5 – Not Having Your Team Engaged
I often see businesses that want to enter the Chinese saudi arabia number market. But instead of having their CEO and other high-level people involved, they pass it on to a frontline marketer. These marketers often already have full workloads.
For example, they might already be responsible for something like Google search advertising, and now they have to figure out how to run ads on Baidu. While they may be very good at what they do, China is too big for them to spearhead alone.
It’s best to approach the Chinese market with a team.
CMO at the top (English/Chinese bilingual).
Chinese Marketing Leader
RoW Marketing Leader
Why give Chinese marketing so much importance?
China and RoW are so different for marketing purposes. If you’re entering anywhere else (e.g., Canada, Vietnam, India, Egypt) you’ll be running on the RoW rails: Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. Whereas, China has Baidu, WeChat, Zhihu, Bilibili, etc.
What’s more, these platforms do not always line up one-to-one with the RoW platforms.
Our teams often play the role of the Chinese Marketing Leader for the key phase of market entry and expansion. Then we team up with several people on the client’s side:
The global marketing leader.
For big businesses, a regional marketing leader also works well.
For small businesses, sometimes it’s the founder that we work with directly.
Salespeople that work with Chinese customers.
Creators of English-language content. We take that and transcreate it for the Chinese market.
Advertising managers or other marketers that work on the RoW campaigns.
Conclusion
In these tips, I kept returning to the importance of speed and decisiveness.
I didn’t consciously or intentionally set out with this in mind, but they were themes that kept coming back around as I wrote—and these were the value of speed and decisiveness.
That emerged organically, and I’m glad it did. If you went to Shanghai, Nanjing, or other big cities, you would feel it on the streets too. It’s just “go go go” in China, and that’s the way you need to move too.
This is not an exhaustive list of everything that could go wrong. Surely there are other potential mistakes to be made in business areas other than marketing.
Nevertheless, I hope this list of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen helps you avoid some of them, and move your marketing forward as quickly as you need to.
Here’s a specific checklist. Remember, these are the things that might end up taking months to get in place.
Determine your legal structure (a company in China or not).
In China: Try to set up WeChat on your own.
Not in China: Be prepared to get help setting up accounts, but don’t do it just yet.