Do Hong Kong marketers prefer to outsource their social media work?

It is essential for brands to adopt social media marketing to better connect with potential customers and enhance their marketing efforts. According to a recent report conducted by Meltwater, three in five marketers and communication professionals in APAC regard social media as more important for their organisation due to economic uncertainties. On average, 34% of their total marketing budget will be invested in social media, with 77% of respondents planning to increase spends or keep them intact.

In terms of execution of social media marketing, 61.73% are opting for in-house social media management, while 26.83% outsource less than half of their projects and 7.2 % outsource more than half of their projects. Interesting, only 2.50% fully outsource their projects.

In a conversation with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, Wilson Wong, marketing director at Price.com.hk revealed that the brand does social media internally as high efficiency, frequency and quality-control are required, which outsourcing is difficult to do so. "We have more than 20 video content being published on our YouTube channel every month. It is never an easy task to manage an agency to help produce such content especially if we do want to have speedy production but with high quality and relevancy," he said.

Further agreeing with Wilson Wong is Iris Yeung, head of marketing at Flash Coffee, who also handles much of the social media executions in-house. This includes social media strategy planning, ideations, ad-hoc content hijacking current news to design. She said that keeping the function in house, allows for more flexibility and responsiveness to changes, especially under the changing social media landscape in Hong Kong. Founded in 2019, Flash Coffee’s products are still very new to the market in Hong Kong. Therefore, the brand is building its customer base. Doing social media in-house helps the brand to maintain control over the brand voice, which it can tailor its social media strategy and content to better meet customers’ needs, Yeung explained.

Why do brands outsource? 

The same report by Meltwater also detailed that, when it comes to outsourcing, jobs such as video production, content production and social media advertising are often being outsourced. Many of the marketers in Hong Kong that MARKETING-INTERACTIVE spoke to say they bank on a hybrid model.

For Regal Hotels International, the more strategic and planning of social media is done in-house, while the more tactical and executional elements are outsourced. “These items are often repetitive and time consuming but are relatively straightforward. Therefore, with the proper framework and guidance in place, they can be done externally effectively,” said Philip Chau, vice president and group head of marketing at Regal Hotels International.

Chau agreed that in-house social media teams have resources that are close to the brand enabling a more concrete understanding of products. Nonetheless, it may be time-consuming and require more effort to build and manage such a team. Outsourcing may be a quicker solution to get immediate support when needed. He added that outsourcing is more suited for one off shorter-term projects, as agencies can provide specific expertise in certain industries or technology that may be harder to seek in in-house hires. 

Further echoing Philip Chau’s views is Cecilia Chan, marketing director of valuation and advisory services business in Asia at Colliers, who revealed that the company's social media projects vary from market to market, and is determined by its local marcom teams in each APAC market.  According to Chan, while in-house executions allow brands to enjoy time to market execution, especially for B2C brands when it comes to responding to market happenings and trend jacking tactics, outsourcing saves brands' learning curve.

One beauty of outsourcing is that brands can leverage the experiences from agencies who have worked with different brands in different industries, learnt the best practices and failures from different strategies and executions in different campaigns at different social media platforms.

At the same time, brands that outsource the social media work to agencies have to make sure the agencies they hired understand and able to carry out their brand essence with zero-mistake, Chan added. 

Meanwhile, Flash Coffee's Yeungclaimed that AI writing tools such as ChatGPT are now dominating not only content creation, but also social media execution, which may become a new trend of social media adoption in Hong Kong. “Some social media editors might find their job is at risk, yet the tools are indeed helping us to improve efficiency and accuracy-mainly on language and grammar usage. The time saved from it can be better used in strategic planning and content creation.” Yeung said.

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