What is Baidu Zhidao

Baidu Zhidao (百度知道) literally means Baidu Knows is a Chinese language collaborative Web-based collective intelligence by question and answer which is built and run by Baidu. Like Baidu itself, it relies on self-censorship in order to keep in line with government regulations. It uses user-generated content and is moderated by platform administrators. Any content related to pornography, commercial advertisements, or direct personal attacks are routinely removed.

The test version was launched on June 21, 2005, and turned into release version on November 8, 2005. In essence, Baidu Zhidao is a question-and-answer-based platform, similar to Quora or it’s ugly cousin – Yahoo answers.

A registered user asks a question in which other members are promoted to give answers using credits as a reward. In the meantime, these answers focus on the search result of the same or relevant questions. That is how knowledge is collected and shared.

Question and answer together with the search engine makes it possible for a member to be a producer and a consumer of knowledge, which is often referred to collective intelligence.

Unlike Baidu Baike, the entries in Baidu Zhidao can be manipulated much easier. Large number of entries are questions and answers often created by the same person using multiple accounts. The platform also often turns to a battleground between brands. It is often too easy to damage competitors’ reputation by posting negative content about their specific brand or product.

Baidu Zhidao Marketing Options

First step in marketing with Baidu Zhidao is to research what type questions, that are relevant to your company, have already been asked or answered on the platform. Then you should try to provide the most objective and informative answer with the goal to get upvoted and ranked higher.

Needless to say, it is never a good idea to disclose the fact that the answerer may be associated with that particular company. Obviously, answers from non-biased participants would enjoy greater degree of trust compared to “corporate” ones.

Just like with Baidu Baike, marketing with Baidu Zhidao can also involve Baidu display ads. While there is no guarantee that your ad will show up for relevant search terms, it is still important to update the setting in Baidu Tuiguang (Baidu Adwords) account and adjust the bidding to maximize those chances.

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As China’s largest search engine, Baidu handles approximately 3.3 billion queries per day. In comparison, Google is only slightly ahead with 3.5 billion queries per day globally. Unlike Google, vast majority of Baidu searches come from China.

While Google’s top search results often feature links to Wikipedia, the top results of Baidu searches are very likely to show links to Chinese equivalents of Wikipedia – Baidu Baike along with another high authority site, Baidu Zhidao. Both of them also happen to be Baidu properties.

Considering how the search results on Baidu are structured, it becomes important for brands to have content published on those platforms. If relevant, such content has a good chance of getting some exposure in Baidu top search results.

Let’s have a closer look on those platforms and marketing opportunities with Baidu Baike.

What is Baidu Baike

Baidu Baike (百度百科), which literally means “Baidu Encyclopedia” is a Chinese language, collaboratively-built, web-based encyclopedia that is owned and produced by the Chinese search engine Baidu. The test version was released on April 20, 2006 and within three weeks the encyclopedia had grown to more than 90,000 articles and surpassed the number in Chinese Wikipedia. From January 2018 Baidu Baike has more than 15.1 million articles.

Baidu Baike also contains food recipes, film products, internet programs and video games, as well as their encyclopedic content. However, unlike Chinese Wikipedia, Baidu Baike never gives a strict definition of the difference between an encyclopedia entry and a dictionary entry, which is why there are many explanations about diction and common phrases.

When it comes to locally registered companies, a lot of information is generated by Baidu automatically. There are some data that can be updated manually but the company must first claim the ownership of that page in order to edit it. All updates are subject to approval by platform’s administrators.

All editors need to register an account before editing, and administrators filter all but the simplest edits before they go public. A phone number registered in mainland China is needed to register a new account.

Baidu Baike Marketing Options

There are two main routes for marketing with Baidu Baike. First, the company should claim their page to get editor access to it. This will offer an opportunity to make such page more informative. However, the editor must first register with the real name and local phone number and provide company’s authorization to the platform.

The second method of Baidu Baike marketing involves using Baidu display advertising to increase chances that the company ad would be shown with the relevant search entry. This route requires a company to register Baidu advertiser’s account.

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Just one year after its launch in China in 2013, Evernote was already claiming 4 million users. Last year, China has become its second largest market with reported 20 million users. Yinxiang Biji, it’s Chinese company, has recently announced its plans to go public in China.

