On the other hand, influencers makes money by advertising or selling products from reputable brands to their fan base

When Truong Cong Thanh was working in the retail marketing industry in his home country Vietnam, he realised clients/brands didn’t get real value for their spend. On digging further, he found a yawning gap in the whole industry. He thought deeply about this for a while and wanted to provide real value to brands and help them sell online in the most effective manner.

“What traditional marketing agencies currently do is just to commit market coverage, impressions, or website clicks — even in the ages of social channels like Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, etc. Hardly any of them commit real orders or the number of customers, who have real interest in the product,” he says.

“So, the question is why don’t we connect brands with content creators so that they can do the marketing for products and generate real orders for brands? With this objective in mind, we developed a social selling platform that could ‘fill the market void’ and guarantee real value to users,” he adds.

Headquartered in Singapore, Ecomobi was started in 2016 by Cong Thanh (CEO), with Nguyen Xuan Dong (Vice President) and Doan Van Tuyen (CTO).

A serial entrepreneur, Cong Thanh has previously built AdFlex and Masoffer, and also served as COO of Eway JSC. His partner Xuan Dong has also startup building experience, having founded Moore Corporation. Van Tuyen , on the other hand, worked as CTO at Adflex.

Ecomobi is an Artificial Intelligence– and Machine Learning-powered social selling platform, which can categorise and evaluate millions of products to make personalised recommendations to key opinion leaders (KOLs), who in turn create customised posts and advertise suitable products on their social media channels.

In other words, the platform connects brands with experts in online marketing and social media influencers for brands to significantly increase sales revenue based on a commitment to certain KPIs such as Cost per Action (CPA). On the other hand, experts and influencers can make money by advertising or selling products and services from reputable brands to their fan base.

The process gos like this: when a buyer wants to ask for products on a KOL’s social media pages, an automatic chatbot will show up and provide them with detailed information. After this, the order information will be sent automatically to brands/merchants. This feature helps KOLs sell products instantly with ease.

“Thanks to this unique feature, brands can also approach real and qualified customers through the advertisement of influencers. Brands need to pay Ecomobi only when a real order is placed. Besides this, Ecomobi provides real-time and transparent performance tracking system that allows social influencers and brands to effectively monitor transactions and get personalised recommendations to optimise performance,” he elaborated on the working model.

As of today, Ecomobi has worked with more than 100 top online and offline companies across Asia, such as Lazada, Shopee, Tokopedia, Juno, Canifa and Vascara. Since hitting the market, the startup has expanded into four countries — Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. It is now planning to start operations in Malaysia, the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia.

“Since each country has different characteristics and social media culture, our strategy is to do thorough research first to have a concrete understanding of the market. After that we develop our solutions to fill the void,” he adds.

Today, social media has become one of the most important resources for both sellers and buyers. Research shows that 64 per cent of online shoppers say that social media helped them decide on a product to buy. Notably, the number of active users on social media reached 3 billion. “All these present massive opportunities for a company like Ecomobi,” says Long Thanh.

Ecomobi has raised two around of funding since inception. In 2017, it received an undisclosed sum in investment from Hong Kong-based STI Capital. A year later, it got another shot in the arm, with ESP Capital (Vietnam) and Nextrans Capital (South Korea) infusing money into it.

Ecomobi is also one of the two winners of Echelon Asia Summit 2019. As part of this, the startup has received S$50,000 from Enterprise Singapore.

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Image Credit: Ecomobi.

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