Chinese consumers are increasingly wary of untried products and ever more likely to make purchase decisions at the last minute. Recommendations from family and friends remain very influential. And television advertising is still a prerequisite for entering the market, but its punch is weakening. Meanwhile, print ads are losing ground, while sponsorships and the Internet are becoming more influential. Amid the growing din of Chinese marketing, connecting with consumers continues to be difficult and frustrating
McKinsey just released an update on their findings of Chinese consumers research. If you are one of those interested in the world’s biggest market, you should have a read. Here is a summary of the key findings: [Read more →]
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. —Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)
The states and Europe are too far from me; my limited understanding warms me of “pretending” to be an expert in those markets. I just want to share some thoughts on digital marketing (especially search) in Asia.
Marketers
I’ve worked with many marketers, few of which truly understand what digital marketing is. Some immediately shut down their mind from understanding it better once they hear terms like “html tags”. In their mind, digital marketing is mostly about “digital”, or “information technology”; ignore part of important total marketing strategies and think “digital marketing” is not their cup of tea.
Many marketers work with digital agencies; more often than not, communication and understanding each other are a problem. I saw marketers set up rules and formats of digital marketing campaigns who actually have little knowledge in digital marketing. A recommended way is to identify the right digital marketing company, set the KPI, and let them do the job without interfering too much.
Some companies (especially those to whom branding is critical) somehow realize the importance but find it hard to find the right person. They usually start to look for people with marketing background but few really have the capability for digital space. While, those with technical skills often have little understanding about marketing.
The right person. Who do you think is ideal for digital marketing role? I reckon, he or she should be a quick learner from marketing background (at least have a passion in marketing) who is willing to learn new things very quickly. Digital space is much more dynamic than traditional advertising and marketing, which requires constant learning from evolving channels.
Agencies
Big advertising agencies. Big advertising agencies don’t want to ignore the increasing popularity of digital media, but are not dedicated to this emerging media. I came across several big players who set up digital department, put one guy in charge who’s from traditional media, and try to cash in whenever they can.
They do have a nice and charming “face” which can give their clients confidence that THEY are the one who can help them do better in digital media. Can they? Who cares about the fact?
Digital agencies. Many digital agencies have realized the fact that, Asia, a big emerging market, is the new big place where they can possibly share a bigger piece of cake. Many digital marketing agencies have been born with very different level of capabilities.
The problem is, one person can set up a company, which is particularly true in China. Many Chinese SEM companies would call whoever they can (even a hair salon) to promote the service and get as much money as possible out of their pocket without caring at all who they can bring to the clients.
“Better” SEM companies in Asia (especially those came from western markets) know what is important to the clients: ROI focused. But, once you sign up, what do you think they really care about?
There are only few companies who truly care about their clients’ benefit and strives toward win/win situation. But the bad news is, few have the ability to make the right judgment about who is the best for them.
Relationship with the clients is essential to a digital agency; but in the long term, how you can continuously strive to add value can ultimately help stand out and make a real difference.
Search Engines
Google. Google is really good. They never stop innovation or improving their existing products. It’s really easy to advertise on Google. The biggest challenge they really face is themselves, growing too big makes people fear and become joulous.
Yahoo. If you are behind your competitor and run at a slower pace, it is even not theoretically possible to catch up. Without a tool like Google AdWords Editor, different accounts for different markets, different currency invoicing, … There are so much Yahoo can do to make their services better; it seems the No. 1 real competitor Yahoo is facing is themselves.
Baidu. Baidu seems to see the difficulties it has brought to itself by too much concentrating on profit gaining. It’s still a market leader (about two thirds of SEM market) in China; but, its technology is behind Google. The good thing is, Baidu is making progress. According to a friend in Baidu, they would probably launch the updated bidding system (what they call “Phoenix Nest”) at the end of Oct.
Experts
The current situation is, the smartest digital companies get the most money, not the best. I see too many individuals and companies who start to laugh at others and blame their limited understanding about search or digital; as a matter of fact, neither do they. It really reminds me of the frog-in-a-well story when I was in primary school. A frog sits at the bottom of a well and think the sky is as big as what they see.
