Joint venture to specialise in 'lead generation'
THAI COMPANY efrastructure yesterday announced a 50:50 investment with Japanese-owned digital marketing firm OPT SEA in the launch of a joint venture, named Lead Commerce.
The overall investment value of the Thai-based JV was not disclosed, however.
Lead Commerce will provide digital infrastructure for online and offline business for small and medium-size enterprises.
The joint venture will in fact play a "lead-generation" role, said Pawoot Pongvitayapanu, chief executive officer of efrastructure.
In marketing, lead-generation is the generation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business. Leads can be created for purposes such as list-building, e-newsletter list acquisition or sales leads.
The revenue stream of this kind of business is normally referred to as the "cost per lead".
Lead-generation often uses digital channels, and has been undergoing substantial change in recent years from the rise of new online and social techniques, Pawoot said.
Initially, two main services – Happywedding.life and Comparison.asia – will be offered via the JV. The former is a marketplace for the wedding industry, while the latter is a price-comparison shopping site.
Soonhee Kim, chief operating officer of OPT SEA, said Happywedding.life was set to be the No 1 wedding portal site in Thailand by the end of the year, with a target of 5,000 vendors in the wedding-sector ecosystem and 2 million visitors.
The portal provides all crucial information about weddings, including venue, studio and food, to facilitate a couple’s nuptial plans, while also offering wedding-related businesses via digital tools for precision marketing.
The revenue model will be from advertising and listing charges to vendors, she said.
Based on an OPT SEA survey, the market value of the wedding industry in Thailand is around Bt50 billion, with an annual growth rate of 15 per cent, he said, adding that around 300,000 couples marry each year in the Kingdom.
Thai weddings normally involve up to 150 guests in urban areas, and often double this number in rural areas.
The top three wedding-options concerns are venue, food and beverages, and studio, the research found.
Meanwhile, Pawoot said the goal for Comparison.asia was to become the No 1 price-comparison shopping site in Thailand in 2017, and to be the Asean market leader by 2020.
Comparison.asia is a platform service helping people compare the prices of products they are planning to purchase.
The concept is to partner with e-commerce stores in sourcing products for price comparison.
The goal is that by the end of the year, Comparison.asia will have 3 million product items from 10,000 e-commerce shops available for comparison, while the site will attract 100,000 visitors per day, said the efrastructure chief.
Another target is for the site to have 1.5 per cent of the search-ad market by year-end – a market that is forecast by the Digital Advertising Association (Thailand) to be worth Bt1.34 billion this year.
