Traditional marketing incorporates various forms of marketing and advertising. Most traditional marketing strategies can get divided into four categories: print, direct mail, broadcast, and telephone. Social media has become a big part of most people’s lives. Shoppers devote lots of time on their social networking sites or on other sites that are also linked to social media accounts with sharing buttons. According to Lewis (2014), integrating social media with traditional marketing provides a platform that is in real time, cost effective and measurable. Integrating social media with advertising helps businesses connect with their customers through several channels.
One of the common ways of integrating both social media and marketing is through using cross-promotion. Cross promotion is the use of one form of advertisement to strengthen the other. For instance, a business can release an advertisement on social media, and it becomes viral before the rest of the public sees it (Smith, 2014). It can also use other advertisements to encourage people to visit their social media accounts for more information. The use of cross-promotion enables marketers to use the strengths of one advertisement form to strengthen the other.
Today, most businesses have an online presence with the creation of websites or even online advertisement forums. One of the common trends used in this integrated form of marketing is Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is the use of strategies and techniques to get high ranking placement in search results. It has become an affordable way for businesses to create awareness to its customers and even sales (Lewis, 2014|). It has been likened to the use of traditional public relations. The high ranking get on top based on the frequency of search for a business or the number of people that have talked about it online. Once a business attains high rankings on search results, it becomes easy for customers to find them and even leads to increased sales.
According to Whaling (2011), the integration of social media in marketing has gotten used by businesses to understand their customer’s needs better. The core element of social media is in the conversations. Businesses today are monitoring the online conversations about their brand, products or services. Monitoring has helped businesses understand their customer’s desires and whether they are meeting those desires to their customer’s expectations. It has also helped businesses compare themselves with their competitors. Such monitoring strategies have given most businesses a competitive advantage over their competitors.
Recommendations
The power social media possess, and its intense use makes it a necessity for any company selling in Shanghai. A social media user in China averages 28-years that compared to the United States 40-years is low. Most Chinese rely on the internet to do their research. One of the recommendations when using Chinese social media is the use of Key Opinion Leaders. The Chinese social media sites are not like the others most people are used to such as Facebook and Twitter. China has unique social media sites such as Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and WeChat. The number of internet users exceeds 550 million, and most of them have accounts in one of the social media sites. Sina Weibo, for example, has a user base that is larger than the United States population (Neat Interactive, 2014). The popularity of this sites has introduced the use of celebrities also called Weibo Star or Key Opinion Leaders. These stars are meant to increase the number of views on a post from thousands to millions. Most of these leaders are journalists, chefs, businesspeople and others whose opinion is trustworthy and influences most followers’ decisions. A company that is looking to incorporate social media in this market must be willing to use Key Opinion Leaders to increase its target audience.
Another recommendation for companies in the Shanghai market is the registration of domains with a .cn suffix. The use of this suffix improves the search engine performance especially for users in China. It is also important to host your websites in the server in China or Hong Kong. Most web pages in China tend to have many links to other pages, so it is important that the company’s web page is information heavy. Also, the company should ensure it uses good tactics on Search Engine Optimization on the most used search engine, Baidu. Fifty percent of the internet users in China use mobile technology. That makes it essential that company websites and other online materials be responsive, meaning users can get the same content and view regardless of the device they are using.
Companies must know that the Search Engine Optimization on Baidu does not work the same as Google. According to an article by Neat Interactive (2014), Baidu, the most used search engine in China has its rules about optimizing web pages. Companies looking to work in the China market should get informed about how the optimization works on Baidu. However, it is similar to Google in that the more mentions one has on the Chinese internet, the higher the ranks one gets on the search engine.
Measuring Results
According to Cifuentes (2012), assessing social media returns requires different metrics. When checking for social media returns, one should check for returns on engagement, participation, involvement, attention and trust. Engagements are the duration of time people spend in a conversation concerning your company’s services or products and interacting with your applications. Engagement can get measured with the number of shares, retweets, comments or even posts on the social media sites. Participation can get measured by the time spent participating in social media conversations. Returns on participation are almost similar to those on the engagement, and they can be measured in the same way. Attention returns are measured by the number of people whose attention gets grabbed by the content. Returns on trust can be measured by the number of referrals a product or service gets from other customers.
Exposure in social media can be measured by the number of subscribers, views, followers or brand mentions on different social media sites. It is also possible to know whether an online marketing strategy was successful by the increase in the number of online sales. Chinese social media sites such as Tencent Weibo provide analytics options to their premium customers. These tools are difficult to understand and navigate especially because most of them are not translated to English (China Marketing, 2014). Companies looking to market in China using social media should have accounts on all the common social media sites. They should also be willing to hire consultants who have more knowledge about the Chinese market and can be of great use to upcoming companies. They can also research on the different habits of the Chinese people which will help in their marketing strategies.
References
China Marketing. (2014, July 9). How to Measure and Track Chinese Social Media? Retrieved from http://chinamarketingtips.com/how-to-measure-and-track-chinese-social-media/
Cifuentes, N. (2012, January 4). How to Measure Social Media- and Show Results to the C-Suite. Retrieved from http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2134500/measure-social-media-results-suite
Lewis, K. (2014). Integrating Search and Social Media into your Marketing Mix. Retrieved from http://www.anvilmediainc.com/about/digital-marketing-resources/articles/integrating-search-and-social-media-into-your-marketing-mix/
Nabil. (2014). Content Marketing Is and Will Always be King. Neat Interactive Digital marketing. Retrieved from http://www.neatinteractive.com/news/content-marketing-is-and-will-always-be-king/
Neat Interactive. (2014, August 28). Chinese Digital Marketing. Neat Interactive Digital marketing. Retrieved from http://www.neatinteractive.com/news/chinese-digital-marketing/
Smith, D. (2014, February 10). Why Integrating Both Traditional and Social Marketing Campaigns into Marketing Initiatives Works. Digital Marketing. Retrieved from http://www.digitalmarketing.com/2014/02/integrating-traditional-social-marketing-campaigns-marketing-initiatives-works/
Whaling, H. (2011, May 12). 5 ways Social Media Has Changed Marketing Campaigns. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2011/05/12/social-media-change-marketing/
