Budget constraints impede Hong Kong marketers

They think their digital proficiency is average.

New research released by Adobe with CMO Council shows that Hong Kong marketers’ confidence in the value of digital marketing continues to grow but budget limitations remain a major concern.

According to a release from Adobe, it announced key findings from the APAC Digital Directions report, a deep-dive into strategies, mandates and challenges and a companion piece to the CMO Council and Adobe’s ongoing Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard.

The report reveals findings based on data collected from 648 respondents in Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and India.

More than half of the companies surveyed were head-quartered in Asia Pacific (56%), and 57% of respondents worked in organisations with turnover of US$1.1 billion or greater. Respondents came from industry sectors including IT, retail, banking and travel and hospitality sectors among others.

Further, according to the report, Hong Kong marketers rate their own digital proficiency as average (39%), citing constrained budgets being the biggest obstacle to their ability to implement meaningful digital strategies to improve business performance.

This was slightly higher than the regional average (36%), where 22% and nearly 5% of APAC marketers rated their proficiency levels as good or very good respectively.

Here's more from Adobe:

Enabling continuous touch points and engagement opportunities with customers (66%); acquiring, converting and retaining customers more cost-effectively (49%); as well as providing knowledge and insight for better targeting and response (41%), are the top three most important ways that digital marketing programs have helped business according to respondents.

Hong Kong marketers believe that additional digital marketing improvements and maturity could impact their business by creating a more customer-centric and responsive organization (58%) and making them a more agile, opportunistic and innovative company (41%).

In terms of making a business case for digital marketing expenditures, Hong Kong marketers are more focused on reporting on previous campaign results and measuring the KPIs of key digital campaigns (76%, the highest result in APAC).

2015 Top Challenges - When it comes to constraints, budget limitations (60%), limited digital agency capability, knowledge or experience (51%), and the inability to find staff with the right skills and experience to execute the strategy (40%) are the three greatest challenges facing Hong Kong organizations in executing digital campaigns in APAC.

Working with marketing teams to determine mix and budgets (72%) is the main factor that decides budgets for digital marketing investments. 33% of Hong Kong marketers expect to spend less than 10% of their total marketing budget on digital marketing.

“The group that is most dramatically under-investing in digital by allocating less than 10% of its budgets, is a relatively small one. In fact, compared to the same time last year, 74% of respondents have increased their digital marketing budget allocation. This suggests Hong Kong marketers generally have confidence in digital marketing,” said Yew Hwee Ng, General Manager of Adobe Greater China.

2015 Top Digital Priorities - Strengthening digital marketing content strategy (70%), social media optimization, including boosting community growth, engagement and content (51%) and richer, deeper customer profiling and insights are top priorities specific to digital marketing in the next 12 months.