In fact, Evernote has succeeded where many famous Western tech giants, such as Google or Facebook, have failed miserably. So, what was it that they were doing right? Let us break down main factors of Evernote’s remarkable success in China.

Navigating around Chinese censorship

Evernote has always stressed its main functionality as a private data storage for individuals, not a social platform and broadcasting service. Although, the original version does include some social functions such as note sharing, they have been either removed or played down in the Chinese product. This enabled Evernote to stay away from troubles with China’s powerful internet censors.

Speed and functionality

The company has realized that the key to good usability in China is the speed of synchronization and access – the core of its functionality. Keeping data centers in US would severely impact connection speed and turn away potential users, making it impossible to acquire critical mass of local early adopters. Hence the decision to setup local data center, which was also its first one outside of US.

Privacy assurance

Company’s CEO, Phil Libin, has published a letter assuring subscribers that Evernote takes securing the privacy of user data in China very seriously. The letter emphasized Evernote’s adherence to its three laws of handling user data by making it personal, protected, and portable.

Employing social media

Evernote quickly embraced Weibo and WeChat, two most popular Chinese social media platforms. The company has also been publishing its own blog filled with useful tips about efficient usage of its services while tailoring the message for the local audience. The blog was encouraging users to write about their personal travel experience with connection to Evernote apps – another good example of user engagement.

Localized customer service

When it comes to Chinese users, Evernote quickly understood the importance of speedy and high quality customer service . The company has been recognized for its efficient response to issues and complaints, both through social media, like WeChat channel, as well via chat on their website.

Successful choice of brand name

Evernote has made a smart choice in picking its Chinese brand name that proved to be an excellent fit on many levels. Evernote’s Chinese name is Yinxiang Biji (印象笔记) and can be translated as “memory notes”. Incidentally, the name also incorporates character 象, an elephant, that is used as Evernote’s logo. The name is both memorable and descriptive of the core functionality of the service.

Integration with local services

Part of Evernote’s China localization strategy was releasing API for integration with local apps. As a result, along with its support for traditional services like IFTTT and Pocket, its Chinese product integrates local services such as WeChat, Weibo, Duoguo (a restaurant guide website) UC browsers and others.

Localized Evernote Market

Most recently, Yinxiang Biji has launched its local version of Evernote Market store with products specifically selected and marketed for Chinese customers. Evernote’s fully functional web-based outlet was noted for its good user experience and original offers. It also itegrates Alipay as its online payment solution.

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The number of surveys indicate that Chinese are increasingly looking toward foreign brands at the expense of Chinese brands for everything from food and cosmetics to airlines and hotels. This means more opportunities for foreign companies considering increasing their foothold in Chinese market and winning more customers at the expense of the local competition.

According to the surveys, China’s food and entertainment industries are at the bottom of the “brand trust scale” while local technology firms are perceived as the most trustworthy brands. In retail, Western companies Nike and Zara enjoy the best reputation, however in grocery market, consumers show more price sensitivity. For instance, Taiwanese grocery chain RT Mart is doing well on the brand trust and overall value while British Tesco is leading among Western grocers in China.

Remarkably, large number of Chinese brands in retail are still perceived as not delivering enough value, even at throwaway prices. As a result, consumers are willing to pay premium for Western branded products as long as the price difference is reasonable.

Companies should learn to engage with their customer from the senior level. A company’s president or a CEO should be able to come out and address important issues head on.

Apart from the food safety scandals, social media has been playing increasing role in shaping brand perception of local products and companies. Chinese netizens are typically more likely to leave negative comments in social media following disappointing experience as opposed to writing raving reviews if the experience was positive. This situation often leads to brands falling out favor very quickly, especially if a company fails to address its social media crisis fast enough.

In one of the episodes of Thoughtful China program, Chinese consumers’ trust was the topic of discussion between several participants across number of industries. The interviewer was asking questions about the best ways of building brand trust, manage brand reputation and respond to crises. Below is the summary of the answers that made the most sense to me:

Companies should learn to engage with their customer from the senior level. A company’s president or a CEO should be able to come out and address important issues head on. Communication by senior level management would build trust and put such company on a different level of engagement with its customers.

