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Marketing Strategy to enter China successfully, compete and dominate your market niche in 2022
Updated: Jan 11, 2022
For you to ever have a chance of succeeding in the highly competitive Chinese market, you will need a well-thought-out marketing strategy.Business development in a new region is not easy, SODA will help you to unlock some important strategies here.
A good marketing strategy in China will enable you to promote your brand awareness, products, business and company to Chinese consumers.
Having a well-planned marketing strategy in China will determine your eventual success or failure to penetrate the Chinese market with your products or services.
With years of experience marketing to the Chinese market, SODA Global Marketing, a China digital agency, has developed an all rounded marketing strategy that you can plug-and-play into your digital marketing strategy in China.
China is a highly technologized nation with over 1 billion internet users.
This means that any business hoping to penetrate and have a share of the Chinese market, will need an effective digital marketing strategy to implement in China.
Is a western digital marketing strategy going to work as a marketing strategy in China?
Unlike the highly dominant internet players of the west - Facebook, Google and Amazon - the online landscape is totally different in China.
The dominant online companies in China are: Weibo, WeChat, Baidu, Xiaohongshu (The Little Red Book), Tmall, Taobao and Alibaba.
Depending on the service or product that you would like to sell in China, your entry digital marketing strategy in China will vary accordingly.
Therefore, depending on your preferences, this article has been categorized into different digital marketing strategies depending on the platforms they are based on.
Top digital marketing platforms in China
1. WEIBO
Weibo marketing strategy in china
What is weibo?
Weibo is a Chinese microblogging website founded in 2009 by Sino Corporation, and currently has over 500 Monthly Active Users (MAU).
This makes it the second most popular social media site after WeChat.
And in that case, for businesses hoping to successfully enter and win in the Chinese market, Weibo marketing in China is extremely vital.
Weibo marketing in China
The nature of Weibo as a social media tool is that it enables people to network through following influencers, getting news feeds, posting content, following content, sharing posts and content.
This means that for you to perform results oriented Weibo marketing in China, you will need to develop a concrete Weibo marketing strategy that encompasses all the different aspects of Weibo.
How to use Weibo for business
Weibo business account
For your business to start up on the right foot, you will need to register your company’s official Weibo business account.
This is because this will help you increase your brand’s authenticity and trust from your prospective clients.
Weibo business accounts also come with other advantages for businesses. For example, if you register your company on Weibo you get access to more advanced features like ad management, audience targeting, ad retargeting and Weibo analytics.
To register your business account on Weibo, you simply start by signing up for an official business account in order to begin your branding on Weibo.
Setting up a Weibo business account
In order to activate your Weibo business account, you will have to be verified as a legit business.
For this, you will need to submit your company's registration certificate for your Weibo business account processing to begin.
With it, you will also need to provide your email address, phone number and location.
The verification process typically takes five to seven days for a company registered in China. For overseas companies, it typically takes about tw weeks and a fee of $1000 to receive Weibo verification as a legally registered company.
If you don’t have a registered company already, start your company registration in China here with SODA Global Marketing, an award winning digital marketing agency in China.
A good Weibo marketing strategy should have the following aspects at its core:
I. Quality marketing analysis.
This will enable your brand to determine your target audience in terms of both the demographics - age, sex, income - and psychographics - values, desires, likes and behaviors.
This is extremely important in determining the voice of your brand. It will determine how your brand messaging will be structured as well as the type and form of content you will focus on as a brand.
II. Effective content marketing strategy.
Valuable content production should be your brand’s top priority.
This is the reason why a prior quality marketing analysis is vital before you begin your marketing efforts.
Since you already know your target audience well, you can now craft a perfect tone and messaging for your brand.
Your brand’s messaging, tone and content production should remain consistent to keep up with guiding your prospects from the buyer's awareness stage to the purchasing stage.
Additionally, you should keep in mind that your content marketing strategy changes and adapts as you get to know and understand your target audience better.
Therefore, be proud of the hits and misses encountered during the process of fine tuning your content marketing strategy in China.
