-1.svg){kind=small}
Ask any marketer out there today and they'll most likely agree with you - the pressure to deliver more, with less, while demonstrating ROI is at an all-time high.
The days of converting customers by merely meeting their expectations are over. In today’s reality, meeting expectations is table stakes. Businesses must devise new growth strategies, understand where their audience spend time to know how to diversify their marketing channels and, most of all if they want to make the case for increased investment in the future, measure and be able to report on the impact of their activity.
Embrace the digital revolution
Asian SMBs seeking growth need to prioritise digital marketing and allocate a larger portion of their marketing budget to digital marketing. Ad spending in Southeast Asia trends towards offline channels, and just one-third of expenditure was on digital channels in 2022.
Consumers in Asia are increasingly internet-savvy and hungry for digital experiences with the brands whose content they engage with and who they buy from. For companies looking to win mindshare, and business, the marketing investment should reflect this trend and be based on where target audiences are spending their time. As brands evolve their marketing investment and digital strategy, they have a powerful opportunity to become much more data-driven and to understand the effectiveness of their activity.
Optimise, optimise, optimise (and not just for paid ads!)
Brands need to continuously optimise digital marketing campaigns -- beyond just paid ads -- to drive increased effectiveness and ultimately demonstrate marketing's impact on business growth.
Understand the different tools you need and how you can unlock more opportunity: if your team is focused on using social media marketing, but want to understand the downstream impact of their activity, looking at attribution and evaluating if your tech stack is enabling effective measurement is a good place to start.
AI is Changing Digital Marketing for Businesses
It’s no secret that digital marketing is being transformed by AI, but to what extent? When we spoke with regional SMBs, we heard some 29% say they have already incorporated AI into their digital marketing, and 56% intend to do so in the future.
However, while more than half of Hong Kong respondents said they had incorporated AI into their digital marketing strategy, just 15% of Singapore SMBs replied positively. 
SMBs need to strategically adopt AI and ensure its adoption and integration is thoughtful and purposeful. “With AI, marketers have a real opportunity to create a 1:1 personalised experience for their audiences. Instead of having to guess that you're one of the 20,000 people that care about this thing, if we have the right data on you, we know exactly what you care about and we can package this thing in the right way, specifically, in the way you care,” says Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot.
Pooja K Dhanothia, Director, Head of Asia - Marketing Solutions at LinkedIn, shares, "recently, we introduced Accelerate, a new AI-powered tool set to revolutionise marketing on LinkedIn. This transition streamlines campaign management, providing marketers with advanced AI capabilities. These capabilities enable precise targeting, personalised content recommendations, and automated campaign management."
"Marketers leverage AI to analyze extensive datasets, uncovering insights for effective strategies. AI-driven tools automate tasks, freeing time for creative initiatives, enhancing efficiency, optimising spend, and delivering engaging experiences to audiences. This integration equips businesses to comprehend customer behavior, predict trends, and tailor content effectively, leading to successful outcomes. Marketers leveraging these advancements achieve business objectives with precision and impact," observes Pooja.
Ways of incorporating AI into digital marketing strategies
Just over 50% of businesses surveyed have started incorporating, or are intending to incorporate, AI into their marketing strategy. Again, this presents an opportunity for employers to empower their teams with the skills, guidance and the right tools to leverage AI in their work.
Recent research by HubSpot revealed that AI tools are not only saving time and bringing new efficiencies, but also driving more effective results. More than 70% of marketers in APAC who are using AI agree that it's helping make their content more personalised. 
HubSpot's Kat Warboys observes, "Generative AI tools can not only support marketers in content creation, but also in repurposing existing assets for different channels or customers, customising messages to ensure they resonate with target audiences."
Key takeaways
As digital channels explode and as regions across Asia adapt their marketing strategies and investment to match that of the digital-savvy consumer, the key to success for business growth will lie in ensuring the customer experience from the point of acquisition through to eventual customer does not reside in silos.
By adopting CRM solutions that can seamlessly integrate with social media marketing and other tools, marketers will be better positioned to make the most of information gathered throughout the customer journey. This two-way information flow will ultimately empower them with the necessary insights to drive more targeted campaigns.
SMBs in Asia have an exciting opportunity ahead to set their digital marketing strategy up for success, revamp their strategy to reach consumers where they are online - across many channels - to increase their investment to ensure effective frequency to drive acquisition and awareness, and to underpin growing investment with a strong technology foundation.