Southeast Asia hosts over 506 million social media users and is one of the regions with the highest social media penetration worldwide. As the internet economy in Southeast Asia is expected to reach USD330 billion in 2025 and with its rapidly increasing digital landscape and tech-savvy population, brands view Southeast Asia as an untapped market primed for influencer marketing opportunities.
This is where brands partner with individuals with a substantial online following who can sway the purchasing decisions of their audience, in order to promote their products and services. Influencer marketing has an estimated industry worth of USD2.59 billion by 2024.
Influencer Marketing as an alternative channel to reach new audience segments
Advertising, as we once knew it, is effectively ‘dead’. In the current high of digital advertising, consumers are becoming more privacy-conscious and increasingly skeptical of ads. Online ads are growing costlier and overly saturated, especially when targeting a wide audience. This challenge will only escalate with the inevitable cookie-less future when brands are unable to serve retargeting ads to their audience.
Today, consumers no longer impulsively click and buy – they seek trusted recommendations before deciding on a product or service. A recent consumer research study discovered that 64 percent of consumers repeatedly purchase based on an influencer’s recommendation or review. This shift signals the rise to new, more personal, and authentic forms of marketing. The old advertising adage of ‘show, don’t tell’ is pivoting to the warm approach of ‘share and engage’ through influential figures who have built credibility within their niches.
The critical advantage of partnering with influencers is in their ability to foster trust and engagement with their followers by sharing authentic and relatable content. This not only presents brands with the opportunity to deepen customer relationships and brand loyalty but also a new pathway to enter niche markets and connect with specific audience segments that might be unreachable through traditional marketing channels.
Tapping on the full potential of Influencer Marketing
To begin, it’s crucial to identify the right influencer for your brand. Your influencer needs to resonate with your brand’s values and target audience. As Southeast Asia is a diverse region with unique cultures and languages, your influencer marketing campaign also needs to be catered to specific countries or markets. A localisation strategy ensures that your brand resonates with Southeast Asian audiences on a personal level.
To maximise your reach, you’d need scale. Explore different social media platforms and all the influencers that are within each platform and evaluate what is a good mix depending on their niche and your business objective.
Instagram, Facebook and TikTok are widely popular, understand the preferences of your target audience and choose the platforms and the influencers that offer the greatest potential for engagement and brand exposure.
Influencer marketing is no longer limited to top-of-the-funnel channel for awareness and engagement. With the right strategy, you can simultaneously work with all kinds of influencers and play to each of their strengths. For example, with a full-funnel approach, you can create the ideal mix of influencers to reach your target audience at various funnel stages, and maintain a consistent brand message across different touchpoints. From building awareness with mega-influencers to driving conversions with nano-influencers, a full-funnel strategy ensures every opportunity is seized.
As important as having the right influencer, tracking the performance of your influencer campaigns is essential for making data-driven decisions. Utilise tracking tools and analytics platforms to measure reach, engagement, conversions, and sales. By monitoring the results, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your collaborations and refine your strategies for future campaigns.
In a diverse region such as Southeast Asia, each influencer has their own creative way of creating content and engaging with their audiences. A tailored communication and compensation approach is best for managing influencers of different tiers and multiple cultural backgrounds.
Drive success with a holistic solution
Influencer management skills are indispensable for marketers who want to gain the full advantage of influencer marketing. A full-funnel influencer management platform like impact.com / creator offers brands and influencers a powerful platform to discover, collaborate and scale your influencer marketing program.
Impact.com / creator provides you with end-to-end campaign management from contracting, content distribution, and hybrid commission payouts to custom campaign performance reports through a seamless workflow. With full transparency, gain access to best-fit influencers, and track and measure each influencer’s activity at every stage of the marketing funnel.
Leading retail brands like Sephora, ZALORA, Charles & Keith and Decathlon in Southeast Asia have already experienced the difference that impact.com’s powerful automation capabilities can make in growing a successful and dynamic influencer marketing programme.
In this new “creator-led” economy, flexibility, visibility, and customisability reign supreme. Influencer marketing in Southeast Asia holds immense potential, and with Impact.com/creator you can effectively build awareness, nurture relationships, drive conversions, optimise and scale your influencer marketing strategy with ease.