Somebody asked me for some general advice on how to use social media for B2B marketing in China.
I’ll answer that here. This is a beginner-level post for marketers with little to no experience with China.
Now for some details about the project. The company in question provides environmental services to other businesses. It’s a large business, but has a small online presence in China. Let's call them “AB Envirobots”. (Just “Envirobots” is taken already!)
Ten years ago, Chinese students learned English in traditional ways like reading books, listening to tapes and going to English corner. It’s the digital era now! The way that Chinese students learn English has changed greatly! They are now much more inclined to learn English online.
In addition to the cheap price, the most important advantage of online learning is convenience. With a computer or mobile phone, everyone is ready to learn English, and the quality of learning isn’t much different from offline learning.
So you’re entering the China market soon. Should you hire an in-house team to do the marketing or hire an agency?
I’m interested in your opinion, please leave it in the comments. First I’ll share my own.
I’ll share some of the pros and cons of each method, including a few hidden risks you might now have considered. Finally, I’ll talk about hybrid approaches.
This blog post is written by our lead social marketer Estrella Yang.
This is a very common question from clients. Yes, everyone can promote their brand with China’s most popular social media marketing tool - WeChat. But using a verified WeChat official account will help you stand out.
Recently, a well-known technology blogger Keso posted a WeChat moment, saying "the WeChat official accounts pay-to-read feature is a little bit late, but it's finally coming".
His post attracted everybody's attention and then he said, the specific launch time still remains unknown, but Pony Ma (the president of Tencent) said it would be ready right away.
I’ve had the chance to see a lot of different organizations expand their marketing reach to China, and I’ve carefully watched the different organizational structures they use.
The two most common structures I see are functional and geographical.
By “functional”, I mean that the organization is broken down by marketing channel. The organizational chart may look something like this:
Weibo's "Fan Connect" advertising platform is one of our favourite promotional channels nowadays. It's quite powerful, but only when used properly.
The reason Weibo advertising is so powerful is that you can target users based on a variety of factors, and then spread your message via their social connections. When a Weibo user's friend likes, shares or comments on a Weibo Fan Connect ad, they'll see the ad too. Chinese Internet users respond very strongly to brands that their friends like.
As a consumer in both Canada & China, sometimes I come across Canadian brands that seem like they could be very successful in China. But why aren't the trying harder?
Perhaps the most iconic Canadian-style brand to Canadians, Tim Horton's seems like an easy match for China.
We’ve been involved in over 200 Chinese-language marketing projects for foreign companies. There’s definitely a pattern behind the successful campaigns, and that pattern has shifted a bit in the 8 years I’ve been specializing in Chinese-language marketing.
For our updated 2016 model, we break it down into 5 “keys” to implementing a successful marketing campaign in China. I’ll start with the 3 keys that most of the Western marketers that contact us tend to agree with, then move on to the less obvious, but still very important, final 2.
Sogou is the third most popular search engine in China. When it comes to ad formats, it tends to follow the lead of Baidu.
Sogou’s default format includes a title and 2 description lines.
The length of the title is limited up to 50 characters. Each description line is limited to 80 characters.
