Very often Online PR is used when a new brand enters the China market. According to Google 2019, 88% of shopper interaction occurs before they interact with a particular brand and 94% of B2B buyers are performing online research before they engage with that particular enterprise. The number is even higher in China.
Online PR can have a significant effect on information adoption, consumer attitude, purchase intention, brand loyalty, and trust. However when it’s not correctly planned or executed, it would go wrong. Deep Digital China finds many mistakes that usually occur in these Chinese online PR activities:
1. Inappropriate targets. Some companies want to get as much exposure as possible using Chinese online PR and some want to build a great brand reputation. Actually they are not wrong however should be considered as a part of your integrated marketing plan. According to our experience, the best practice is use online PR as reputation builder while social media marketing is used to engage follower and search marketing is used to drive customers.
2. Incorrect use of media platforms. Here incorrect can be seen in two ways: wrong use of platforms or too wide use of platforms. If you are a B2B company, you don’t need to distribute your content on B2C APPs like Xiaohongshu(cross between Twitter and Pinterest). If you are in education sector, you don’t publish your content game forums. That’s just wrong. And using too many platforms would just add much to your cost and won’t get much in return. The use of media platforms should be determined based on the target you try to achieve within Chinese online PR.
3. Incorrect keyword selection. To generate the content, you need to determine the keywords that you want to focus on in each article/post. The keywords shall be selected based on their typical use form, monthly search volume and competition. It will involve Chinese keyword tool like Baidu keyword planner or some third party keyword tools. Keyword exploration is a key step in online PR.
4. Lack of SEO standards. To help the articles/posts get higher organic ranking, it’s necessary to generate content based on SEO standards. Embed the keyword in the title and first paragraph will help. Certain keyword density will also benefits. However very often new brands in China forget to meet the SEO standards on the content and couldn’t get high ranking which leads to low exposure.
5. Lack of patience. Customers check review of a long time span to confirm the reputation of a brand. They don’t see a recent review and just buy it. So it’s not enough to just do online PR for only a month or two. It’s necessary to last at least 6 months to make the reviews look much more real.