How to Market Yourself to Recruit Chinese Students

“Study abroad”becomes a trend in Chinese society. Every year over 400,000 Chinese students will go abroad for study–more than any other country. In recent ten years, the number of returnees graduated from college overseas has risen rapidly. Most of these students prefer to seek higher education in western nations like USA, UK and Australia.

8 out of the world’s top 10 universities are in the US, so it’s easy to see why the US ranks top 1 country for Chinese students. The latest trend reveals that American elementary schools (or primary schools) and high schools (secondary schools) show growing popularity with Chinese parents as well. In 2015-2016 school year, 91,215 Chinese students were heading to UK for higher education, making them the largest group of non-EU international students in the UK. Besides, there are over 140,000 Chinese students in Australia as of March 2017, accounting for 30% of all Australia’s international students.

Here are some tips to attract Chinese students who have an intention for overseas study.

1.    Baidu SEO

In China, if one wants to learn some information about oversea study, he/she will first turn to ‘Baidu‘, China’s NO.1 search engine. If your courses and university cannot be found in the search results, then you are simply invisible in China, regardless of your reputation outside of the country.

2.    Tailor Your Content to Chinese Market

You should make sure that you have a Chinese version of your website and don’t forget to optimize it on Chinese search engines. All content is suggested to be translated into simplified Mandarin Chinese.

It is wise to focus on courses like English, Business, Management, International Relations and Mathematics, because these courses remain the most popular ones and are widely searched on Baidu.

3.    Cooperate with Service Agencies Online

As the growing need of studying overseas has no sign of slowing down, more service agencies appear online which can help take care of all the paperwork for students. It is no surprise that people are getting suspicious about school information that they learn from the Internet and some of them prefer to ask their personal network to get any relevant information.

4.    Social Seeding

Nowadays young Chinese are increasingly connected with social media. In order to get information they need, students would first of all try to get them from social platforms online, such as WeChat and Microblog. As an education institution who tries to attract Chinese students, you’d better have presence on the mainstream social platforms, where even Chinese parents now are using them to networking.