Chinese Web Marketing – A case study from Money Cat

Money Cat Consulting is and Australian multi-lingual marketing company.
It provides innovative marketing solutions for corporations wishing to reach Chinese communities in Australia and abroad.

They launched a Chinese-language financial & investment website (http://www.moneycat.com.au), to reach Chinese investors.

To reach out and acquire members, they used various marketing & PR tools – with different levels of success.

When reaching for the Chinese market, these are the lessons that we can learn from Money Cat.

• Using newspapers is very expensive with a very low response rate. Especially advertisements have little effect, but some advertorials can generate a good level of interest depending on the specific product.
  
• Web banners can work sometimes, but they usually have a limited exposure period. It can be a good tool for branding, but Chinese web users do not click a lot on web banners anymore.
  
• Google Adword-campaign is not effective for reaching the Chinese market – the favorite search engine is Baidu. Google Adword and Yahoo keywords do work in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where English is is predominant Web language.
  
• Taiwanese websites are effective as a marketing channel, since many Chinese web users also look at Taiwanese websites for information. Especially articles on consumer goods and finance are popular.
  
• Blogs are highly effective, it generates consistent traffic. Chinese web users love to read and write blogs. Money Cat sent an article to 200+ blogs across Asia (and Australia), and saw their traffic grown tenfold in a month. However, it is important to target the right blogs for the right topics.
  
• Videos and Audios can be effective, but bandwidth is still a problem. Broadband infrastructure is not yet fully established across China, and quality is often distorted. Money Cat opted to upload video clips on Taiwanese and Hong Kong websites that can also be accessed by Chinese viewers.