China is still largely a relationship based society which explains the phenomenon of KOL (key opinion leaders) in the social media – individuals whose opinions are held in high regard by the large number, sometimes hundreds of thousand, of followers. Building relationship with KOL in the area of company’s operation is extremely important for brand reputation management.

Company should consider cultivating internal KOLs, the process that takes time and requires close engagement in social media. Once again, company’s CEO with enough charisma could be the best candidate for KOL. Chinese customers are very likely to appreciate such company’s efforts to build direct relationship with consumers from the highest level.

Chinese consumers tend to put more trust in large companies that are viewed as more reliable. In the West, on the other hand, people are more likely to distrust big corporations. Communicating the size, global reach and long history of a particular company will actually be beneficial in China in terms of brand perception.

Consumers in China are becoming increasingly demanding for greater social responsibility from companies they deal with. Issuing periodic social responsibility reports by such companies, as it is common in the West, will also help in building better reputation and, ultimately, solid and sustainable brand trust.

Overall, local brand trust situation in China shows signs of improvement, partly due to increased pressure from the government on corporations to become more transparent. Also, China’s market is still young and, since building trust takes time, foreign brands with established history and track record are likely to still stay ahead of local competitors for some time in the area of brand trust .

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Building a Chinese website for a foreign brand maybe not be as straight forward task as in the case of other markets. Thanks to a unique nature of Chinese internet and various market specifics, brands must modify their approach for establishing China web presence.

Here is the comprehensive list of 15 points to consider for building Chinese websites for brands.

#1 Use native translation for Chinese website

While using native translation should be the obvious rule, a surprising number of foreign companies still cut corners on this one. It should go without saying that companies should always use professional translators to repurpose the original content for a Chinese website version while also making sure that they are proofread by native Mandarin speakers.

#2 Remove links to blocked social media

While re-purposing landing pages for Chinese market, many companies forget to remove standard links to their social media accounts that are inaccessible in China anyway. The links to company Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram links won’t work anyway and but those broken links may also significantly slow down Chinese website loading time. Ideally, a page loading time should not exceed 5 seconds, although that is often hard to achieve with overseas hosting (more on it below).

#3 Optimize your Chinese website loading time

Loading time is almost always an issue for sites hosted outside of China. Unfortunately, without local business registration, hosting in China will not be possible. The next best option would be to get a hosting in Hong Kong. Some Hong Kong based hosting providers would often advertise “fast China route” options without physically having to host on the Mainland’s servers.

Alibaba Cloud is a popular hosting solution that is cheap and easy to sign up for. However, make sure that you select Hong Kong based servers when buying their hosting package.

#4 Embed videos from local platforms

Embedded videos which are hosted on YouTube or Vimeo won’t be displayed in China (see #2). The solution is to setup an account on YouKu, Chinese YouTube equivalent, upload your video there and link to it from your Chinese landing page. However, one should keep in mind that free YouKu accounts will often display pre-roll ads to Mainland visitors. The solution is to opt to paid YouKu accounts or find an alternative video hosting platform that isn’t blocked in China.

#5 Integrate share buttons and links to Chinese social media

If you already have Chinese social media presence on Weibo, YouKu, WeChat or other platforms, make sure to include links to those sites on your Chinese website. As there is no such thing as a “WeChat link”, your Chinese website should display official account’s QR code. This will not only demonstrate to your visitors that you have an established local presence but will also help in getting more followers to your Chinese social media channels.

If your website includes sharable content, make sure to include sharing buttons to Weibo and WeChat that do not require having an account on those platforms.

#6 Localize the contact form

Most website nowadays offer some type of subscription form to collect visitor’s email and other data. What is often missed is localizing such the forms by making sure that all the fields are properly translated to Chinese and don’t have any original English field names which can confuse visitors.

Also, keep in mind that while your English form may have separate fields for first and last names, Chinese equivalent would typically use just one name field for both the surname (one character) and the given name (one or two characters).

#7 Optimize for mobile

Mobile optimization of a website is extremely important for Chinese market as most traffic comes from mobile devices anyway. It’s essential to use responsive design for your Chinese website ensuring that it displays correctly on most types of mobile screens.

