Whether a realistic business proposition or not, China is the one country that nearly everyone in business at one time or another has considered as a target market. Its scale and opportunity are hugely enticing, and it is human nature to compare business practices of China and the UK. For those involved in marketing, and digital marketing in particular, China presents a different World – some of it old and some of it ahead of what those in the West are used to.
As many Western brands have found to their cost, the similarities are nowhere near close enough to simply overlay what works in one country onto the other. But the one thing in common is that you have to treat consumers as individuals.
The starting point for Western companies is to understand that their brands have a significant advantage over indigenous product manufacturers and service providers. The high levels of perceived reliability, and huge interest in the West are embedded brand attributes. This applies to both B2C and B2B markets.
The web can be used to emphasize these attributes. But if there is no web presence, or the presence does not meet cultural or commercial expectation it can be extremely damaging to brand equity. This is because the Chinese use the web to research purchases far more than counterparts elsewhere. They like content heavy websites, and frequently look beyond first page search results. And the absence of a website indicates a lack of respect for the buying audience.
The key point in creating web presence is to understand that appending Mandarin pages to a UK website does not work. Pages will not be visible on Chinese search engines. It is therefore necessary to have a localized microsite built from the ground up with Chinese browser habits, design/UX standards and consumer persona in mind.
For accessibility, the website must be hosted within the Chinese Government firewall, or over a Content Delivery Network (CDN), otherwise loading times may be slowed to the point at which the site becomes inaccessible. An ICP licence is also required from the Government for all business websites, but obtaining one is a matter of formality.
The 500 million plus Chinese Internet users are far more likely to access the web from a mobile device. What they use it for most in both B2C and B2B sectors is exchanging and researching product information. In particular, social media is used far more when making purchasing decisions. In the luxury sector 80 percent of purchases are made based on peer driven social media recommendation.
A key difference in China compared to the UK is that there is a much broader demographic that use the Internet on a regular basis. There are no age, social or income groups that do not use it more intensely than Western counterparts, and all are highly influenced by peer recommendation. They want to learn about value, but also learn about the latest trends and fashions. The latter applies to high ticket items in particular.
Although there are equivalents to Facebook, Youtube and Twitter – all with their own unique functionality, there are also high volume niche social media platforms such as Kaixin, which is used primarily by high income professionals and Douban, which focuses on culture, film and music. This allows marketers better targeting opportunities with social media messaging.
Paid search (PPC) is a powerful tool in China, but it does not work in the same way as in the UK. The biggest difference arises from the language structure. This fundamental difference directly affects the bidding of keywords and optimisation/structure of accounts. For example, ‘phrase match’ on Baidu (the Google equivalent in China) acts more like ‘modified broad match’ – broad match modifier does not exist yet on Baidu PPC.
Also, ‘broad match’ captures far more queries due to the complexity of the Chinese language. Other extensions such as Baidu Brandzone is also unique to the Chinese search engine.
SEO also works differently in China. Baidu spider is still not as powerful as Google bot, and generally does not crawl deeper than three levels within website structures – sites that have thousands of pages that index on Google might only have hundreds that index on Baidu. The ranking algorithm is also different on Baidu. Many western brands do not even have first page visibility for their own brand names – this is primarily due to Google centric SEO strategy that does not work on Baidu.
The key things to remember about digital marketing in China are that browsing and social media habits are far more intense. This presents brands with great opportunities to engage with consumers and influence purchasing habits in the short, medium and long term. Combined with the generic interest in all things to do with the West it gives UK companies a very effective means of engaging with consumers.
