Chapter 2
Tailoring Your Marketing Message for Asia
In This Chapter
- Succeeding in Asia
- Discovering Japan
- Succeeding in China
- Finding out about South Korea
- Operating in Russia
The first stop on our world tour of online marketing in the international venue is the Asia region, which includes Japan, China, South Korea, and much of Russia. In Chapter 1 of this minibook, we briefly touch on the search engines popular in this region, along with a few tips and tricks for operating a website in those countries. In this chapter, we go into more depth on operating online in Asia. You discover tips on how to succeed in the targeted country, the demographics of the region, and any other hints we think would be useful to you along the way.
Succeeding in Asia
Starting a website or expanding your site into the Asian region can be a little daunting. Asian culture can be very different from Western culture, with nuances that can harm you and your company if you miss them, and that’s not even considering the language barrier. Not to worry, though. We’ve put together a step-by-step getting-started guide for building or translating your site to work in the Asian markets.
One chapter in a book isn’t enough to make you an expert in SEO for the Asian market. In fact, the most important message you should take away from this chapter is that there is no shortcut or substitute for research and local know-how.
Assessing your site's chances
Your first step is simple: Assess the usability of your translated site — is it going to work for your target country? What works in the U.S. might not work in Asia. If you want to work in any country other than your own, you should be hiring some people who are native speakers from the local markets. This doesn't have to be an expensive proposition. You might find some international students at your local college campus who want to earn a little money by looking over your translated site and pointing out anything you have missed. Look around and see who’s available to you and get them to tell you everything they can about your new target market.
Just as you would analyze the market back home, you want to consider the viability of your niche when marketing in Asia. The trick here is that you're dealing with an entirely new culture. You need to find out what's popular before you can start selling it, after all. So maybe there’s not a huge market for custom classic cars in Asia, but maybe you have a side operation that sells all sorts of classic-car memorabilia, including fuzzy dice. Through your research, you discover that, in Asia, they can't get enough fuzzy dice. You're in business! (Disclaimer: We made up this example. We really don't know whether anyone in any Asian country can't get enough fuzzy dice. But who doesn't love fuzzy dice?)
Sizing up the competition and sounding out the market
After you have your market, it’s time to analyze your competition. Having figured out that there is a large market for fuzzy dice in Asia, you need to sit down and study how your competition is doing in the foreign market. Check out other sites that sell fuzzy dice, especially if they’re local companies. This is where someone who speaks the language or knows the culture would come in very handy. All the tips and tricks from Book III come in especially handy here. Follow the same step-by-step procedure to gather and analyze information.
You’ll have an easier time gathering information using the proper tools. Many SEO tools are available. We obviously recommend the SEOToolSet (www.seotoolset.com) from Bruce Clay, Inc. In SEOToolSet Pro, you can use the Single and Multi Page Analyzer tools to compare the optimization of top-ranked pages for your keywords, both general and localized. The SEOToolSet can be used in nearly 20 different languages, including Japanese and Russian. Find the top-ranking pages in your market for your target keywords and then include those URLs in your multipage comparison to see what patterns emerge from your competition. Another feature of the Pro version of SEOToolSet that’s especially useful for a search marketing project outside the U.S. is the Ranking Monitor, which can be configured to track your pages’ rankings for target keywords in the popular search engines of 17 countries, including Google Japan, Yahoo Japan, and Bing Japan.
After you sort out your competition, you need to broaden your research to the entire Asian market in order to plan your strategy and tactics. How does marketing work there? Who’s online, and how are they searching? A quick search turns up these stats:
- China has 649 million Internet users, with the vast majority — 85.8 percent! — connecting via a mobile device. Users are overwhelmingly in the 15–34-year-old age group.
- In Japan, 86 percent of the population is online, which represents nearly 116 million people. The country has the fastest-aging population, and a demographic segment called the Baby Boomer Juniors, aged 28–37 years old, is responsible for much of the consumer spending.
- The Internet in South Korea is considered the fastest in the world. Most of the population is online, connecting to the lightning-fast Internet through mobile devices. North Korea’s stats are largely unknown.
Determining your plan of attack
After you determine your suitability, competition, and strategy, you can move on to the actual implementation. Your next step is the planning phase: Here’s where you create your Asian marketing plan.
If you have an e-commerce site (any website that sells a particular product or service, such as fuzzy dice), you need to start with Japan, and then expand into South Korea and China. However, if you’re branding (establishing your name and associating it with your business, such as Nike or Xerox), you need to start with China, then move into South Korea, and then Japan.
Sound strange? It's really not. China is notorious for knock-off brands, so you should be starting there immediately if you want to expand your brand. In Japan, they tend to copy technology faster and to be conscious about brand, so you need to establish yourself as the authority product and then work on your branding so that you're recognized as the only brand to have.
Next, you need to know the search engines you’ll be using. Google is used almost everywhere in the world, but certain search engines are actually more popular in a particular country or region. You need to know which search engines are the most prevalent in your target market, and look at getting indexed (getting your site into the search engine’s database) as soon as you can. The search engine statistics look something like this:
- In Japan, Yahoo has 53 percent of the online market share, with Google the runner up at 40 percent.
