Lê Công Thành, chairman of Infore Technology Group talks to start-up owners at the workshop. — Photo courtesy of Ministry of Science and Technology

HÀ NỘI — Start-ups have been advised to apply digital strategies in order to obtain growth, a workshop heard in Hà Nội recently.

The workshop, entitled ‘Growth Hacking for Start-ups through new digital strategies’, was held by iMentor – a community of professional start-up mentors, VAG Media and the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Mentors at the workshop said communication plays an extremely important role in boosting profit for businesses, but old advertising tools and methods are no longer effective. That is why digital communication (also known as a digital strategy) has become increasingly popular in the era of technology.

It was estimated that global spending on digital media in 2017 reached US$209 billion, equivalent to 41 per cent of total spending on advertisement and higher than advertisement spending on TV.

According to the Việt Nam Advertising Association, with 25 billion Internet-connected devices and 3.3 billion social network users worldwide, digital media has attracted businesses with high human resource demand.

In Việt Nam, there are currently about 7,000 advertising and human resource companies with at least 70,000 employees, which can meet the demand of the industry.

With more than 3,000 start-ups, the Vietnamese ecosystem is growing very strongly. Digital media is one of the keys to start-up growth, the participants at the workshop said.

Lê Công Thành, chairman of Infore Technology Group – a technology start-up specialising in big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – said he started his business in late 2011 without any experience in business development and partners. AI was then a totally new field.

“Digital media helps me advertise my start-up and more and more people learn about my model,” he said.

Lê Hồng Sơn, CEO of Metric – a pioneering start-up bringing social research and data analysis solutions to help businesses get closer to consumers – said in the era of information, a customer can reach thousands of different messages. Through social networks, customers share their information, interests and everything about their lives. There is a great demand of collecting and analysing information on demand.

Only when we understand customers, can we approach them and apply relevant marketing strategies in the right direction and make customers happy. Therefore, Metric helps businesses achieve better business results through a deep understanding of consumers on social networks, he said. — VNS