China’s $5 trillion market is huge and still growing. Digital marketing opportunities are among the most sophisticated in the world, but with great opportunities come great challenges.
China’s huge and fast growing market isn’t as impenetrable as you might have heard, but endless trends, inexperienced marketing teams, new privacy laws and fearless local brands make it a super challenging environment.
The Fundamentals Of Marketing in China
Is Marketing Fundamentally Different in China?
The short answer is NO.
China’s online world has been shaped by tech titans and their visionary founders just like the internet world outside of China. But China’s internet was built by an entirely different set of companies and founders. They built huge walled gardens with a contrasting set of rules and even different revenue streams. From overseas, this ecosystem sometimes looks completely different.
But why?
China’s Unique Internet Ecosystem
Due to the extensive censorship of Internet in China, the industry has been protected from much of the competition on the international arena. This has given the Chinese Internet ecosystem some unique characteristics.
With essential Western social media services blocked in China, copycats are effectively filling the gaps of a blocked foreign companies. However this unique ecosystem is also fostering truly innovative companies.
While China has its unique internet ecosystem, from search engine to social media, all the channels seem to be different from the rest of the world, the fundamentals of marketing in modern is no different to anywhere else on earth, or at any time throughout the history.
Philip Kotler, the father of Modern Marketing, explains in his book Marketing Management,
“Marketing is an administrative and social process through which individuals and groups obtain what they need and desire by the generation, offering and exchange of valuable products with their equals”.
All in all, the fundamental purpose of marketing is to create value for and build trust with customers. So when you expend your brand in the Chinese market, you just need provide value to your potential customer with the help of the right channels.
In this guide, we will explain China’s unique internet ecosystem, and give advices for companies planning to enter China. After you read this guide, we’re confident that you will have a better understanding about marketing in China and how to make use of China’s social media platforms. At the end of this article, we will guide you step by step to create your content distribution plans in the Chinese market.
Competitive Market
The social media market in China is highly competitive, with a number of domestic platforms vying for users’ attention. The two largest players in the market are Tencent’s WeChat and ByteDance’s TikTok (Douyin in China). Other popular social media platforms in China include Weibo, a microblogging site similar to Twitter, Xiaohongshu, similar to Pinterest but with extensive E-commerce feature, Douban, Zhihu, etc. All these platforms have a strong following among users and are used by businesses and individuals to promote their products and services.
Overall, the social media market in China is dominated by domestic players and characterized by intense competition and government oversight. Businesses looking to establish a presence in the Chinese market will need to navigate these challenges and adapt to the unique features and preferences of Chinese consumers.
In this comprehensive guide, we will explain the major social media platforms and how you can make use of these platforms to grow your business in the Chinese market.
WeChat is China’s most powerful social media platform with an extensive list of features. Its ecosystem is comprehensive, integrated and indispensable. Leaving home without it is like forgetting your key.
A Few Things Users Can Do In WeChat
- Chat with family, friends, colleagues and business partners.
- Consume content including videos, livestream, articles, news, games and much more.
- Moments feed: Similar to Facebook feed, but it’s very private, users can only see likes and comments under posts from people they are personally connected with on WeChat. Thus WeChat is a rather closed ecosystem.
- Collect and pay money online and offline
- Payment features includes topping up mobile credit, paying for utility bills, booking trains/hotels, buying movie tickets, ordering takeout, etc.
- Invest money and pay off credit
- Access to local city service
- Access to brands’ WeChat official accounts which is equivalent to official websites from brands.
WeChat As A Super App
WeChat is a platform for everyday use where a consumer can have all of their needs managed. It merges social networking, financial and E-commerce functions, but also provide access to third-party merchants. And so, they eliminate the need for users to download separate apps. With each new extension, it tries to get more attention, time and in turn make more money from a user. So, WeChat is not just another messaging app, it’s a super App to solve everything and it’s necessary for survival if you live in China.
How WeChat Can Help With Your Brand?
WeChat “Channel” For Video Distribution
Channels are algorithmically driven short videos, providing a rare opportunity to reach new audiences inside the WeChat ecosystem.
