Any digital marketing agency specialising in China will give us the same (mandatory?) recommendations if we want to be successful in the market.
- You need to be on WeChat, Taobao, Weibo, Pinduoduo, Douyin, etc.
- You must have a Baidu-optimised website, integrated with multiple advertising platforms and a set of mini-apps.
- You have to use dozens or even hundreds of KOLs (Chinese influencers), create endless amounts of short videos, engage in live streaming, build parallel worlds in the metaverse, etc.
Do we really have to do all of this? >> NO!
Do we have to do some of these things? >> YES!
A Chinese website, with a .cn domain name, is a good idea, because it makes things much easier on Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google.
Be careful, it involves various regulatory commitments, so legal assistance will be necessary.
It makes sense to have a presence on WeChat, because of its daily use by hundreds of millions (!) of Chinese consumers. And because it is a unique ecosystem, incomparable to anything we have in the West.
It is full of mini-apps, replacing perhaps half of the apps that a Western consumer has on their mobile phone.
Ubiquitous, in a nutshell.
Being in the rest of the above-mentioned applications really depends on our ambitions, the segment we are targeting, the product we offer, our budget and many other criteria.
Maybe Douyin (the original TikTok) is a good option?
And let’s not forget live streaming, to which we already devoted some space in a previous Newsletter, a phenomenon that really ‘exploded’ just two, three years ago and which commands huge budgets.
To get an idea of the complexity of digital marketing in China, just take a look at the last image in this article and ask yourself honestly: how many applications do I really know from this list?
If the answer is ‘less than five’, maybe it’s time to seek professional help in the Chinese digital world!
Source: https://sekkeidigitalgroup.com
