Four Trends in Destination Marketing in China

Destination marketing is the practice of promoting a city, a region, or a country to attract more visitors. Until recently, most destination marketing was done with traditional media: print, public transportation, television and social media.

Trend 1: TV shows, for example, became a new form of destination marketing.  “Where Did Daddy Go?” – a documentary/reality series that puts Chinese celebrities in challenging parental situations – greatly increased visitor numbers to locations featured in the show, such as Snow Village in the remote northeast and Jiming Island off the coast of Shandong.

Trend 2: Baidu wants to use new forms of display to help destination advertisers raise their ads’ visibility and click rate, such as creative writing, graphics, and direct telephone bookings, because travel decisions are made based on more than rational factors, there are also emotional factors. Stirring up sight (pictures and video), sound (music), and other senses will improve marketing results. Search engine marketing (SEM) is the root; any methods that surrounds this root will continually get stronger, and one day it will grow into a towering tree. Users spend only seconds on a given website, giving advertisers very little time to make an impression. More than two billion ads are displayed on wireless devices per day in China, and Baidu alone works with over 800,000 active online advertisers. The result is that users are presented with an overabundance of information, leaving very little time to sift through it all.

Trend 3: Consumers are now engaging with travel information during their trip. Now destination marketing can’t just stop at promoting a brand and attracting visitors. It has to add faster and more convenient services, to help travelers make better decisions before the trip, to worry about everything they might worry about, to think of everything they might think of, and to offer solutions that meet their needs during the trip. Only in this way can you better accomplish the goal of attracting visitors.

Trend 4: Destination marketing in China is an endeavor of epic proportions. China boasts a staggering 1.25 billion cell phone users – over 90% of the population – and over 850 million mobile internet users, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. So how do destinations reach them all? The key to connect those consumers with the information and services they need is SoLoMo – social-location-mobile. This is a mobile-centric way of displaying local entries in search engine results, which is made possible by the GPS technology built in the smartphones and tablets.

In practice, it’s simpler than it sounds. One recent example was when Baidu teamed up with McDonald’s for a “Parkour Crazy Cherry Cone” promotion, which harnessed the power of SoLoMo to reach consumers on the ground level – literally.

“Baidu Maps would automatically send a push notification to users who were three kilometers or less from a McDonald’s Dessert Station, users could then initialize a search and click the cone image to instantly take part in it.

“After you got your cherry cone and shared it on a social website, it inspired the next person to take part in the event. The event got really good results, with a successful combination of SoLoMo.”