Just like with TikTok, the follower count is not that important – thanks to algorithms, the content can reach an audience beyond the Channel’s followers. Which means, even as a new brand you still have chance to make your videos go viral and received millions of views in the early stage.
Video is big — This has been said for years now, but video is now essential. WeChat Channels are constantly adding useful new features. Sure, WeChat as a video platform is unlikely to compete with Douyin or Bilibili, but Channels being inside the WeChat ecosystem create a seamless customer journey, which could help you quickly grow audience on WeChat.
Hacks & Tricks To Grow Your WeChat Channel
Just like on YouTube, quality of the content on WeChat Channel is also crucial. And a well planned cover image and title are at some level even more important than content itself. Making use of hashtags, location tags and tagging the relevant brands accounts in the copy can also increase the views. But at the end of day, the key to grow your WeChat Channel ist to truely understand your audience and provide value consistently.
WeChat Official Account
WeChat Official Accounts provide brands with a way to build a following inside WeChat’s walled garden — but you still have to understand their rules and follow them.
There are two types of Official Accounts on WeChat, and both limit how often brands can publish content as you can find in the above comparison table.
Key Statistics About WeChat Official Account
- Over 20 million active WeChat Official Account
- 80% of WeChat users follow at least 1 Offical Account
- 40% of WeChat users spend more than 30 minutes per day reading articles published by Official Account.
Tough Competition
According to research by QuestMobile, out of the 20 million OAs, 73% of WeChat users only follow up to 20 OAs. 41% of users follow Official Accounts based on recommendations from friends. Being on of the few accounts a user follows is therefore very competitive. But WeChat Official Account is necessary for any brand which want to be successful in China. Because WeChat Official Account is not only crucial when it comes to build a brand presence in China but also you will be benefit with WeChat’s built-in search engine feature which we will discuss soon.
WeChat Official Account Instead Of Email Marketing
Email marketing may be the B2B tools in the West, but these are less common in China. Email is useful for marketing in China, but it’s not as useful as it is elsewhere. In general, you can expect Chinese professionals to check their email when they’re at work. But the frequency in which they check their email might mean that you need to send them a WeChat message or give them a phone call to say: “Hey, please check your email.”
Many Chinese companies will not require potential customers to enter an email address in a lead generation form, instead they require user to login with and follow their WeChat account. Customers who opt into following a WeChat Official Account (OA) are engaged and invested in your brand and tend to be more receptive towards content posted. Treat the WeChat OA as a mini-website for your brand: use it share industry insights and updates on brand products.
But after all WeChat is controlled by Tencent, so we still recommend that most companies use email to send key communications and documents to potential Chinese clients, but don’t rely on email alone. Give Chinese customers additional contact options such as WeChat, QQ and/or live chat on your website.
WeChat Search
With more than 20 million WeChat Official Accounts publishing content, WeChat had a massive content library but no good way to search it. Currently, WeChat deliberately restricts outside access to content within its ecosystem, which mean people can not find content on WeChat with other search engines such as Baidu and Google. To help its users navigate this enormous amount of material, WeChat has been honing its native search feature, and in the year of 2017, WeChat Search was launched as a standalone search engine inside WeChat.
Why WeChat Search matters?
- 700 million monthly active users on WeChat Search (2022)
- 32% of WeChat users use it as their primary search engine
Data Source: https://socialbeta.com/t/interact-with-the-reader-about-wechat-christmas-gift-2019-1203
Indexed Content
WeChat crawlers index the following types of content:
- Posts on WeChat Moments
- Articles published by OAs
- Official Accounts
- Mini Programs
- Products and services
- Internet content via the Sogou search engine,
- 3rd party platform content from the following social apps: Zhihu (the Chinese version of Quora), Zaker (news), and more
How WeChat Search works differently?
WeChat Search doesn’t work like other search engines. Google and Baidu often prioritize ads and lead users to external pages, while WeChat Search adopted People Rank as the core algorithm mechanism.
But What is People Rank?
