Source: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2020-hong-kong

Hong Kong is the world’ most significant financial centers and commercial ports, it is also a multiculturalist hub in Asia and proximity with China. With these benefit, Hong Kong has a lot of opportunity and potential in developing digital marketing strategies. Let’s see how Hong Kong’s digital marketing environment, trends and opportunities can help you maximize the success in Hong Kong market and stand out from keen competition.

Digital marketing landscape in Hong Kong

According to the internet report, the total population of Hong Kong is about 7.27 million and the internet penetration rate is 91%. This shows that 6.79 million Hong Kong residents are internet users. Among them, 5.8 million people are active on social media, which is equivalent to 78% of the total population of Hong Kong.

Digital Landscape of Hong Kong

Hong Kong residents spend an average of 6 hours 16 minutes online every day, including 1 hour 57 minutes on social media channels and 2 hour 33 minutes on videos.

Insight: Social media and videos is the trend in digital marketing in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong's daily time spent with media

Search Engine Google is the main search engine in Hong Kong. Google.com and Google.com.hk rank first and sixth respectively among the most visited websites. Yahoo, another popular search engine, ranks fourth among the most visited websites in Hong Kong.

Insight: Google and Yahoo search engine should be used when you want to do search engine marketing in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong's most-visited websites

Most-used social media platforms in Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s most popular social media platform is Facebook, with a penetration rate of 85%, followed by YouTube (81%), WhatsApp (79%) and Instagram (60%).

Insight: If you would like to promote your products and services in Hong Kong, you may consider these social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube and Instagram).

Hong Kong's most-used social media platforms

Facebook

Facebook is the most used social media platform in Hong Kong, with more than 4.8 million Facebook users in Hong Kong. According to a report on December 2019, Facebook has more than 2.45 billion active users’ accounts worldwide, making it the #1 social media platforms in the world.

Hong Kong's Facebook audience

In the past year, these three Facebook content formats got the top user engagement: video posts accounted for 8.92%, photo posts accounted for 6.01%, and page link posts accounted for 3.49% user engagement.

Insight: Video becomes the trend when it comes to Facebook post, it can get more engagement. It is suggested to use video format when you want to advertise on Facebook.

Hong Kong's Facebook engagement benchmarks

YouTube

YouTube is currently the #2 social media platforms in Hong Kong and the top video viewing platform. There are more than 20 Billion users around the world. Global users watch more than 10 billion hours of video per day and watch billions of times. More than 70% of YouTube users watch YouTube videos on mobile devices. YouTube is a great platform for your target customers to understand your brand and products information.

Instagram

Instagram is the #4 social media platform and the #2 photos and video sharing platform in Hong Kong. Apart from normal photos and video sharing functions, it also provides Instagram shopping and IGTV for users to share their products or videos.

By January 2020, there are nearly 2.3 million Instagram users in Hong Kong. It accounts for 30.2% of its total population and 56.9% are female users. Young people between the ages of 25 and 34 are the largest user group, with approximately 920,000 users (40.3%). The second largest user group is young people aged 18 to 24, with about 520,000 users (22.8%).

Insight: When you want to target audience under aged 34, Instagram is the first priority social media platform in Hong Kong.

Instagram users in Hong Kong

Digital Marketing Opportunities in Hong Kong

1. Ecommerce in Hong Kong

84% of Hong Kong people will search for information online before buying products and services, 75% of people will visit the brand's online retail store to know more about the product, and 70% will even purchase products or service online. The percentages of ecommerce activities by mobile and desktop were 47% and 43% respectively.

Hong Kong people are more willing to buy products or services online. If you want to seize this business opportunity, a user-friendly website and site exposure are very important. An easy-to-browse and mobile-friendly website allows visitors easily find the products and services that they want. There are many ways to increase brand awareness online. One of them is to increase your brand exposure in search engine results. By selecting the right keywords and executing search engine paid ads, it can increase your site exposure to potential customers, thereby increasing your brand awareness and online sales.

Ecommerce activities in Hong Kong

2. Social media marketing in Hong Kong

With the increasing popularity of smartphones, social media has become one of the popular platforms for Hong Kong companies to promote their brands, especially Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook and Instagram provide shopping and livestream functions. Companies can connect their images to their website with shopping function and their target customers can purchase the products and services online. More and more ecommerce businesses in Hong Kong use livestream function of Facebook and Instagram to interact with their customers. Companies show their products on the livestream video and interact with their customers in real-time. It increases the audience trust of the products and services and hence enhances sales online.

3. KOL and Influencer marketing in Hong Kong

Everyone can share their daily life and opinions online. As long as you share good content and attract followers, you will have the potential to become a key opinion leader (KOL). KOL interact with their fans and have high influence online.

Normally, every KOL has their specific group of audiences. It is the trend in Hong Kong to cooperate with KOL. KOL cooperation fees are usually based on their number of followers and influence. KOLs with more followers generally need a higher fee. Therefore, companies in Hong Kong tend to cooperate with multiple micro-influencers in promoting their brand. Micro influencers are those who have 5,000 to 20,000 social media followers with high trust from their followers. It becomes a more effective digital marketing strategy in Hong Kong because the micro-influencers fans have a higher engagement rate but lower cooperation fees.

Summary of Digital Marketing in Hong Kong

If a brand wants to stay ahead in the digital marketing in Hong Kong, ecommerce, social media marketing and influencer marketing are the latest trends and opportunities for you to capture more clients in Hong Kong.

About AsiaPac Net Media

With an extensive digital marketing experience of serving more than 2,500 clients across Asia in sectors such as education, travel and hospitality, finance, Government and others, AsiaPac’s expert team is highly recognized for the excellence in providing performance-driven services to businesses across Asia, and global corporates targeting Asia markets. If you’d like to learn more about AsiaPac and the work we’ve done, visit our Work page. For more information on AsiaPac/ AdTech and our services, please contact us at info@asiapac.com.hk/ info@adtechinno.com.