You may consider a separate design for a mobile version of the site to pack the most essential info “above the fold” and minimize scrolling and clicking text links.

#8 Live support

Having been spoiled by Taobao, China’s online consumers often expect instant live support for Chinese website. This is especially true for ecommerce or website that offer services.

One of the most critical components for a successful conversion of online consumers is being able to communicate with them in real, or almost real time. Luckily, there are many options available for such live chats that can keep track of the conversations and capture users’ data at the same time. Companies like Alibaba offer their own chat solutions that can incorporates into other sites.

#9 ICP License for Chinese website

If your company is registered in China, it is eligible to apply for ICP (internet content provider) license. It would allow you to get hosting in China that helps improving Chinese website loading time as well signal to your users that are in full compliance with the local law.

The ICP license number should be displayed in the footer like this:

#10 Subdomains or multiple domains

Chinese search engines generally dislike subdomains – something that is very common with multilingual websites. For example, you should avoid setting up en.mysite.com for English and zh. mysite.com for Chinese. Baidu prefers to have different languages on completely separate domains. For example, if www.mysite.com is your main site, www.mysite.cn could be its Chinese language equivalent. This makes it harder to maintain, however, if you want to rank high on Baidu – do not use subdomains.

#11 Using robot.txt file

Another Baidu quirk is disfavoring robot.txt file – Google’s standard way to communicate with search engine crawlers. This is the most common way to tell search engines which pages should not be crawled. For the purpose of your China web presence, those specific instructions should be set in .htaccess file or in server settings. This is another reason to use separate domain for your Chinese site (see #1).

#12 Domain names

Baidu ranks .CN domains higher than the equivalent .COM and.NET. As .CN domain registration is open to foreigners now, there is no excuse not to grab it. Also, once you have established you China web presence and your brand becomes well-known, chances are that .CN domain may become the target of internet squatters. So, if it is still available, register it now.

#13 Blacklisted keywords

If your site uses any of the blacklisted keywords, it will be deindexed by Baidu and probably blocked from access too. Wikipedia keeps updated list of blacklisted keywords that are mostly related to politics but keep in mind that the list may change quickly triggered by specific current events. In any case, staying away from politics in China is probably a good idea anyway.

#14 Using iFrames, JavaScript and Flash

Similar to Google, Baidu can’t crawl iFrames and Flash content. Although Google is getting much better in crawling JavaScript, Baidu is still pretty much blind to it. This means that any of your SEO content should not be in JavaScript which also includes navigation drop down menu. This is why it is a good idea to have a duplicate footer menu that is not JS based. As for iFrames and Flash – they belong to history anyway.

#15 Keep it Baidu-friendly

Due to frequent connectivity problems, Baidu’s crawlers won’t index pages that are too deep in your hierarchy. Keep your website’s architecture flat and accessible.

Anchor text should of course be in Chinese. They should also match the keywords being used on your website. Baidu is quite strict about this and may penalize sites where the anchor text and keywords are not in sync.

Don’t count on Baidu finding your site quickly – it’s better to submit it manually. Since, Baidu doesn’t have an equivalent to Google webmaster tools, the website has to be re-submitted every time there is a major change. Here is the link to Baidu submission tool.

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In this post, we attempt to summarize various pros and cons of having your site hosted in China.

The pros of hosting in China

Loading speed

Having a site hosted abroad, especially on the servers that are geographically remote, often affects loading speed. This, in turn, will most definitely hurt the ranking on Baidu, the main Chinese search engine. In addition, slow loading tends to turn off users resulting in increased bounce rate. By hosting a site in China, the loading speed will definitely improve.

Another reason for sites that are hosted overseas to load slower has most likely something to do with various filters related to censoring. An easiest way to see it is to load the same site with and without VPN, thus bypassing the Great Firewall. In most cases, the difference would be fairly apparent.

Geo-targeting

Although, most search engines like Google  assign less weight to a physical location of a site these days, one should keep in mind that Baidu is always a couple of years behind with their search algorithms. It is very likely that all other factors being equal, a site with the local domain (.cn or .com.cn) and with the local IP will be ranked higher than a foreign one.

The jury is still out on how much server location and .cn domain affect Baidu search results but, in my opinion, it still does quite a bit.