Developer from WeChat Search said that in the offline world, when people encounter question, most people will ask his trusted friend who has expertise in this field. “People Rank” is developed to recreate this scene online with the help of big data that WeChat already has. The goal of WeChat search is to provide users the most trusted information and solve the problem that most search engines have, which is having too many ads on the result page.
WeChat as a platform is huge and very complicated, so it probably takes more than 10 articles and 10 videos to explain its whole ecosystem. Therefore in this essential guite we could only write the most basic knowhow to help you get a better understanding about WeChat. In the future we will publish more articles and videos about WeChat, but now let’s move on to China’s second biggest social media platform: Weibo.
Weibo is China’s longest-running and thriving social media platform. It provides a place for people to gather online and discuss hot trending topics and thus presents brands with a wide range of opportunities to engage with customers.
Weibo was launched in August 2009 to fill the void after Twitter was blocked. Upon its launch, Weibo was quite similar to Twitter where it adopted all the core features: the 140-character limit, talking to other people using “@UserName” format, adding hashtags with a format of “#Hashtag#,” following other people to make his/her posts appear in users’ own timeline, and retweeting.
The platform quickly rose to prominence as an online space for public discourse and it continues to hold that status today. The platforms’ openness and emphasis to push trending topics to its audience is why many people still turn to Weibo to discuss, celebrate or complain about just about anything.
A Platform For Brands With Budget
In Q2 of 2021, Weibo made about 88% of their revenue through advertising. Being on the market for such a long time, their advertising platform is quite sophisticated and can yield great results, even with limited budgets.
An Easy Entry Point
The starting costs for Weibo are low and are based on CPM and CPE. This makes it a great place for brands just entering China and testing the waters to try out without investing a lot upfront.
Advanced Targeting
Weibo offers a wide range of different demographic targeting options, helping marketers really refine their advertising message. Brands can target based on: Age, gender, location, device, hobbies or interests, specific followers and competitors.
Boost Organic Growth
The openness and publicity of Weibo, compared to a platform like WeChat, allows paid ads to reach a wider audience than planned for. Anything that users engage with, comment and like, will live on the platform longer. And of course, it’s a place for brands to interact with their fans in real-time.
Tips & Tricks To Grow Your Account On Weibo
Weibo relies on ‘hot’ topics and searches (also known as hashtags). So, keep track of the trends and leverage them to your advantage. That’s the easiest way to gain more exposure. BUT do it naturally. If the topic doesn’t fit, then let it go; there will be another one.
Do not stick to text only. It’s important to use a variety of visual content in your updates, and the platform gives you quite a few options. You can also increase interaction by adding a poll, for example.
Visually, it’s a good idea to post pictures in groups of three. Actually, a very popular format is a photo grid of nine pictures. This may be nine different pictures arranged together in an appealing way or one picture broken down into nine pieces to draw more attention. You can also incorporate characters in the grid that could stress the CTA you used in the post. For instance, in the first picture below, the characters say ‘Share the post to join the contest’ (words you couldn’t otherwise include in the post).
Uploading a video is also a good option. Weibo allows both short videos (similar to Douyin) and longer ones. Once you add a video to your post, it will be automatically added to Weibo’s video platform and can be browsed (and discovered) by users.
Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu)
This app has an unusally name: Little Read Book. With only 5.3% of China’s Internet Users, how exactly Little Red Book has become one of the most favored platforms by brands and content creators?
Xiaohongshu’s Interesting Birth Story
Xiaohongsu’s birth was inspired by a surge of Chinese tourists traveling overseas and their increased spending – in 2012, Chinese tourists spent $102 billion while traveling (that’s 41% more than in 2011) and overtook Germans as world’s biggest-spending travelers. As more Chinese traveled abroad, they also discovered new products, yet unknown in China.
In 2013, the Xiaohongshu team launched the first iteration of the platform – which then was a simple PDF file. The founding team had gathered a handful of shopping experts to compile shopping guides for 8 countries or regions, and users could download the document for offline reading. The file had nearly half a million downloads within one month.
Seeing an opportunity, the platform founders launched an app shortly after, in the hopes of activating the “daigou” community and help them create UGC content for their platform.
