Targeted marketing is the way to go in China

By Matthew Kwan, Principal Consultant, Adams Company Limited | Jun 17, 2011

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According to a CNNIC report released in January 2011, China’s Internet users reached 457M users (out of 1.8B in the world) at the end of 2010.  In addition, www.news.cn reported in May that the total online purchase in China in 2010 hit RMB498B. 70 percent of those deals were done online on www.taoboa.com.

Did these figures impress you?  Despite the impressively huge market in China, you can actually reach your desired customers with a targeted approach which traditional media cannot provide you with.  You can reach groups by age, sex, education background, job titles, interests, living standards, etc. according to the demographics provided by various databases.  You can utilize multiple chanels of communication ranging from the online medium to emails, text messages, display advertisements, social media sites and the like to reach your target customers.

The ecosystem and players in the Chinese market are very different from the rest of the world, even from Hong Kong.  As such, you would really need to pick the right tools and channels carefully.  Otherwise, in China you may end up spending a lot of money without achieving your objective.  It's simply because the sheer scale of this country is just too large.
 

Chinese penetration strategies

With an intimate understaing of these Chinese challenges, Adams Company has been working extremely hard to aggregate excellent channels for companies to penetrate their traget groups in the Chinese market. Here are a few options you may consider:

1. Baidu Search Engine
Customers can publicize their company, products, brands, services using the No.1 search engine in China, Baidu.  Other than advertising, Adams  also help their customers to create an online presence on Baidu related products including Baike (Wiki), ZhiDao (Knowledge), TieBa (Forum), KongJian (Blog) and so on which have proven to be very effective.  The daily budget for advertising is as low as RMB 50 per day.

2. D&B Direct Marketing
D&B Hong Kong, one of the largest customer database companies in the world, has over 100 years history.  They can provide very detailed and comprehensive database of both consumer and business service, through which you will be able to reach your customers in China via direct mailing, e-mails, SMS, MMS.

3. China Post Direct Mailing
Adams is also helping customers sort their most relevant target audience by specific critieria such as province, city, area, street, estate to uniquely identify customers.

4. China Online/Internet Payment
You can also engage popular internet payment gateways in China, where you can both collect money and make payments with ease.  The one time setup charge is as low as HK$3000.

5. China Toll Free Direct Call Number
Adams is a partner of the ONLY official distributor of the China Toll Free Direct Call number company in Hong Kong that can provide a PRC telephone number which can be routed to Hong Kong or anywhere else in the world.  This would certainly increase your accessibility to the Chinese market and improve your customer service levels in China.

Exciting times for mobile marketing
We see exciting trends in mobile marketing and there are many opportunities to promote your services and products through this new channel and media.  We now partner with various mobile coupon websites that allows you to upload your promotional items for less than $1500 per item for mobile phones (iPhone, Android, Nokia…etc) to download.

In the same vein, we also help our clients advertise on the Google network to promote their messages and advertisements on mobile ready websites.  The coverage is not only huge but also targeted. You may choose the type of websites you want, the gender and age of the target audience and so on.

In the last few months, Adams Company has been actively working with major telecom carriers in Hong Kong to help our customers do targeted and location based SMS text messages to select customer segments. We sent text messages to people with a mobile phone bill of over HK$500 with a history of international roaming charges using their Blackberry Phones. We were even able to target those whose office is located in Central, Hong Kong. For a country like China, you can do without targeted marketing campaigns.