Minimizing risk of being blocked

It is often said that even if your site is hosted overseas but you are making sure to steer away from politically sensitive or illegal topics, you should be fine. However, there is always a risk of being unlucky enough to share a server with a site that gets banned by the government. There were instances in the past when some “innocent” sites got blocked just because they happened to be on a blacklisted server. It is, however, much less likely to end up on such server in China due to much stricter oversight over local ISPs.

The cons of hosting in China

Hassle of obtaining ICP license

Every site that is hosted on a Chinese server is legally obligated to obtain ICP license (Internet Content Provider or ICP备案 in Chinese). It is a little number that is usually displayed in the footer of every Chinese site. All websites with their own domain name that operate within Chinese borders are required to obtain that license, and China-based Internet service providers are required to block the site if a license is not acquired within a grace period. ICP licenses are issued at the provincial level and the application period may take up to 3 weeks.

Substandard local ISPs customer service

If you are used to customary high level of tech support by Western hosting services, you may be quite disappointed in China. HostGator type of support is quite few and far between, not to mention language problems. I’m sure that the situation will continue improving but, in the meantime, prepare  to lower your expectations.

Questionable value of .cn domains

Search ranking apart, having a .cn or .com.cn extension may not improve a click-through rate as some might expect. In fact, it is often noted that .com domains still command higher authority than the local ones. It may be especially true for the Chinese who may even distrust .cn site in favor of .com or .net one.

Ideally, you could own both .com and .cn domains and, incidentally, Chinese government now allows foreigners to register and own them, which was not the case until most recently.

In conclusion, my advice would be to focus on your site performance, most importantly, loading speed. Then, based on that, decide on the optimal hosting location. If you conclude that the loading speed difference is too large to ignore, than consider hosting in China. Alternatively, you may want to explore a possibility to host your site in Hong Kong or Singapore which are geographically closer to the Mainland and have plenty of excellent ISPs with English support.

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First, let start with the definition of – a landing page (or LP) is where your potential customer “lands” first after clicking your link in the search results, social media or an email. Making sure that landing page design is clear, focused and the content is easy to understand is the key in converting visitors to customers.

Before we look at the specific guidelines that are relevant to building a Chinese landing page, let’s make sure that the general page structure follows best practices applicable to all types of landing pages.

Let’s start off with a quick rundown of those guidelines that are applicable to all types of landing pages:

• Having clear and concise headline up top
• Strategic placement of a large and distinctive CTA (call to action) button
• Using interesting and visually appealing images
• Making sure that the main text clearly explains the offer and is going from general to detailed description as the reader moves down the page

Now, let’s list the specific requirements for Chinese landing pages along with the common mistakes that companies often make in creating them:

Chinese landing page design: do’s and don’ts

#1 Use native translation

While using native translation should be the obvious rule, a surprising number of foreign companies still cut corners on this one. Re-purposing original landing pages for Chinese market by using machine translated text or simply relying on low-quality translations would make such landing pages completely useless and counterproductive.

Always use a professional translator to write proper copy for your Chinese landing pages and make sure that they are proofread by native Mandarin speakers.

#2 Remove links to blocked social media

While re-purposing landing pages for Chinese market, many companies forget to remove standard links to their social media accounts that are inaccessible in China anyway. Not only those Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram links will appear broken and wouldn’t even display an icon, they will significantly slow down Chinese landing page loading time.

Ideally, a page loading time should not exceed 5 seconds, although that is often hard to achieve with overseas hosting (more on it below)

#3 Optimize your Chinese landing page loading time

Loading time is almost always an issue for sites hosted outside of China. As long as your company doesn’t have a local business registration – hosting in China is not permitted. The next best option would be to get a hosting in Hong Kong. Some Hong Kong based hosting providers would often advertise “fast China route” options without physically having to host on the Mainland’s servers.

Alibaba Cloud is a popular hosting solution that is cheap and easy to sign up for. However, make sure that you select Hong Kong based servers when buying their hosting package.

#4 Embed videos from local platforms

It is often a good choice to have embedded videos on a landing page, however, if it is a YouTube one – it won’t work in China (YouTube is one of the blocked sites).

