4 Steps to Develop an Online Marketing Plan for China
Consider this approach to draft out your company's online marketing strategy targeting the Chinese audience.
Consider this approach to draft out your company's online marketing strategy targeting the Chinese audience.
At the end of each year, it’s normally the time to plan ahead for the following year’s marketing plan. Every CMO (chief marketing officer) or online marketing manager, especially those that have newly joined a business with an e-commerce website or a B2B website would be required to draft out their brand’s digital marketing strategy.
Step 1: Identify audience or potential customers for your brand
It’s about connecting the brand (product or service) with the right customers. The CMO or online marketing manager may have been assigned a job to market a brand to the Chinese market, but it’s important to identify the exact range of the brand’s potential customers:
To achieve this:
Step 2: Identify traffic sources that are suitable for your brand
An e-commerce site or B2B site always need traffic (or visitors), and subsequently some of these visitors would eventually convert into customers. It’s important to understand the traffic sources. Traffic source types may include:
To achieve this:
Step 3: Design your website for your potential customers
With a typical e-commerce site, your customers would engage with pages:
To achieve this, you may start with digging the appropriate data using Google Analytics (assume your site has Google Analytics set up) and focus on reports including:
Step 4: Design your customer relationship program (CRM) for your potential customers
Typically, you may have to spend 3-8 times more effort acquiring a new customer than simply keeping an existing customer satisfied. It’s important to regularly communicate with your existing customers, find out what they need and sell them what they want (need).
Newsletters via emails: A way to communicate the status update of your company, products, services and brand.
Promotions via emails: For example, communicate with your Chinese customers when your products or services offer discounts.
Loyalty program: With a customer retention program, you can roll out cashback, coupons, gifts, etc.
Mobile: Communicate to your Chinese customers about their loyalty program status, new promotions, and post-purchase information.
Customer care call center / service center: When your Chinese customers aren’t satisfied with your brand and may complain, you need a way for them to reach you (or for you to reach them), and solve their issues.