Always be willing and ready to experiment, change and tweak your content style and type until you find the perfect content that works for your brand. Which you can then incorporate into your Weibo marketing strategy.
You should also make sure your content on Weibo is engaging and interesting. To boost engagements for your brand, respond to comments, and actively respond to messages directed at your brand.
It has also been proven that short video and image content often have better attention-grabbing abilities and engagement compared to text.
Therefore, incorporate video and image content into your Weibo content marketing strategy.
III. Weibo Advertising.
After doing some content marketing on your verified Weibo business account, it is now time to move on to the next level of your marketing strategy, which is Weibo advertising.
Doing advertising on Weibo enables you to reach a wider audience to boost your brand awareness and also helps to raise your sales.
Your aims for advertising could be to improve your brand’s awareness, to increase engagements with your brand, or to place your products and services in front of your prospects' eyes.
With Weibo advertising, you can specifically target your prospects based on specific demographics or psychographics. For this reason, you can run successful video, text, or image ads targeting your audience.
With a well-researched brand persona, Weibo advertising should give you a positive ROI. To learn more about Weibo digital marketing, check out this Weibo guide here.
Weibo advertising cost
The cost of advertising on Weibo is about 1,500 dollars for 1000 impressions (CPM).
Weibo advertising can be categorized into the following types:
Fan headline advertising: these types of ads are shown on your brand's followers and fans' timelines.
Fan tunnel marketing: this Weibo advertising type can be used to target any Weibo user, not only your fans and followers.
Weibo banner ads: these types of ads are placed as banners alongside a user's organic contents hence blending in well and making them good for marketing.
Weibo search engine advertising: these ads enable brands to bid on keywords so that when a user searches for a particular keyword, their brands can show up.
To be sure that you are getting a positive ROI for your advertisements, you can work with an experienced Weibo advertising agency
IV. Weibo Search Engine Optimization (Weibo SEO)
How to do Weibo Search Engine Optimization.
The first step of Weibo SEO is bidding for keywords that you would like your brand to be ranked for.
After doing this, the next step would now be to deveop content, products and categories based on those keywords.
This will enable your brand to be found or shown to Weibo users who type those keywords.
V. Weibo Key Opinion Leaders (KOL)
In China, key opinion leaders (KOLs) can really help boost a brand’s awareness and sales. The KOLs in China can be socialites, musicians, internet influencers, or thought leaders.
They hold so much power to influence sales and brand awareness of a brand, that you cannot afford not to find a suitable one for your brand to incorporate into your Weibo marketing strategy.
2. WECHAT
WeChat Marketing Strategy in China
WeChat is the most popular and most used social media site in China, accounting for over 1.24 billion active monthly users on the platform.
This huge popularity of the platform in China makes it an indispensable marketing tool to add to your arsenal of digital marketing strategies in China.
What is WeChat?
WeChat is a Chinese messaging, video streaming, voice-messaging, and photo and video sharing app. It’s equivalent to Whatsapp in the West.
WeChat for business
WeChat works as a marketing tool by allowing companies and businesses to create WeChat business accounts. Once you sign up, your account will be activated.
This will allow your brand’s followers to view your content posts, like videos, pictures and texts.
Tips for successfully marketing your brand using WeChat.
Open a WeChat official account for your business. This will give your business advantages like: audience targeting, brand awareness, WeChat Advertising and earning customer trust.
Post helpful, relevant and engaging content. Quality content that is relevant to your audience will help you raise your brand awareness and engagement with your potential clients.
These content can be in the form of video, text, or images.
Be consistent and reliable. It’s not just enough to post content once in a while. You will need to be consistent in order to reinforce your message and brand.
Work more on your branding. Chinese consumers are known for trusting and wanting to deal with brands. Your own brand will make you more authentic, genuine and trustworthy.
Use the WeChat advertising feature.
The weChat advertising feature is vital for your marketing strategy in China. Its targeted marketing campaigns make it extremely helpful in driving sales and gaining customers for your brand.
How will you use WeChat to market your products in China?
Customer targeting is one of the most notable and powerful marketing features on WeChat.
Advertising on WeChat
The microtargeting features in WeChat will allow your brand to target prospects based on both target audience psychographics and demographics.
