Use of influencer marketing by brands in Asia has spiked since the onset of COVID-19, according to a new report by CastingAsia, which looks at the shifts in strategies for influencer marketing campaigns by businesses in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan.

The influencer marketing business, part of AnyMind Group, revealed an 85% increase in branding campaigns, and a 130% increase in campaigns that focused on corporate social responsibility and public causes like social distancing and raising awareness about safety and prevention measures since March 2020.


It also found that digital-first brands, including gaming and e-commerce businesses, activated more influencer marketing campaigns sooner, from April 2020 to June 2020, while most businesses in other verticals resumed influencer marketing activities from July 2020 onwards.

There was an increase in influencer marketing campaigns on Twitter and YouTube from March 2020, despite an overall favourability for influencer marketing campaigns on Instagram (45.08% usage rate of total campaigns) throughout the one-year period.

Interestingly, Twitter started slow, but influencer marketing campaigns on Twitter started seeing growth momentum from March 2020 onwards - coinciding with the month COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. Additionally, in the recorded months for 2019, Instagram was the platform of choice for more than half of influencer marketing campaigns, but that has dropped in 2020.


Of the top three most-favoured social media platforms by influencers in Asia, Instagram emerged as the best platform for engagement rates on influencer content, with micro-influencers performing the best. On Facebook, micro-influencers have the best median engagement rates, but nano-influencers interestingly performed better for engagement rates on YouTube.


Rohit Sharma, COO for AnyMind Group, said that the region is still in the early stages of influencer marketing, and constant evolution is to be expected.

“However, this report shows how marketers in Asia are increasingly embracing influencer marketing to remove physical and geographical borders with their customers, and we might actually be seeing just the ripples of the potential for social media influencers and influencer marketing,” he added.

CastingAsia’s State of Influencer Marketing in Asia 2020 report covers 10 markets including Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, and analyses over 170,000 influencers and influencer data points, and 1,300 campaigns run on the CastingAsia platform from September 2019 to August 2020. 

Sourced from CastingAsia