The solution is to setup an account on YouKu, Chinese YouTube equivalent, upload your video there and link to it from your Chinese landing page. There is one caveat here however – the video will be preceded by an advertisement and those are notoriously long and can even run for up to 90 seconds. The only way to play videos without pre-roll ads is to sign up for a paid YouKu account. Although not cheap (currently RMB 5,000 per year), it would make sense to purchase if you are planning to host more videos on the platform in the future.

The last tip about the videos – if they are in English, make sure to either provide a Chinese voiceover or, at the very minimum, Chinese subtitles.

#5 Integrate share buttons and links to Chinese social media

If you already have Chinese social media presence on Weibo, YouKu, WeChat or other platforms, make sure to include links to those sites on your Chinese landing page or, in the case of WeChat, display official account’s QR code. This will not only demonstrate to your visitors that you have an established local presence but will also help in getting more followers to your Chinese social media channels.

In case you didn’t yet setup those social media account in China, at least include sharing buttons to Weibo and WeChat.

#6 Localize the contact form

If your Chinese landing page is designed for collecting users’ data, make sure that the contact form is properly translated to Chinese and don’t leave any English field names to avoid confusion.

Also, keep in mind that while your English form may have separate fields for first and last names, Chinese equivalent would typically use just one name field for both the surname (one character) and the given name (one or two characters).

#7 Optimize for mobile

Mobile optimization of a landing page is extremely important for Chinese market as most traffic will come from mobile devices. It’s essential to use responsive design for your Chinese landing page ensuring that it displays correctly on most type of mobile screens.

Once the landing page is displayed on a small mobile screen, it is critical to make sure that most relevant information such as the headline and CTA (call to action) shows up “above the fold” rather than relying on users to scroll down the page.

#8 Test, test, test

Finally, your Chinese landing page is ready to go live and now you can just sit back and relax. If only that was true… The fact is that you can never be 100% sure that your page works correctly unless you, or someone else on your behalf, would test it from within China.

Although, there are some online tools available to test loading speed and accessibility of sites in China, they cannot be relied on completely as they wouldn’t show common display problems, broken links or other errors. Therefore, it is best to have someone to test your Chinese landing page in China using inspector browser option (F12 hotkey in most browsers) to note and record any errors and loading time.

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This post is the first one in the upcoming three part series covering basic market research in China.

Baidu Search

Due to a number reasons, the familiar digital marketing tools, which are mainly run by Google in the Western markets, are not available in China. Google search engine market share in China has fallen below 1% this year and all the Google services, such as Google docs, Google maps, Google analytics etc., have also become blocked from access. This fact alone is making life quite difficult not only for marketers but for regular citizens and businesses.

Luckily, there is an alternative and it is Baidu (baidu.com), the largest Chinese search engine with about 60% market share.

In fact, just a few years ago, Baidu was much more dominant reaching about 80% of the total search market. Since then, other popular services became more competitive and managed to grab larger market share away from Baidu. Those platforms are 360 Search (haosou.com) and Sogou (sogou.com) holding somewhere around 30% and 15% respectively as of the end 2014.

Here I will be mainly focusing on Baidu but, in principle, other search engines are fairly similar and can also be used for the purpose of basic market research.

Just like with Google, your basic research can start with a simple search term of a product translated to Chinese. Now, a word of warning, I strongly advise against using Google Translate or other machine translation program for that. You must find a native speaker to verify the term that you are interested in.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you are interested to search for the term “sunglasses”. Here is what Google Translate would return:

Unfortunately, even though the translation may technically be correct, no one in China actually uses the term太阳镜.

The proper term for sunglasses is太阳眼镜 and this is what you should be using for Baidu search. Once again, Google Translate cannot be relied upon even for a translation of simple keywords, let alone complex “long tail” ones.

Anatomy of a typical Baidu search results

Here is an example of a Baidu search results for the term “sunglasses” (太阳眼镜). Paid results are typically grouped at the top and on the right panels like in the example below:

Compared to a typical Google search results page, with Baidu, it is somewhat harder to tell the difference between paid and organic results. In fact, the only thing that indicates paid ads would be a small word “推广” at the bottom right.

For popular keywords, there would be very few organic results (if any at all) on the first results page.

