – it is the internet connection that make dubstep like noise when you connect and very very slow), the general population is not digitally sophisticated. Using search engines to search information is uncommon. Instead people use Facebook, the most popular webpage in Myanmar, to search information through Facebook Graph Search.
From an exploratory qualitative research done by MMRD in 2013, it is gathered that male tend to use internet more than female. This trend is more obvious in older generations. Reading news, catching up with friends and families are the activities they do on internet. Independent news & informative pages are the most popular pages among young & old, despite most of the alleged news page on Facebook are not actually credible and factual based. This may driven by the tight restrictions put by Government media censorship which is only loosened a year ago. With those restrictions, digital media played a crucial role in country’s reformation in recent years when journalists bypass censorship using social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Digital Arenas
As said above, Facebook is the most popular page and roughly 22% of the the population with internet access use Facebook in Myanmar, that is roughly 1 million users. Local blogs such as Thit Htoo Lwin have high visitations and regarded as reliable sources. Twitter and LinkedIn, however, is still at its budding stage and only used by foreigners in Myanmar and professional locals. Other social media platforms; Pinterest and Google+ are largely unrecognized by Myanmar netizens.
Digital Demographic
Alike any other country in the world, the demographic segment with highest usage rate is young adults, 20-30 years old. This segment represent over 50% of Facebook users and highly active in sharing, commenting and posting. Older demographics, middle aged (31-59) less active on Facebook, they read news and updated posts from relatives & friends. In this older segment, the online demographics skewed towards male population as aforementioned.
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Digital Marketing
As only 1% of population has access to internet, it is no brainer that digital marketing is not the best way to reach mass population. On the other hand, the upper socioeconomic class with higher spending power is readily accessible through internet and some companies already deployed their digital marketing activities. However, the digital marketing in Myanmar is not at satisfactory stage yet. This is due to both lack of general technical knowledge and software infrastructure. Most of the websites do not track their analytics data. Google Adwords is not yet available in the country. Digital marketing is not understood by majority of the businesses and decision makers yet.
On the other hand, Facebook advertising has surged in the past year and several companies and celebrities are started branding activities on sponsored stories and Facebook advertising. in 2013, it has shown that younger population are willing to click on those advertising if it is concern or related to their activities. Advertising on other webpages such as Thit Htoo Lwin blogs, or Myanmar Times are usually disregarded. Moreover, display advertisement on search engines and other Google services (such as Gmail) usually went unnoticed. This indicates that the only viable form of digital advertising is only through Facebook at this stage, which limits the marketing activities.
Digital Future
At this stage, we can see Myanmar population is going towards what digital marketers call “Content marketing”. Basically content marketing is creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target, in other words, product or service promotion disguised as news or entertainment content, this include photo posts on Facebook and blog posts.
What is going to happen from here? Obviously, the internet usage is going to rocket after introduction of 3G/4G by international telecommunication service providers. But on the other hand, the majority of the population (and also the businesses) need to be digitally educated before we can reach to the stage where we can see results from digital marketing. I, among other digital marketers, am waiting to see more quality webpages, mobile marketing activities and big data tracking.
( This article was written by Ko YanJamesAung in his personal blog. )
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