E-commerce & Social Media Platform
As the Xiaohongshu platform community grew, the content also went through changes – product descriptions became more creative. Some Xiaohongshu content creators started becoming recognized for their unique tone of voice, and thus became key opinion leaders. Xiaohongshu also shifted from pure e-commerce, more to a lifestyle platform.
t’s worth notice that 90% of their users are yong femle and more than half of the users are from Tier 1 cities, which makes the platform a perfect home for beauty and fashion shopping & content consumption. While many hail it as an ecommerce platform, Little Red Book’s true strength lies in the user generated content it hosts, thus serving more as a discovery platform. Its similar peers from US are Pinterest and Instagram.
Best Platform For Influencer Marketing
Although Little Red Book doesn’t allow content creator to add outbound link in their app, for example, it’s not allowed to add your WeChat account or Website address in the profile, but Little Red Book has extremely high engagement rate compare to other more general type of social media platforms, which attracts huge amount of Brands to work with content creators directly. In this platform, even small content creators with only 5000 followers will be able to earn more money than having a normal full time job. By working closely with these micro influencers, brands get to spend their budget more efficiently and never have to pay a huge bill at the beginning.
Video Platforms
The video format is one of the most beloved content types in China in recent years, which created huge competition among video platforms. At the moment there are a few major players in this industry, but not yet any platform has been growing into a very mature status like YouTube does. In the near future, one of the following players might grow into the Chinese version of YouTube.
In this very complicated battlefield of video platforms, it’s important to understand some major platform and find out what’s the best way and the most suitable platform to distribute video contents.
In this article, we will discuss two very important types of video platform, which are Streaming Platforms and Shot Video Platforms.
In this very complicated battelfield of video platforms, it’s important to understand some major platform and find out what’s the best way and the most suitable platform to distribute video contents.
In this article, we will discuss two very important types of video platform, which are Streaming Platforms and Shot Video Platforms.
Streaming Platforms
- Each platform is a combination of Netflix & YouTube, allowing both user/brand uploaded videos, and they all have a subscription service for licensed content.
In the following chart, Bilibili might seem to have the lowest MAU among the four platforms, but it has the highest daily watching time. We think it’s the platform with lots of potential for both brands and content creators because of its rapid growth in the recent years, and also because it’s very similar to YouTube. So later we will give more details about Bilibili. As for iQIYI, Tencent Video and Youku are more traditional type of platforms with contents created by professional film or TV series making companies.
Bilibili (Similar To YouTube & Twitch)
When Bilibili was first founded, it mainly served yong people who are interested with four types of content: animation, music, games and life, and the content was relatively niche just like its Japanese peer Niconico. But in recent years, the platform has continued to invest in content construction, such as setting up more national animation, introducing documentaries, self-produced variety shows, self-research games, etc. In addition, through a series of measures such as investment, mergers and acquisitions, the whole industry chain of ACG expansion, the site content ecology continues to enrich, coverage of the population is also gradually expanding. Now Bilibili has changed its goal from building a community for people who are interested in anime, music, games and life to building a huge online entertainment community just like YouTube.
Difference Between YouTube And Bilibili
YouTube is a video consumption platform built through mesh social relations and various video contents, while Bilibili is a video exchange community based on the tone of interests. So in terms of content structure, YouTube is more non-entertaining and closer to the structure of a normal person’s information consumption in a day than Bilibili.
Bilibili, on the other hand, was built at the beginning to searve yong people with paticular interests (animation, music, games and life). Despaite of the fact that the platform has been successfully attracting people with all different interests in recent years, its user base is still relatively yong, only 5% of its users are above 36 years old.
Data source: https://www.fxbaogao.com/pdf?id=3140240
Bilibili Is Great For Life Related Brand
Life related videos account for 36.7% of the videos with more than one million views. Bilibili has also become one of the largest vlog communities in China. Data shows that the number of vlog submissions on Bilibili accelerated from 2018 to 2022, with a year-on-year growth rate of 244% as of Q2 2020. The content of the lifestyle area is diverse, advertisement and influencer marketing work very well for brands in industries such as clothing, food, housing, etc.
