Building brands, increasing sales

As a young student, Nuttaputch Wongreanthong favoured arts over business, opting to pursue a degree in dramatic arts and master in cultural management at Chulalongkorn University rather than earn a more practical Master’s of Business Administration (MBA). Not for him the stage, though, but a career in business for which, it turns out, he has a natural talent: Today Nuttaputch is one of Thailand’s leading digital marketing expert and a specialist in content marketing.

The head of Digital Marketing at Total Access Communication (dtac), he is the author of “Content Marketing” and also serves as lecturer in this subject for master’s degree students at Bangkok University.

He puts much of his success down to his love of learning and to a career path that has seen him change jobs seven times since leaving university. 

“The human resource department frowns on frequent job changes but for me it was invaluable as I gained experience and knowledge I would never have learned at business school,” he says.

As a new graduate he started work in the creative department of a TV channel then a year later switched to a marketing job at Major Bowl. He then served as personal assistant to Singaporean Commercial Ambassador for two years before moving to take care of corporate social responsibility (CSR) for IBM Thailand. Stints at entertainment giant RS and digital marketing agency EdgeAsia followed then came the move to Dtac where he is today.

“I integrated the skills I learned in each position and that has worked to my benefit,” he says. 

“The spell as personal assistant to the Singaporean commercial ambassador taught me about sales and negotiation, while working at IBM gave me a solid grounding in systematic thinking and project management. Working at RS added the publisher’s point of view while the EdgeAsia job gave me the agency view. At dtac I’m learning the point of view of a brand.”

He was still at IBM when social media took Thailand by storm and, recognising that it would dramatically change the marketing paradigm, immediately jumped on the networking bandwagon,

The RS experience took him briefly back into marketing while his stint at EdgeAsia, where he was head of Social Media Content and in charge of its customer Facebook page, saw him taking care of social media content for more than 50 brands

“At the beginning, we focused on how to build visitor numbers, which are counted by the number of ‘likes’. We then realised that the real value is not about numbers at all but the content we want to convey,” he explains, adding that he spent a lot of time boning up on marketing methods in the social media age,

“Social media have totally changed the way businesses do marketing. They allow brands to have their own [mass] media – for example, the ‘brand as journalist’ or the ‘brand as publisher’. It is about content marketing. Communication is the most marketing important skill in the digital age,” Nuttaputch explains.

“Companies can no longer use the tried and tested marketing formulas taught at business school. They must change the way they communicate with their customers.

“Content can change behaviour, beliefs and attitudes. Marketers need to learn how to use content to benefit their sales pitches.”

Despite his success with his various employers, Nuttaputch has always been aware that his credibility was suffering simply because he hadn’t attended business school. He has therefore set out to prove his theory about content marketing using his personal brand to demonstrate a “show not just tell” strategy. 

He created his own blog http://nuttaputch.com/ to disseminate his knowledge and his thoughts about marketing in the digital age; and used every social media channel to build and promote himself. The strategy has paid off: Nuttaputch currently has 144,0000 likes on his Facebook page and more than 400,000 people visiting his blog. 

“Without a degree in marketing, I cannot win in this game. So I needed to change the game and play my own game,” he says.  

Part of that game has involved investing time and plenty of effort in learning by reading and doing as well as trying out and testing his ideas.

“Marketers must always keep learning and be able to adapt to changing situation,” he points out. 

“I firmly believe that practice makes perfect and I do that through my blog. I write not just to build an online presence and reputation but to practise my skills and also instruct.

“In this regard, I have also set up DOTS Consultancy to provide training on doing marketing in the digital world as well as content marketing,” says Nuttaputch, adding that he is really only at the beginning of his journey to become the master of marketing in the digital world. 

He does, however, recognise that marketing in the digital world requires a lot of changes in the management and organisational structures and will therefore take time.

“To achieve my goal, there are a lot of things to learn and to do. I will never stop learning. But I will carve out my career path as a marketer,” Nuttaputch concludes.