Why search engine marketing in Thailand in underused.

Abstract

This research aims to explore the reason why search engine marketing in Thailand is underused when comparing to developed countries, such as United States and Japan. Qualitative research method is being used in this study. A prepared set of questions are being shared to the 25 respondents from Thailand’s top five agencies before the scheduled interview sessions. All interviews were taken place in private meeting rooms to allow interviewees to express their ideas freely and were being recorded from start to finish with respondents’ consent. The period of interviews is between April to May 2018. The collected interview data is being interpreted, analyzed and summarized. The study reveals that agencies actually have the knowledge on how to use search engine marketing and understand how it helps answer clients’ objectives. However, search engine marketing is still underused because clients from the brand side mostly do not have sufficient knowledge on how search engine marketing can be the target medium given the objectives of their campaigns. Majority of brands in Thailand, especially from fast moving consumer goods industry, still rely on offline medias to market their brands and products. Since high investment costs were being allocated to video ads productions, they usually spend more budget on television and Youtube to make use of the assets as much as they can. Facebook ads were usually more preferred than search engine marketing because clients want to see how many likes, follows, shares and consumers’ feedbacks in the comment section. Another reason that search engine marketing is underused is because most big corporations usually have already established websites which do not have taggings at different websites’ touch points since the time when these websites were first developed, search engine marketing is not widely practiced yet. To do search engine marketing for their websites, tagging is necessary to track the performance. And revamping the websites to put tagging to different touch points within the websites requires highly skilled web developers, time consuming and very costly. Because of these restrictions, most brand owners usually give up and decide to dismiss search engine marketing. Given the survey results discussed, training on search engine marketing should not only focus to the agencies, but also to clients from the brand side because they are the ones who make budget allocation decision and they need to know how search engine marketing can help them achieve their objectives. Moreover, on hand experience should be given so that clients see the actual performance analysis and understand how budget should be allocated.