Thien Minh Group found itself having to move really fast the last three months. The mainstay of its business, inbound visitors, had disappeared and it had to pivot to a domestic market. The positive was that Vietnamese consumers, like everywhere else in the world, had moved online and this was an environment the group, which owns Ivuvu.com, was used to.
The tactics though had to be different to appeal to the type of Vietnamese travellers they wanted to target.
Thien Minh Group’s Ngo Thuy Ngan says the company collaborated with influencers re-targeting to local market.
Said Ngo Thuy Ngan, director of sales and marketing, “We’ve been trying quite a few things over the past two months in terms of re-targeting to local market.”
One of the new things was a collaboration with Miss Universe Vietnam Top 10, Quynh Trang. “We collaborated with her to be a new face of TMG hotels for the local market, as before all of our brand image revolves around an image of a French classy female traveller seeking for cultural experiences in Indochina.”
It was time for a local influencer to work her charms. One of the first things they got her to do was a live streaming cooking class during lockdown, which worked really well because people were stuck at home.
“We did it again at a later time but the audience dropped because people were going out again. So we got her to go out on catamarans and boat trips and did live videos and that got better views,” said Kien Tran Tong, founder and CEO of TMG.
This was the Livestream TMG series, featuring the beauty queen.
It also collaborated with multiple influencers to help boost brand awareness of its newly-launched Victoria Mekong Cruises to the domestic market.
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Ngan said they are happy with the results of their experiments. “So far it’s been well received by the audience. Some influencers generate very good awareness among the target audience. For the Miss Universe Vietnam, there are a few videos that have lower views than others, so we’re testing different format i.e. actual livestream, pre-recorded livestream, testing the length of video (15-30 minutess) etc.”
Thien Minh Group’s Kien Tran Tong: “It’s time to try new things.”
As for what lessons it’s learnt from the experiments, she said, “The way Vietnamese react to media is totally different than Westeners, we have to shift 100% our strategy in order to target them. They are much more active on social media, heavily influenced by eye catching photos/videos and “salesy” content.
“Their buying behaviour also differs – they buy directly on Facebook with 100% transactions happening here. Our social media platform becomes a major buying channel – takes 17% of total revenue during this summer (second highest source).”
Ngan said it would naturally continue with the campaigns that generate good results.
Added Kien, “It’s the time to try new things.”
Asked if he would be trying live streaming on a bigger scale, given how the new platform is gaining traction in other markets in South-east Asia, he said, “We will. It hasn’t really worked for us yet but maybe that’s because we don’t know how to use it yet.”
The one positive – “Traveloka has not been spending as much in Vietnam the past few months and we have gained market share, becoming the number one online platform in Vietnam,” he said.
• Featured image: Miss Universe Vietnam Top 10 at one of her cooking class | all images courtesy of Thien Minh Group