With a strong rebound projected for the China economy, this report highlights national marketing trends and investment focuses with the goal of helping advertisers, publishers, agencies, and more strategize for China's ever-changing marketing landscape in 2021.
Multinational brands- Generally, yearly budgets are typically at around 100,000 USD on the low end and over 1,000,000 USD on the high end which can cover full digital scopes including SEM, PR, Website, Social, and Media.
Creating campaigns or specific promotion- The budget will be dependent on which channels are used for promotion and what kind of audiences the brand is trying to reach. But it’s important to remember, with any campaign, having a creative hook can be just as important as the total amount of budget allocated.
An average yearly marketing budget for brands of different sizes would look something like this:
Very small Brand at around size of 1-5 employees : 25,000 USD – 100,000 USD
Small Brand at around size of 5-20 employees : 100,000 – 300,000 USD
Medium Brand at around size of 20-100 employees : 300, 000 – 1,000,000 USD
Large Brand with more than 100 employees : 1,000,000 USD or above
In terms of launching a social media campaign, even a very small brand has to spend at least 15,000 USD. For a holiday promotion, it depends on the product category and the platform chosen, but the budget would be around 10,000 – 40,000 USD.
The calculator can produce estimates for top-tier down to micro influencers, across eleven social media platforms. Within a couple weeks of launching, the calculator has gained over 3,500 users.
Reason To Invest More: Millennials spend more time doing online researches in 2021
It’s also fundamental to create high-quality content because beautiful images and gifs as well as engaging storytelling have more possibility to attract the attention of consumers. And considering that nowadays Millenials spend more time than ever doing online research before purchasing, companies must pay more attention to content.
However, when Millenials do online research they don’t usually visit the company’s websites because they don’t trust very much information provided by the companies that want to sell their own products.
Instead, they usually check information about the products on other websites, look for them on articles, blogs, and conversations on Q&A forums. You need to work on these online spaces through SEO to be found by your target.
Reason To Invest More: Understand Your Audience & User Intent
Does your audience prefer text? Images? Video? Audio. Knowing this will all be more important than ever in 2021.
You need to understand what Chinese are expecting to find online and recommend your business based on the most frequently searched queries.
Consumer behaviour switches very quickly such as interests, tastes, and preferences of your audience change over the time especially these trying times. Without the smart insight, we are hardly able to tell which strategy works for your business in the short run and long run. Even if your Chinese website content is perfectly written and optimized, if it’s done for the wrong group of audience, it won’t make your business grow in China.On the contrary, if your site enhances the audience's journey, you’ll be rewarded by Baidu and your visitor will invest more time to understand your business.
Reason To Invest More: The Booming third tiers cities market is more lucrative in 2021
Over many years, companies have invested their resources in the first tier cities, where there is the highest concentration of high income population. Recently, many brands have understood that the market in lower-tier cities has developed because people in these cities are becoming richer.
Many luxury brands began to invest in lower tier cities to leverage the new purchasing power, especially the younger population, that are more curious about new trends and products.
According to Baidu’s big data, the market of third tier-cities has particularly increased. This factor is very important because it highlights the high potentiality of these areas where competition is much less strong.
Reason To Invest More: Localize Business Social Media To Increase Consumer’s Loyalty
We definitely recommend launching a campaign by creating a landing page for the Chinese market to increase conversion. You are able to add links to Chinese social media accounts including WeChat, Youku, Sina Weibo, Baidu maps and so on will help with a guarantee of a better conversion. Brands with an existing Chinese social media presence should incorporate links or QR codes to those sites on webpages. Those without accounts should still add “share” and “like” buttons to shareable content platforms to increase social traffic and crawl speed.
WeChat still dominates the social media landscape in 2021. Official account is not sufficient enough to attract attention these days. WeChat is the most frequently used tool, preferable over the phone and QQ. To make WeChat an integral part of your China digital marketing strategy, you have to think about more than just quality content, consider using WeChat to communicate with prospects, such as creating a QR code for people to easily follow your account or generating a conversation window so visitors can quickly connect to your customer service.