Meta Hong Kong & Singapore Financial Forum 2023: Building Full Funnel Marketing Strategies

The Hong Kong & Singapore Financial Forum was held on 31st October 2023. It was the first event that brought together industry leaders and content creators to share views on industry outlook for 2024, full funnel marketing strategies, lead generation solutions and creative best practices for Hong Kong and Singapore.

In his opening remarks, Dhruv Vohra, Managing Director, GBG Mid-Market, APAC of Meta, highlighted the state of business on Meta platforms. He noted Meta apps had 3.96 billion monthly and 3.15 billion daily active users. Additionally, there were 19 billion video connections and 600 million business messages made daily; 50% of advertisers are leveraging Advantage+ for AI-powered creative optimization, obtaining 6-7% lift in engagement from AI-driven recommendations.

Dominic Yiu and Matthew Chia, Account Managers of Meta, kicked off their presentation in a VR Workroom.

As AI is integral to Meta's development, the company continues its significant investment in research and driving adoption. Meta’s AI platform offers several beneficial capabilities for marketers. It can power stronger discovery engines, enable dynamic 3D spaces, automate chatbots, and improve ad targeting and messaging customization.

Meta continues to enhance the efficiency of its AI infrastructure and expand advanced models to achieve precise ad delivery and process automation. Advertisers have achieved 32% ROAS using Advantage+ Shopping Campaign (A+SC).

Breaking the geo-boundary, Alvin Kwok, Co-founder of OneDegree; Grace Chiang, Head of Brand, PR & Communications of Endowus; Margaret Mok, SVP, Head of MarTech & Digital Acquisition, Consumer Banking Group and Wealth Management of DBS Bank (Hong Kong); and Mark Czajkowski, Chief Marketing Officer of Manulife Singapore, have come together to exchange views on 2024 Industry Outlook. Moderated by Scarlett Ho of Hailstone Labs and Jeggan Rajendram of Meta, the panel speakers discussed emerging trends in Asia's thriving wealth and insurance sectors.

The significant regional growth, particularly in the affluent sector, is resulting in an increased focus on consumer education and financial literacy. The panel speakers emphasized the importance of actionable content to drive informed financial decisions. A hybrid AI-human customer service model shows promise when applied judiciously and can effectively address basic customer inquiries.

Ravi Choudhuri, Marketing Science Partner of Meta, stated that a full-funnel approach combines short and long-term goals, via both direct response and brand marketing tools, to drive sales now and in the future. Ravi recommended adopting Brand Diagnostics which helps define upper funnel strategies by understanding brand metrics; while Performance Diagnostics optimizes lower funnel strategies based on audience saturation and campaign objectives.

In addition, he also showcased Brand Lift and Conversion Lift solutions to measure incremental impact by objectives. Brand Lift assesses brand metrics uplift from ads and Conversion Lift quantifies incremental ROI driven by campaigns. Staging these measurements allows full funnel optimization to ensure synergistic and intent-based goals across funnel.

Meta Advantage suite is an end-to-end campaign management solution that optimizes audiences, creatives, budget and can manage up to 150 creatives. Vincent Shek, Performance Director of Fabcom, shared positive experiences after adopting Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaign (A+SC) to a finance campaign. An 10% lower CPA and 30-40% higher reach versus baseline campaigns were resulted. He stated that A+SC targeted new and relevant audiences with higher purchase intent and drove steady long-term performance.

Integrating Click-to-WhatsApp ads and audience targeting to trigger one-to-one customer conversation is more effective in driving conversion. Thomson Ho, Co-founder of 10Life, observed that the adoption of Click-to-WhatsApp ads saw 20 times better insurance leads compared to previous campaigns. Three-quarters of those leads would continue the conversation on messaging tool, while one-third of them would convert finally. The integration with Click-to-WhatsApp ads removed communication barriers between consumers and service providers and allowed better customer expectations by using an automated messaging response.

Arvee de Guzman and Iman Sukhaimi from Shuttlerock outlined best creative practices for successful financial campaigns. They advised leveraging Reels to increase recall and purchase intent, especially among Gen Z audiences. They provided guidance on crafting effective Reels through immediate attention-grabbing openings, incorporating real people and trends, optimizing audio and music, naturally showcasing brands, and arousing inspiration and curiosity by good storytelling.