Most Australian businesses that expand into Asia get the hard parts right. They sort out distribution, freight, pricing and local compliance. Then they run the same Google and Meta campaigns that work at home, get very little back, and decide the market isn’t interested.
Usually the market is interested. The campaign just went to the wrong places.
Here is what changes once you cross the border, and how to work out which market to try first.
“APAC” is about twenty markets wearing one label
The most expensive assumption you can make is that the region behaves like a region.
Buying habits in Jakarta have almost nothing in common with Seoul. Payment methods differ. So does the way people find a supplier, and how long they take to decide. Even the markets that look adjacent on a map, like Malaysia and Indonesia, split along language and platform lines once you get past the surface.
The businesses that do well pick one country, learn it properly, then decide whether a second one is worth it. The ones that struggle write an APAC strategy in Melbourne and roll it out to six markets at once.
Pick one. You can add the others later, and you will add them with real data instead of guesses.
Google is not the search engine everywhere
This one catches people out, because in Australia Google is search. It holds about 90% of the global market, and even that is its lowest share since 2014.
In South Korea it is a genuine contest. StatCounter had Google at around 47% and Naver at 42% in April 2026, and Korean industry research puts Naver higher again, near 63%. Whichever figure you take, close to half the country is searching somewhere you aren’t.
Japan splits differently. Yahoo Japan still holds a real share, and Bing has climbed sharply on the back of Copilot and Edge arriving through enterprise deals.
None of that makes your Google campaign a waste. It does mean a Google-only campaign in Korea or Japan reaches part of the market and leaves the rest to your competitors.
Naver also rewards different work. It favours its own blog, cafe and knowledge properties over external websites, so ranking there looks more like building a community presence than optimising a site. Australian businesses used to winning on technical SEO and backlinks often find none of that effort carries across. The keyword research tools you use here mostly don’t cover it either, which is why the first honest answer on Korea is usually that you need someone local to tell you what people actually type.
The messaging app is the marketing channel
In Australia we treat messaging apps as private. Across much of Asia they are where business gets done.
LINE reaches about 92.6% of internet users in Japan, with roughly 97 million monthly users in a country of 125 million. KakaoTalk reaches around 97% of internet users in South Korea. Zalo is the default in Vietnam. WeChat has about 1.41 billion monthly users and works as a wallet and a storefront as much as a chat app.
Now look at those same platforms globally. LINE sits around 8.7% worldwide, WeChat 3.6%, Zalo 2.6%, KakaoTalk 1.4%. That gap is the trap. On a global chart they look like rounding errors. In their home market they are closer to universal.
Three things change as a result:
- Your service channel. A Japanese buyer may expect to reach you on LINE rather than email, and treat a contact form as a dead end.
- Your remarketing. Official accounts on LINE and Kakao behave much more like an email list than a social feed, and they are one of the few durable audiences you can build in those markets.
- Your ad mix. Meta’s reach varies a lot country to country. In several markets it is nowhere near the main place people spend attention, which changes how you split a first ad budget compared to running the same campaign at home.
Localisation goes well past translation
Translating your website is the easy part, and the part most businesses stop at.
The harder question is why someone in that market buys at all. What counts as good value there. Which sources they trust. How they check whether a foreign supplier is legitimate. What makes them abandon a purchase halfway through.
Two examples of how far that goes. In several Asian markets an unfamiliar overseas brand needs third-party proof before anyone will consider it, so reviews and marketplace presence matter more than your own website copy, and a local partner endorsement more again. And in markets where cash on delivery is still normal, a checkout that only takes cards will lose you most of your customers before they ever contact you.
You can’t get this from a translation agency. You get it from someone who lives there, or from the customers you already have in that market.
Your measurement breaks too
This part gets discovered late, usually after the first month of reporting looks wrong.
Traffic from Naver, Yahoo Japan or a link opened inside LINE often doesn’t arrive tagged the way you expect. Plenty of it lands in your analytics as direct, so a campaign that is working can look like it did nothing. If you have ever wondered why your direct traffic seems too high, this is the same problem with an international accent.
Fix it before you spend, not after. Tag every campaign link by hand rather than trusting auto-tagging to cover platforms Google doesn’t own. Set up a country breakdown on your key conversion report on day one. Agree what counts as a lead in that market before the first ad runs, because a WeChat follow and an Australian contact form submission are not the same event and reporting them together tells you nothing useful.
How to choose the first market
Three questions, in order.
Where are you already getting enquiries you can’t service? Check your analytics for the last twelve months. Unsolicited enquiries from a country are the cheapest market research you will ever get, and most businesses never look for them.
Where can you actually deliver? A market you can’t supply or support is not a market. Marketing into it just creates work you have to turn away.
What does being wrong cost? Some markets take six months and a modest budget to test. Others need a local entity, a local partner and a year before you learn anything. Start where the cost of being wrong is survivable.
We worked this one out on ourselves. Our global marketing page started showing up in Google for searches like paid social agency APAC and PPC agency APAC. We never targeted either phrase and never wrote a line of copy aimed at them. Google had matched the page to demand we had not gone looking for, and it took us months to notice it was there. The same signal is probably sitting in your analytics right now, and it costs nothing to check.
What a sensible first campaign looks like
Test in one country. Give it a real budget for at least three months, because anything shorter tells you about seasonality rather than demand.
Run search on whichever engine that country actually uses. Put a real local reviewer over the copy rather than a translation tool. Set up the messaging channel that market expects before you drive traffic, so enquiries have somewhere to land. Track leads by country from day one, which sounds obvious and is the step most often skipped.
If it works, you will know inside a quarter. If it doesn’t, you will know which part failed, and you can fix that instead of writing off the country.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a local entity to market into Asia?
Usually not to start. You can test demand with search and paid social from Australia. A local entity tends to become necessary when you need local payment processing, a local phone number, or an official account on a platform like WeChat that verifies business registration.
How much should I budget for a market test?
Enough to run for three months without stopping. A campaign paused after six weeks has cost you the money and taught you nothing. The right figure depends on the market and your sales cycle, and it is worth working out before you start rather than after.
Should I translate my entire website?
Start with the pages that carry the sale. A translated homepage and one strong service or product page will teach you more than a full site translation you can’t maintain.
Which Asian market is easiest for Australian businesses?
New Zealand and Singapore are usually the softest landings. English works, business practice is familiar and contracts are enforceable. They are also smaller. Japan, Korea and Indonesia are bigger prizes and cost more to get right.
Can I run the same ads with translated copy?
You can, and it is a reasonable first test in a market like Singapore. In Japan or Korea it will underperform, because the creative conventions, the proof buyers look for and the platform itself are all different.
If you are working out which market to test first, or your Asian campaigns are running and not converting, our global marketing team works across APAC, North America and Europe. Book a free strategy call and we will look at your numbers with you.