With WeChat Advertising, you can target potential prospects based on their location, age group, income status, job type, gender, likes, and habits.
On WeChat you can have 3 types of accounts: official account, business account, and corporate account. Each of these types of accounts has its own unique advantages.
For more in-depth information about marketing on WeChat, check out this WeChat digital marketing strategy in China.
3. BAIDU
Baidu Marketing Strategy in China
Baidu is the most popular search engine in China. It is the equivalent of the Google search engine in the west.
Here are a few tips to help you make the most of Baidu as a marketing tool in your overall digital marketing strategy in China.
I. Effective website design UX/UI
Just like Google and Bing search engines, Baidu search engine drives traffic and ranks higher websites with better user experience and user interface. This is because their algorithms are designed to give priority to websites that would give a positive experience to a user.
As you begin your Baidu marketing strategy in China, which would start with creating a website, learn more about setting up a good UX and UI website.
This will help your website rank higher in Baidu.
II. Baidu SEO marketing Strategy in China
The key to a successful Baidu SEO marketing strategy in China begins with quality keyword research.
The advantage of well-researched keywords to be used for Baidu SEO marketing in China is that they will enable your brand to bid on only the most valuable and relevant keywords related to your brand.
Focusing on only the right keywords will save you so much time and effort in your Baidu SEO marketing strategy.
This is because competing for such keywords means that if you win, you are assured of only quality and qualified traffic to your website.
III.Baidu digital advertising in China
Baidu is a very powerful advertisement channel for businesses in China, with over 6 billion queries performed on the platform every single day.
Imagine how fast and big you could grow your company if you could take advantage of such a large number of queries related to your business in China.
Types of Baidu advertisements
Baidu SEM. Baidu search engine marketing is divided into Baidu pay per click (ppc), ad search advertisements and Baidu PPC display advertising.
Baidu Ad Search marketing in China
With this type of advertisement model, you bid on the keywords you would like your brand to appear when a Baidu user types those keywords into their browser.
This is one of the easiest and quickest ways to start getting traffic to your site.
If you are just getting into the Chinese market, this could be your best way to begin getting some traction for your business.
Baidu display Ads marketing in China
For Baidu display ads, you can retarget any prospect that may have come into contact with your ads, website, or products.
This marketing strategy is really valuable because, at this stage of your marketing strategy, you know that the prospect is already aware of your brand and may be familiar with your products.
At this point in a buyer's journey, the prospect has more trust in you because he/she knows your brand.
This is where you warm up your prospects to buy your brand’s products and services, making this marketing stage vital for your overall marketing strategy in China.
IV. Baidu Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing strategy works hand in hand with the Baidu SEO marketing strategy.
Once you have all your keywords that you would want your brand to rank for on Baidu, then the next step is to develop quality, valuable and relevant content for your target audience in China.
For your content marketing strategy to succeed in China, you will also need to develop your brand’s tone and messaging.
Baidu content marketing strategy in China relies more on consistency and reliability with your content. You will have to turn up to listen to your Chinese audience's content and information needs.
Your content should be able to guide your prospects from information seekers to your brand’s buyers.
V. Baidu Website Optimization
And finally, after working hard to implement your Chinese marketing strategy and you now have traffic to your website, the next thing in your marketing strategy in China is to optimize your website.
Baidu website optimization is important to help convert your traffic into customers as well as help in gettting more traffic to your website due to the nature of Baidu's algorithm.
What you should focus on in your Baidu website optimization marketing strategy should be your website speed, website conversion rate, mobile friendliness optimization and UX optimization.
More resources for a winning marketing strategy in China.
Tips for implementing Xiaohongshu digital marketing strategy in china
Douyin digital marketing strategy in china
Conclusion
Depending on your preferences and the uniqueness of your business you will need to choose the best entry marketing strategy in China that will suit your needs.
If you feel overwhelmed by all the things you have to do to have a successful entry into the Chinese market, you can work with an experienced digital marketing company in China, SODA Global Marketing will help you develop and implement you own unique and effective digital marketing strategy in China.