Bilibili, as an interest-oriented video community, attracts young people from different circles with ” interest “. Users are keen to learn skills or find fellow users on Bilibili, and are willing to pay more money for their hobbies. The vast majority of content creators have started commercial collaborations, but there is still much room for improvement in the number of commercial creations.
Bilibili is suitable for many types of brands to communicate with consumers, and brands can choose the right marketing approach according to their own development needs. It is worth noting that when co-creating with content creators, brands need to pay attention to the authenticity and value of the content. In addition, brands need to understand the cultural climate of the platform and can come up with content ideas from the perspective of popular topics and user needs on the platform, and must pay attention to the balance among traffic, contents and brand values.
DouYin – Much More Than Just A “Chinese TikTok”
Many often refer to Douyin as “the Chinese TikTok”, and while Bytedance presents both platforms as the same product, they are actually completely separate entities. If Douyin was born in 2016, then TikTok was a 2018 rebrand of another short-video app called Musical.ly, which had been acquired by Bytedance a year earlier. The app was already popular among teens in the US, and with its overnight rebrand and new UI, existing Musical.ly user accounts were migrated over into TikTok.
Douyin is available on the Chinese app store and only users with a Chinese phone number can sign up. The content on both apps is completely different, overseas TikTok can’t access the Chinese Douyin user content and vice versa. Douyin also has so many more features which are not available on TikTok, ranging from better live streaming, E-commerce and a geotagged services tab or “points of interest” (POI) section. Douyin allows uploading content of up to 15 minutes in length, while TikTok’s videos are limited to 10 minutes. There’s also significantly more professional user generated content (PUGC) on Douyin than on TikTok, meaning the production value of a video tends to be higher on Douyin. So while TikTok’s limitations are ideal for memes and challenges, Douyin’s content is often similar to what is found on YouTube.
Douyin Is Amazon In China?
E-commerce and short video platforms were originally two different species that would not have intersected much. In Western countries, people who want to shop will go to Amazon, and those who want to watch short videos will open TikTok. It’s yet difficult to imagine, more and more people would prefer to shop on TikTok instead of Amazon. However, in China, these two species have become more and more like each other in the last two years, and are accelerating to kill each other’s hinterland with clear intentions and resolute attitudes.
Alibaba (Parent company of Taobao and Tmall) is Amazon in China, which held 61% of the e-commerce market in 2019, but lost nearly 10% of its market share in the next two years. Who stole Alibaba’s market share? In the chart below we can see that Douyin and Kuaishou —— the two major short video platforms increased their market share by 9% in those two years. What is happening in the Chinese e-commerce market?
The biggest difference between Douyin and TikTok is the fact that Douyin has a live streaming function, and the biggest income of content creators is not from advertising or platform revenue sharing, but from the sales commission through live streaming. So Douyin was initially in partnership with Alibaba and JD.com, because at the time Douyin had a lot of traffic but lacked the e-commerce infrastructure to help content creators monetize, so it had to rely on the two major players of the e-commerce market Alibaba and JD.com. But this period of cooperation did not last too long. As Douyin grew rapidly, its desire to build a closed loop of e-commerce grew stronger, and it eventually “broke up” with Alibaba and JD.com in mid-2020, as their relationship began to move from cooperation to competition.
Alibaba also reacted quickly, and a few months later there was a “GangGuang” page on Taobao with a variety of interesting short videos related to products. Nowadays, if you open “GuangGuang” on Taaobaao, the amount of short videos might even make you think that you have come to another Douyin. (GuangGuang in Chinese could mean take a walk, or window shopping)
But today, we will focus on Douyin and how brand could make use of this platform to increase sales.
In order to grow your brand on Douyin, merchants need to master five elements: Content Creation, Products Management, KOL Management, Advertising and After Service.