- In China, Baidu (
www.baidu.com) reigns as the major Chinese search engine and the fourth-most-used search engine in the world. - In South Korea, Naver (
www.naver.com, a Q&A formatted Korean search engine) claims nearly 80 percent of the Internet search market. Google has only 4 percent market share.
Use localized keywords (search terms), advertising copy, and landing pages (the page a user arrives on when he first visits your site). Do not use an unnatural mix of English and the local languages. Think of how amusing but untrustworthy misspelled signs or menus are. You might think a store offering “Creem donuts” is hilarious, but you probably wouldn't make a purchase from that store. The same is true when English speakers attempt to do business in other languages.
Building trust and face-to-face interaction are huge parts of selling yourself in the Asian market. Putting a face on your brand is very important, and you need to be selling yourself as much as your product. Be prepared to log some frequent flyer miles. Meeting with clients, vendors, and others you do business with face-to-face helps to establish trust.
You should also be monitoring your local competition. You’re the foreigner, so you are starting at a disadvantage. Be looking for an edge: something that separates you from the local competition, but at the same isn’t too foreign or untrustworthy.
In this chapter, we cover things that you should generally be aware of when you move into the Asian market. But each country has its own quirks and legal issues, so you need to do your research.
Discovering Japan
Japan has the third-largest economy in the world, following the United States and China. Japan has open markets that actively encourage foreign investment, which means that you can expand into the Japanese market slightly more easily than you can operate in some other Asian countries.
The most demanding shoppers in the world live in Japan. There is a huge market for brand-name services and goods, and the Japanese are very big on brand names as status symbols. Louis Vuitton, Vivienne Westwood, and others do a healthy share of business based on their brand names alone. During the global economic recession of 2008, it’s said that the demographic group made of young working women 28–37 years old singlehandedly shored up Japan’s economy with luxury brand purchases.
For much of the last 70 years, Japan led other countries in terms of personal savings. But an aging population is responsible for a decade of drawing down savings accounts. In 2014, for the first time since records were kept in 1955, the country’s household savings rate (savings divided by disposable income plus pension payments) was –1.3 percent. Spending is strong, especially among the 13 percent of households with annual incomes above 10 million yen (approximately $80,000). For businesses vetting the viability of the Japanese market, note that another marked characteristic of the Japanese economy is an openness to foreign multinational companies that have evolved products and services for developed markets such as tech and advanced fields.
The Japanese are aware that the language of business on the Internet is English, but to do a good business with the Japanese, you have to be able to communicate in Japanese. The design aesthetic in Japan is also different from the Western one, and when you do business in another country, you should consider the local preferences of graphic design. Check out the site design of Yahoo Japan (www.yahoo.co.jp/) in Figure 2-1.
Figure 2-1: The home page of Yahoo Japan has a lot more images and movement than Yahoo in North America.
Figure 2-1 illustrates the preference in Japan for busy, interactive, and media-rich websites. Internet users in Japan are much more likely to trust a website that looks like this than one that looks much simpler.
To establish a web presence, get a .jp domain (the space your site occupies on the web, like a .com, or a .net, or in this case, .co.jp, .or.jp, or .ne.jp). Hosting your site on a server actually physically located in Japan is a good idea as well; however, the advent of cloud computing (storing, processing, managing, and hosting all files in a remote server) has made local hosting nice to have rather than a critical consideration. Be sure to include your contact info on your website, such as a number someone can call to receive information. Be sure that the person in charge of this phone line speaks Japanese and is able to answer any questions.
As with starting a business in any foreign market, we recommend getting a person on the ground. Hire someone familiar with Japanese language and customs, and if at all possible, someone who actually lives in Japan. A local resident can help you navigate the differences between the Western world and Japan and help you achieve greater success in the long run.
Succeeding in China
China is a new frontier when it comes to the business world. It’s also a tricky one to navigate. Not only do you have the language barrier and the cultural issues to work through, but you also have more extensive and stringent government regulations to deal with. However, China’s economy is booming, and if you are willing to take the steps, now is a good time to get in the front door.
Internet searchers in China are very different from users in the United States or elsewhere. Two of the top ten Chinese website domains include numbers. Why? Because the Chinese language has 13,500 standardized characters. So, if you’re designing a keyboard to have one key per character, the keyboard needs more than 13,000 keys! This is why businesses may find adopting the number platform beneficial.
You also definitely need to get a website domain within China’s ccTLD (country code Top Level Domain) of .cn (or .com.cn, if you can). You also need to host your site in China to avoid gateway issues.
If you’re getting started in search marketing (PPC or SEO) in China, start with Google, through its interface. Although it’s not the dominant search engine in China, it’s a good place to start your optimization campaign because Google China’s rules are similar to its U.S. ones, and you can get your campaign up and running without having to jump too many hurdles.
The home page for Google China features a search box that drops down to offer a guided search (a search suggestion). Because the language has so many characters, the guided search helps users find information quickly.
