Did you know Chinese tourists are now the hottest demographic in the global travel industry? Why? Two reasons: China's millennials (ages 18 to 35) make more trips abroad and spend more than all American tourists combined!
"Chinese tourists are the most powerful single source of change in the tourism industry," said Taleb Rifai, secretary general of the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), as reported in the South China Morning Post.
Here's a list: KFC, Nike, BMW, Apple, Levi's, Microsoft, and Starbucks; what unites them? Not only are they examples of western brands in China who have managed to win both Chinese consumers' hard-earned yuan, but also, significantly, their hearts (though not all of them achieved this without issue… more on that later).
Google is blocked in China, and there are several locally-grown search engines that took its place.
Baidu (百度) is the clear market leader with over 78% of the overall market.
If you ever wondered if it’s possible to promote your products in China using channels established by other people, then the answer is: yes, it is possible. There are two ways to make it work; option one is working with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) – which we talk about here. Option two is affiliate marketing, which, in China, means working with an affiliate network, similar to a popular affiliate called LinkShare used in Western countries.
Of the Western companies that contact us with questions about search engine marketing in China, it seems about 95% of them are only thinking about Baidu. But Baidu isn't the only search engine in town. In fact, we've had some killer campaigns on Qihoo's 360 Search (360搜索) as well.
Douyin (抖音 or Tik Tok) is the short-video app everyone seems to be talking about in the recent months- especially in China. In September 2017, the app celebrated its first birthday and in the first quarter of 2018, it became world’s most downloaded app for iOS (Google Play is blocked in China hence there is no accurate data for Android). In Japan alone, the app has been downloaded more times than Facebook.
Some time ago we decided the pictures on our website deserved a makeover – they hadn’t been changed for years. Over time we all got even prettier, so why not show it to the world, am I right? ;-)
We always ask our newsletter subscribers what they struggle with when it comes to Chinese digital marketing. Recently, one of them said: “We are not exactly struggling in China, we do a great job.” If it were a scene in a movie, the music would go silent and all the faces would turn to him. We definitely wanted to know more! And we’re sharing their example with you now.
For the past few months, we live-streamed our China marketing trainings on Yingke. We did it mostly for fun, to play around with live-streaming which is becoming more and more popular in China. We’ve used this marketing channel while working with our clients and we decided to give it a try as well.
If you're planning to enter the Chinese e-commerce market, should you consider using a standalone website based on Magento? And, if you do, what do you need to do to be successful.
Today we interview Jing Zhou, Business Director of TMO Group.
