Every business needs to control its marketing budget, and in the current economic climate, it’s more important than ever to seek out those efficiencies. The good news is you can help to make your budget go further by making some smart decisions about how you structure your marketing and resource its delivery. Let’s take a closer look.

The challenge for marketers

Marketing is increasingly becoming a data-driven discipline, and the rise of digital marketing methods makes it easier than ever to track where tactical activities are performing – and where they aren’t. This can help marketers by allowing them to target and organise their spend to where it will achieve intended goals – submitting strong business cases for more budget, where necessary, and where a clear opportunity exists for more conversions.

But when marketing in China, the challenge is to track and measure marketing activity success when most of native platforms are in Chinese. Unless you have those native language skills, combined with the ability to understand and interrogate back-end systems of platforms such as Baidu, WeChat, Weibo, Douyin and others, it’s very difficult to gather the data you need.

Luckily, a Chinese digital marketing agency can help you to remedy this challenge.

How a Chinese digital marketing agency can help

Here are some ways that the right Chinese agency partner can help you to really extend your marketing budget – and to leverage it to the best effect.

1. Expert guidance on your marketing strategy

Whether you’re new to marketing in China or have existing experience, this is a hugely complex and rapidly-evolving market, with a vast number of digital platforms. It’s difficult to keep up to date with everything that’s going on in the Chinese digital world, and the customer market itself keeps growing and changing too.

For example, the lower-tier cities that your strategy might have ignored in previous years, are now becoming increasingly affluent, with young motivated customers who have plenty of disposable income and a desire to buy quality Western products.

If you’re not updating your market research and checking that your targeting, positioning and overall strategy are correct at least once a year, you could risk missing out on valuable opportunities for your brand.

A Chinese digital marketing agency can help you to identify emerging trends, possible new target markets and the right digital platforms for your marketing strategy. Sometimes these platforms will be smaller and ‘niche’ – but with audiences that vastly exceed Western equivalents, and which offer more cost-effective targeting in this country of 900+ million online users!

2. Assistance with measurement and evaluation

A Chinese digital marketing agency will naturally include marketing professionals with native Chinese language skills and the ability to work confidently with the back-end systems of Chinese platforms, from Douyin to Little Red Book.

This gives your business rapid insight into which of your campaigns are working, and which need adjusting for the best results. By harnessing agency expertise, this activity can be carried out quickly and effectively, with accompanying insights that allow you to optimise your campaigns quickly for the best results.

3. A flexible digital marketing resource

An agency partner also offers you the ultimate flexibility when it comes to resourcing your marketing activity. We work on a partnership basis with our clients to provide access to the Chinese digital marketing skills that they need but on a highly flexible, customised basis. This is far easier than trying to resource your own business with an in-house Chinese digital marketing expert, especially one with native language skills.

By using an agency you get immediate access to skills, delivery expertise, a wide range of services and a cost-effective means of acquiring the skills that you need without the time and running costs of a permanent, in-house team. Even better, we can flex our support to match your changing needs at short notice, offering you complete flexibility and scalability around your business demands.

4. Tactical tweaking

By using a highly experienced Chinese agency partner, you also get to fast-track your tactics, with effective ‘tweaks’ that make them perform better and which avoid more expensive projects later down the line. For example, you might benefit from reworking your mobile-friendly website UX to factor in the different journey patterns Chinese customers take online. This action alone can make your website perform better, without the need to create a new one.

Equally, an expert Chinese digital marketeer might identify that you could achieve better results by adjusting your campaign keywords on Baidu to avoid competing with bigger brands and to target a profitable niche. These adjustments can stack up benefits quickly and more than justify their investment – whilst keeping your budget tightly under control and avoiding waste.

5. Contacts

Perhaps the other powerful way that a Chinese digital marketing agency can help your budget go further in 2023 is by accessing and leveraging networks and contacts in China, especially when it comes to booking and negotiating KOL relationships and other types of service.

Effective negotiation techniques can often unlock better pricing arrangements and favourable marketing terms, and a deep understanding of Chinese business and cultural practices goes a long way to achieving these outcomes. Again, native language skills help greatly too and can help to fast-track these relationships for the quickest benefits to your bottom-line results.

Find out more

Market Me China is here to assist you with every element of your Chinese digital marketing campaign, with services that include market research, Chinese PPC advertising, Baidu SEO, social media marketing and KOL marketing, ePR, website localisation and translation and copywriting services, marketing strategy development and plenty more.

We work for clients across all industries, delivering integrated digital marketing campaigns that yield real results. Our team is friendly, helpful and extremely flexible and we can work in a way that best suits your unique business needs. Please contact us in the first instance to find out more about how we can help you to enjoy Chinese marketing success in 2023!