It’s an education process which would take some time before people have the ability to make the right judgement about what “good” truly means. What you truly believe, I’m afraid, is the only thing that help you succeed.
Whether or not you are in finance industry, you are probably aware of the recentLehman Brothers and AIG incident; it’s been a turbulent week for them. Yesterday in Singapore, hundreds of anxious policyholders lined up in the hot sun outside the AIG Singapore offices. Hundreds more were already inside the offices of AIG and its wholly-owned subsidiary AIA. [Read more →]
comScore today released its ranking of the top search properties in the Asia-Pacific region based on data from the comScore qSearch 2.0 service, revealing that Google Sites continued to lead the region with 33.5% of the more than 27 billionsearches conducted in July. Baidu ranked second with 27.4% search share, followed by Yahoo! Sites in third with 19.7% share.
Surprised to see TENCENT and Sohu in the top 10 list. If you are a stranger to them, you should know: Tencent’s search engine is SoSo (”So” in Chinese means “search”) whose paid search is powered by Google; [Read more →]
Finally I’m back blogging! Came across this interesting survey done by CIC, below is a summary of the key findings. In general, Baidu market share slightly slips; surprised to see Sogou’s market share has rised.
China Search Engine Market Share Based on Daily Usage
Do your online contest yourself first and test it among a group of 5-10 people before you launch it to the crowd.
I chanced upon an online contest from a big printer brand. The contest is simply; just answer one MCQ of how long it takes to install the printer. And, the additional information only requires name, NRIC, contact number, gender, and email address.
Cool! You got a simple form to fill in, which won’t piss off impatient guys like me. But, the shit happens when I did a quick research online to try my luck.
I was lucky to find the answer from a guy’s review who purchased the printer, but it left me with a bad impression of this brand. “The install disc says the printer setup process will take about 30 minutes; I ran into a problem and ultimately spent nearly 90 minutes…
Clearly the answer is “30 minutes”; it takes a long time for me to forget the “answer”; but even longer to forget the fact, “90 minutes”.
Back from Tioman holiday for a while; just got some time to put together a post below to get you started using Google Insights for Search.
Google Insights for Search
Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.
Google recently launched this new tool called “insights for search” (overview here), which is similar to Google Trends. Let’s take a look at how this tool can help your business with some examples.
Brand Awareness. Take five P&G brands for example:
Simply separate different terms (brands) by commas, and you can apply any of three filters:
you can see the trends throughout different period and different regions as in Google Trends.
Competitor Analysis. Compare your product or brand related terms with that of your competitors and identify the trends to find out who is driving wider awareness in which market.
Popular Products Trends. For companies having launched many products under each brand like Apple iPod, it’s always good to checkout the most popular ones and the trends.
Industry Search Trends. By simply selecting the region, date range, and industry category, you’ll be able to see the related searches to the industry you’re in. Here is an example of telecommunications industry:
Seasonality comparison. For example, the graph below shows the search trend for “great singapore sales” (GSS) during mid-year GSS period (June, July) in Singapore:
Or, what you can do is to pick the whole year and compare the trends of one or a few generic keywords to identify the seasonality trends.
Geographic distribution. Know where to find your customers who’re interested in your products. See how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.
Campaign duration. When should you start a campaign and when should you end it? Use Google Search Insights to get some ideas. e.g. if you sell Christmas gifts, you want to know when you should start paid search campaigns and when is your “last opportunity” to promote; this chart shows you some ideas:
This post just gives you some ideas how to make use of Google Insights for Search for your business. Don’t bury your eyes with those numbers; instead, focus on the trends.
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 [W3C]
This document specifies Best Practices for delivering Web content to mobile devices. The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from such devices.
Web Analytics
Five Most Neglected Metrics: Go Beyond Clicks & Conversions to Optimize Campaigns [MarketingSherpa]
“A Top-5 list from MarketingSherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark Guide and experienced marketers who volunteered their favorites and tips on implementing them. Two major themes emerged: analyzing visitor behavior before and after a click; putting conversions into context to determine ROI.”