① Content production: the core of Douyin account operation
Content is the core competency for merchants and brands to achieve long-term profit growth on Douyin. Content quality not only determines traffic, but also purchase conversion. Without good content, there is no way to get the snowball rolling. Therefore, merchants need to prioritize the ability to produce high-quality video that deliver value to the target audience, thus growing high-quality loyal fans in the laang term.
The fundamentals of content strategy on Douyin is very similar to the content strategy on TikTok, if you are interested you can find all the important Hacks and Tricks in this article: Drive FREE Traffic to Your E-commerce Store with TikTok – Step By Step Guide 2022。
② Product management: provide users with good products at reasonable prices
The core demand of most Douyin users is to have good products at reasonable prices when it comes to shopping on Douyin. Because Douyin users have high requirements for the quality of products, in addition to the brand’s guarantee of authenticity, it’s also important for merchants to do a good job in product quality control. Douyin is also strengthening its supervision in this area to protect the shopping experience and consumer rights of users while at the same time protecting brands and merchants.
Due to the quality improvement of Chinese brands in recent years and the change of Chinese people’s consumer perspective, there are many cases of big international brands going downhill in China. China is no longer a country blindly obsessed with foreign brands, so it is no longer easy to win in the Chinese market just by relying on “foreign titles”. But with the rising income of Chinese consumers and their pursuit of quality of life, more and more good brands are gaining consumer recognition in a short period of time through short video platforms like Douyin. The current environment of fierce competition in China breeds a lot of opportunities, the key is whether you can use these short video platforms to seize such opportunities.
③ Influencer marketing: integrate into the influencer ecology to increase business opportunities
Influencers are not only the core content creators, but also the bridge to consumers, so it is extremely important to understand how to find the right influencers and cooperate with them. Brands need to have multiple capabilities, from influencer filtering and negotiation, to data analysis and long-term relationship maintenance. At the same time, the influencer management team also needs to understand the brand, the product and the e-commerce business in China, while maintaining close cooperation with multiple teams such as content creation, branding and advertising to ensure a synergy that will drive business growth together.
④ Advertising: minute-by-minute precision placement
As a content-based interest recommendation e-commerce, the biggest difference between Douyin e-commerce and traditional e-commerce lies in the dynamic change of content. Therefore, the advertising team needs to be aware of the business objectives and the logic of advertising, but also needs to conduct real-time testing of the data performance of the content, to achieve minute-by-minute fine-tuning, in order to maximize the traffic guarantee for the operation of Douyin e-commerce.
⑤ Service guarantee: creating flexible services on Douyin e-commerce
As an emerging e-commerce platform, every consumption experience of users on Douyin is an opportunity to gradually build trust, and this trust needs to be maintained together by the platform and merchants. Therefore, a good pre-sales and after-sales service has also become the major focus that brands must pay attention to. The Douyin e-commerce platform has also established a series of store rating systems to provide a comprehensive multi-dimensional evaluation of merchants’ service performance and help brands better improve their service capabilities. The service score of the store has also become an indicator that needs to be focused on in the daily operation of the merchant, as it will affect the merchant’s referral traffic acquisition and many other rights and benefits.
So far we have discussed the main strategy of growing your brand on Douyin, but since there are so much more hacks and tricks about Douyin worth talking about, so in the future we will create more articles and even videos with regards to Douyin.
Finally we reached to the last and the most important section of this article: How to distribute your article and video contents?
Effective Content Distribution
There are so many social platforms in China which makes it very complicated, and each platform has its own attributes. Therefore it is very difficult to delivery cotents across all the platforms, and thus it’s important to choose the right platform. But, how exactly shall we choose a few suitable platforms and efficiently customize the content for each platform?
Regarding platform selection, we think the most important things are user size, user attributes, the brand’s industry and the type of content the brand wants to place.
Lastly, we suggest to customize your pillar content (article and videos) for each of the platform at the chart shows below.
Although social media environment and digital marketing in China seems complicated, there are many foreign brands have made it successful in China, so you can do it as well. If you have decided to enter Chinese market and need some advice or help, we are more than happy to provide you the information you need and cooperate with you in the long run. And if you are interested in reading more articles from us, leave a comment or send a message to us so that we can deliver the information you need!
