Which digital channels matter in Vietnam
Vũ Kỳ AnhFounder, MWY Consulting
Short answer
The channels that matter in Vietnam depend on where your category is discovered and where the purchase completes. For most consumer goods, discovery happens in video and social feeds and the purchase completes inside a marketplace, which makes a website-centred plan aimed at the wrong step. For considered purchases, the decisive channel is often the one that holds contact during a long decision, and in Vietnam that is usually messaging rather than email.
A Vietnam channel plan usually arrives as a translation. The structure that worked in another market gets adapted, the platform names are adjusted, budgets are scaled to market size, and the work begins.
The translation is usually competent. The problem is that a plan can be translated perfectly and still be aimed at the wrong step of the buying journey.
Two questions before any platform is named
Where does discovery happen?
In many Western markets, a considerable share of buying starts with a search: the customer knows roughly what they want and goes looking for it.
In Vietnam, for a large part of consumer goods, discovery starts in a feed — short video, social posts, live selling — or inside a marketplace's own browse and recommendation surface. The customer was not looking for your product. The product reached them.
This changes what the first touch has to do. A plan built around capturing existing demand will find less existing demand than expected, and will conclude that the market is smaller than it is.
Where does the purchase complete?
This determines what you can measure, which in turn determines what will look successful.
| Purchase completes | Measurable immediately | Needs deliberate work to measure |
|---|---|---|
| Your own website | Most channels | Cross-session and cross-device paths |
| Marketplace | In-platform advertising | Anything off-platform that drove the visit |
| Chat thread | The click that opened it | The sale that followed |
| Physical store | Nothing | All of it — offline conversion must be built |
The last two rows are where most channel comparisons in Vietnam quietly break. A channel whose job is to start a conversation records a click and nothing else, so it loses every comparison against a channel that closes on a website — not because it performs worse, but because it is measured worse.
What tends to surprise a team arriving from elsewhere
Messaging does the work email does elsewhere. Zalo is where a large share of conversation, follow-up and repeat contact happens. A considered purchase with a three-week decision needs something holding contact in between, and in Vietnam that is usually a message thread rather than an email sequence.
Live and creator selling are ordinary. Live commerce and creator-driven affiliate sales are established purchase paths, not experiments to pilot. Their costs sit outside the advertising account, which makes them easy to leave out of efficiency calculations and easy to underinvest in for the wrong reason.
The marketplace is a media channel, not just a shelf. Each platform runs its own advertising system with its own rules. Treating marketplaces purely as distribution, with media planned separately, misses that the two are the same decision.
A sequence that avoids the common errors
- Establish where your category is discovered, separately for each product line rather than for the company.
- Establish where the purchase completes, and accept that this decides what is measurable.
- Fix the measurement gaps that matter — usually chat-to-order, and off-platform traffic into marketplaces.
- Only then allocate budget, and review attribution before using the results to cut anything.
The order matters. Allocating first and measuring later produces a plan that looks data-driven and is driven by the data that happened to be easy to collect.
Where MWY sits
MWY runs no campaigns, produces no content, and takes no commission from any platform or agency.
The work is helping decide the channel mix against how your category is actually bought, getting the measurement right before spending scales, and then reading the results back each month from the company's side of the table.
Common questions
Is Facebook still dominant in Vietnam?
It remains one of the largest channels by reach for many categories, but dominance is the wrong frame. Rising costs and competition have widened the gap between a well-run account and an average one, and short video has taken a large share of discovery. The useful question is what role it plays in your particular buying journey rather than how it ranks overall.
Do we need to be on TikTok?
If your category is discovered rather than searched for, yes, because that is where a large share of discovery now happens and because TikTok Shop connects discovery to purchase in one place. If your customers actively look for what you sell and compare on specifications, it matters less than being present where they search.
Should we use email marketing in Vietnam?
Email open rates for consumer audiences here are generally weaker than messaging, and Zalo occupies much of the space email holds in other markets. For business audiences email still works. The practical test is where your customers already reply, not which channel your existing marketing stack supports.
How much should we allocate to marketplaces versus our own site?
Start from where the purchase completes in your category rather than from a preferred split. If most buying happens on a marketplace, media that drives traffic to your own site is working against the customer journey rather than with it. Owning the customer relationship still matters, but it is a separate objective that needs its own plan and its own budget line.
Is this your problem?
Thirty minutes, no fee. Bring real numbers and the call will be far more specific than the article.