Next, you would typically see results from Baidu-owned sites like Baike (equivalent to Wikipedia) or Baidu Zhidao (Chinese “Yahoo answers”).

News related results would be ranked next followed by the results from ecommerce sites. Interestingly, links to the largest ecommerce platforms of Alibaba, Taobao and Tmall, would not be shown at all. This is the result of the fierce competition between Baidu and Alibaba.

Finally, closer to the end of the page in this example, you can finally see a few organic results followed by another block of ads:

What can you learn from Baidu search? First, you can immediately see the level of competition in your intended market. If there are many paid ads, be prepared to compete with those advertisers for the same keywords.

Next, you will be able to learn who the main competitors would be and what they are offering. It’s a good idea to go and see their sites, explore the offers, sales strategies and distribution channels.

Finally, basic search would give you a better sense on whether it would be wise to invest in Baidu pay-per-click (PPC) or SEO to get ranked organically. I’m going to discuss those choices in more details in the future posts.

Stay tuned for the upcoming post on how to perform basic market research with Chinese online marketplaces.

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International education in China: facts and trends

The main reasons behind increased demand for international education are internationalization of labor, the rapid growth of academic mobility at the higher education level, and the increasing dominance of English as the language of business.

International education in China has been mainly the market for the children of expatriate families. Government regulations have been holding back the development of this sector for locals which, potentially, could be practically unlimited. Therefore, 410 international schools in China have mostly been teaching foreign children or those from mixed marriages where one parent is a foreigner.

Dulwich College has been one the most well represented international schools in China with facilities in Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Zhuhai. Presently, every single first tier city and larger number of second tier ones, have at least one American and one British school and their numbers keep growing.

Some of the most well-off Chinese parents go as far as obtaining for their offspring passports from African and Caribbean countries which are used for the sole purpose of qualifying them for international schools. This is why it is not uncommon to come across Chinese kids with Gambian or Senegalese passports enrolled in some of those prestigious educational institutions.

Moreover, international education in China is also one of the most expensive in the world with fees reaching $40,000 per year for high-end Shanghai and Beijing schools. Such price level is already comparable to tuition fees of top Western universities.

Trying to tap into this lucrative market, increasing number of private Chinese schools are now offering international curriculum for locals. Students in such schools can choose to opt out of traditional Chinese programs in favor of English based ones in order to boost their chances of enrolling in top Western universities.

There are also signs of authorities gradually easing their strict rules with regards to international education in China. One of them was a relatively recent relaxation in the regulations for Sino-foreign school partnerships. If the regulations are eased further, and given Chinese students’ demand for overseas universities,  the market will most certainly grow further.

Considering Chinese parents insatiable drive to invest in the their children education combined with the means of large number of them to do so, international education in China is well on the way to become the largest market globally.

The post International Education in China first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post International Education in China appeared first on Sampi.co.

The book explains in great details two main platforms that, today, are “must haves” for every digital marketing strategy – WeChat and Weibo. The book is filled with helpful tips and plenty of examples of successful strategies that work, Ashley’s book, which she shared with us prior to the its official release this week, is a must read for anyone who is serious about getting into Chinese market.

Here is more about the book:

Marketers who have struggled to capitalize on their Chinese social media presence can rest easy, with the launch of new book “Unlocking the World’s Largest E-market: A Guide to Selling on Chinese Social Media”. In response to growing interest in the world’s biggest e-market, author Ashley Galina Dudarenok has consolidated her 12 years of professional experience in digital marketing in China into an easy-to-read business book.

China has the world’s largest e-commerce economy, with revenues of 7.57 trillion yuan (US$1.17 trillion) in 2017. Hong Kong has strong business ties with China, yet many local brands and small business owners have an incomplete understanding of Chinese consumers and the online channels to reach them. There’s an increasing demand to learn about digital strategies and tactics specifically for the China market but current books on the
subject often lack practical solutions. Seeing a gap in the market, Dudarenok decided to publish a book not just for brands seeking to enter China, but also for those who want to expand their presence in China and those who provide services to Chinese tourists abroad.

“Unlocking the World’s Largest E-market” is now available on Amazon.com and Kindle. From Feb. 5th to 10th, you can purchase the ebook for $0.99 and the paperback for $5.99.

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