Artículo: How can we market ourselves online in China...without Google?

Chinese idiosyncrasy, also online

On 29 May, the Port Authority of Barcelona organised the Third Conference on Internationalisation and New Technology, which focused on the use of search engines, in particular Google, for international research and marketing. The advantages of good positioning on this search engine to achieve international visibility are already know; curiously however, in China, Google does not appear to be the best medium to use to achieve this.

It all began in 2002 when the Chinese authorities decided to control information published online that could question their ideology. As is to be logically expected, this provoked a series of ethical debates on freedom of expression, and it would appear that a certain amount of pressure was exerted on the world's most used search engine. Cybernauts in Peking and Shanghai complained that when they typed google.com into their browsers other search engines, such as that of the University of Beijing, CJ88 and BAIDU appeared.

Google China
Google ended up giving in to pressure from the Chinese government and announced the launch of a special version for China, which filters certain search terms according to the specifications of the Chinese government. For example, if you search for images of Tiananmen in google.com, tanks will appear. Then compare that to the same search on the Chinese version of Google, no tanks appear.

Standard version

Chinese version

If we put this controversy to one side (you can find more information in the articles at the foot of this page), the reality of the situation is that almost 80% of the searches in China carried out using three different engines. According to data published by Nielson in 2006, the Baidu search engine has the majority with 43.9%, followed by Yahoo with 21.1% and Google with 13.2%.

Baidu, the leading search engine
Founded in 2000 in Beijing, BAIDU, a name inspired by a Chinese poem, which literally means "hundreds of eras", is now in the world's seventh most used search engine according to the Alexa Ranking. Alexia also specifies that 93.7% of the users of this search engine are Chinese. Baidu had a turnover of 271.3 million RMB in the fourth quarter of 2006 alone ($34.8 million), up 136.1% compared to the same period in 2005. By clicking on the following link, you can view Baidu's traffic data.

It offers almost the same services as Google or Yahoo, using a service similar to that of sponsored links or CPC (Cost per Click), which they call Pay for Performance (P4P), which guarantees that our company will appear when people search for our product in Chinese via Baidu.

This is a key point that companies should take into account if they wish to increase their visibility in the Chinese market. Companies must appear in these search engines when potential clients carry out a search for their product or service in China.

Define objectives and direct yourself at the target market
However, we should not forget that, although search engines are one of the best marketing tools online, there are others. For example, companies should appear on online portals and directories in accordance with a geographic segmentation strategy, product segmentation strategy, or even, according to potential clients. You can find a good example of where companies can market themselves on Sohu, which offers different promotional possibilities, including sponsored searches on its network of portals, such as Sogou, Chinaren and Focus, among others. There is also Sina and the famous Alibaba.

All in all, it is possible to establish digital marketing strategies in China, all you have to do is carefully define your objectives, identify your target market and aim it at where the action takes place.