Phuong1309In 2024, Vietnam will welcome 17.6 million international tourists, ranking second in Southeast Asia after Thailand. With a high growth rate in recent years, Vietnam is emerging as a leading emerging tourist destination in the region. With its current position, we can completely upgrade Vietnam’s tourism promotion activities to closely follow current tourism promotion trends in the world.
Among those trends, Influencer marketing through social networks has been used by many countries to proactively promote emerging domestic destinations to international tourists for many years. In Vietnam, proactively cooperating with international KOLs is no longer too far-fetched or difficult.
Many favorable changes in international KOLs and content trends on social networks that are taking place recently will help our tourism promotion activities through international KOLs take off. The following article will introduce some of those trends to tourism businesses.
Group of international KOLs living long-term in Thailand helps connect with US and European markets
Thailand is one of the world’s leading tourism powers, but few people know that this country is chosen by many travel bloggers around the world to live permanently. They often come to Thailand to live for a long time to create content about tourism, culture, and life in Thailand in general and Southeast Asia in particular. This content is produced in many different languages to serve the community of followers in China, Japan, Europe, America, Australia, etc.
Because Thailand is a tourism powerhouse, attracting the world’s leading number of international visitors, the demand for viewing content, learning about culture, cuisine and destinations in Thailand is huge. The streets in the capital Bangkok are always crowded with foreigners, they can be tourists or people coming to Thailand for the purpose of living and working. Not only creating content in Thailand, these influencers also expand content about other Southeast Asian destinations to serve their followers in their home country. Travel bloggers are often active on 2 platforms: Youtube and Instagram. They can be micro influencers with 10,000 – 50,000 followers or macro influencers with 100,000 to millions of followers.
This large group of travel bloggers in Thailand is only 2 hours flight from Vietnam. We can use the content on their channels to promote Vietnamese tourism to viewers in China, Japan, Europe, America, Australia, etc. at a reasonable cost.
KOLs Group in Southeast Asia to Make Vietnam a Trending Destination in the Region
While South Korea and China account for more than 50% of international tourists to Vietnam, the Southeast Asian market still has a lot of potential. According to statistics from the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, in 2024, the ASEAN tourist market to Vietnam will grow well, specifically Indonesia will increase by 91.9%, the Philippines will increase by 59.5%, Laos will increase by 14.4%, Cambodia will increase by 12.4%, Malaysia will increase by 6.9% and Singapore will increase by 5.4%. With this data, in the next few years, Vietnam will welcome more and more visitors from neighboring countries. To catch up with the development trend of this market, cooperation with KOLs in the region to actively promote Vietnamese tourism needs to start now.
See more: 3 most important things when using international influencers to promote Vietnamese tourism
Southeast Asia is the region where influencers and social networks have the most influence in the world, the average time people spend on social networks is up to 3-4 hours per day. Southeast Asian youth have a high level of trust in influencers and they also actively follow new trends from influencers. In Southeast Asia, KOL marketing is an effective channel to turn Vietnam into a trendy destination for young people – something we have not been able to do so far.
Although there have been many influencers in Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines… sharing their experiences of traveling to Vietnam, we have not yet proactively built a cooperation strategy with content creators in the region to make Vietnam a trendy destination. To become a trend, we need to promote cooperation with a large number of Influencers at many levels from celebrities to nano-influencers to create a spread with diverse content.
Every month, the IMVN community still receives a lot of shares from international influencers about their travel plans for Vietnam in particular and Southeast Asia in general. These influencers are also very open to the opportunity to cooperate with tourism businesses to introduce unique and new experiences to their followers. This is an opportunity for Vietnamese businesses to cooperate with influencers to create attractive tourism content about Vietnam. IMVN is a unit with experience in implementing many campaigns to bring international KOLs to Vietnam in promotional projects for VinFast, VinHomes… With experience in strategizing and organizing experiences for KOLs, we will connect Vietnamese tourism businesses with potential international KOLs. For more details, please contact:
