Marketing in China? Never Ignore China Online Marketing

Chinese Media consists primarily of television, newspapers, radio, and magazines. Since 2000, the Internet has also emerged as an important communications media which is under the supervision of Chinese republic. Hence, Chinese media landscape now has become increasingly comprehensive.

Intense competition for the media market is among the most important factors behind the emergence of more diverse and autonomous media in China. As indicated earlier in this study, efforts by the Chinese media to respond to an increasingly demanding print and broadcast market have created an expanding spectrum of media products ranging from serious news journalism to purely entertainment stories. According to one estimate, advertising in all media forms increased 35-fold between 1981 and 1992. Print ad revenues jumped ten times between 1990 and 1995—from 1.5 billion yuan to 15 billion yuan.

According to a Chinese overview of all media marketing cost, the growth of media advertising marketing is higher than GDP growth before 2014 and Inflection point shows, the ads quotation starts to decrease after 2014.Regarding to the brands and advertisers, the proportion of Chinese digital marketing and terminal promotion costs has kept rising in corporate marketing. TV still has the most advertising budgets, and the digital media take the second place in advertising budgets. It can be expected that in the future, brands will be promoted in a cross-media way with various media channels combined as an integral portfolio.

As to the new media marketing approaches in China, Weibo marketing and Wechat marketing have increasingly demonstrated their significance in the domain of China online marketing.

Lots of international companies have already tasted success on the most popular social network in China by carrying out Weibo marketing compaign. In 2011, Tourism New Zealand signed up multi-award-winning Chinese actress Yao Chen as their brand ambassador in mainland China. At the time she had more than 40 million Weibo followers. During a tour of New Zealand she sent out regular ‘tweets’ about the country to her social network. They resulted in nearly half a million visits to a microsite that was the focal point of the campaign. On its webpages were images of the actress, video messages, airfare packages and links to New Zealand tour operators.

Another key online marketing methods are SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing). In China, since Google became inaccessible in China, Baidu, the most popular Chinese search engine, currently holds around 60% of the desktop market and close to 90% on mobile, making Baidu SEO and Baidu SEM critical in online marketing.