Products that will help you understand your searchers and trends in the Chinese market are
- Baidu Index: The Baidu Index tool (
index.baidu.com/) breaks down keyword-popular queries across all Baidu’s products, including web, image, and video search and calculates how much user and media attention these terms are getting. This is a good way to do keyword research for up-and-coming trends and opportunities. - Drop-down keyword suggestions: Because people in China often use guided search (in which the search engine makes suggestions based on your queries, much the same as Google Instant or Yahoo Suggests), search engine optimization is a little easier because search marketers know off the bat what queries searchers are using. Also, you can use Google China’s Popular Searches function.
A site that might be worth checking out is Tom.com (www.tom.com), which is one of the top ten most popular websites in China (see Figure 2-2). This site features tons of links on the page without a search box above the fold. Users come here as a destination site, not to search.
Figure 2-2: Tom.com is among the top ten most popular sites in China.
Baidu (www.baidu.com), China's top search engine and its answer to Google and Bing, has made accommodations for Western businesses in recent years, with packages for paid search, display advertising, and an engine-specific SEO program, among others. Baidu Advertising offers two tiers of PPC management plans ($500 each month for the Lite package and $900 a month for the Comprehensive program). Funds can be paid via PayPal or wire transfer, and English-speaking support for account setup and management is now available. Find out all about these offerings at the English-language site https://www.baiduadvertising.com/.
Analytics-wise, Baidu and Yahoo provide no impression results. But Google Analytics is available in China. On Baidu, the paid listings are mixed in with the organic listings (search engine results that are not sponsored and which rank in a normal search of the index). Long-tail search queries (keywords, or search queries, made up of several words or a phrase) don’t really exist in China because users don’t do as many searches as Americans do. They rely more on guided search.
Here are some key observations on Baidu:
- It’s the most popular search engine for lifestyle searches in China, but not for business. Google as well as China’s second and third most popular search engines, Haosou (formerly known as 360;
www.haosou.com/) and newcomer Sogou (www.sogou.com/), dominate searches in some verticals. - Paid advertising campaigns overwhelmingly influence Baidu’s results.
- Baidu has its greatest reach with young, lifestyle-centric searchers.
- Display advertising that charges by the page view, called CPM advertising (CPM stands for cost per mille, meaning cost per each thousand impressions), is most popular with Baidu.
- Baidu offers a unique (and expensive) product among the search engines — Baidu Brand Zone. A brand that purchases Baidu Brand Zone can have its logo and tailored content display whenever a brand’s specified keywords are searched. It’s expensive but draws a click-through rate of 50 percent. That’s a big opportunity for brands with the budget to buy exposure in China.
Being a foreigner in China can be both a disadvantage and an advantage. Although people have the natural tendency to push back against the unfamiliar, in China, you have something of an advantage if you're an expert. When you come in to speak, if you have any kind of credentials, you’re treated like a rock star. Additionally, by being a foreigner, you can get away with not knowing the customs at first. Be warned, however, that your grace period ends quickly, so be ready to adapt to Chinese culture.
The Chinese market has a few challenges that, although not unique to the country, are certainly worth knowing ahead of time:
- Budgets for local companies are small. If you're a search marketer, you have to deal with less capital than you might have expected.
- Clients are very particular about their contacts in your business. Have a point person who’s extremely knowledgeable in the culture and can handle your business dealings in the local markets.
Business is very relationship-based in China. Good relationships are absolutely critical to success. You have to be introduced to the right people at the right places. Many Westerners underestimate exactly how important having good contacts is. This is true everywhere, but especially in China: It’s about whom you know, how well you know them, and whom you work with.
Your employees make or break a deal in the long run. Most of the advertising in the Chinese market is branding, not trying to convert. If you do decide to tap into the Chinese market, make sure that you’re willing to be flexible and do things its way.
When looking at hiring people abroad (and this includes all countries), be sure to check the following things:
- Check the credentials for the people you’re meeting.
- Confirm that they’re doing the work themselves, rather than outsourcing it.
- Establish goals and document them in contracts.
- Do periodic checks of the quality of the ads and the effectiveness of campaigns.
You should pick your teams based on their effectiveness. Offer incentives for employees to maintain loyalty. As with any business, a happy employee is an efficient and loyal employee. Pick your partners well and do a lot of research on their capabilities.
In China, Internet access via mobile devices is ubiquitous, with more than 85 percent of users connecting that way. The growth in search from smartphones is due to increased interest in the Internet and the government’s heavy investment in network construction to make high-speed connectivity available. Remember the differences between desktop and mobile searches in regard to searcher intent and behavior, as we discuss in Book I, Chapter 3.
What does all this mean to the outside world? You have a lot of opportunities to market to the Chinese if you do it on its terms and within its comfort level. The keys to succeeding in China are relationships, patience, diligence, and an open mind. People in China have become comfortable with e-commerce in a very short time, with most users connecting through their mobile devices on the go. Keep this in mind as you expand into the Chinese market.
Finding Out about South Korea
When we talk about Korea, we focus on South Korea. North Korea is an unknown and politically hostile environment for pretty much all marketers, so we ignore them entirely. You should, too.
South Korea has an incredible infrastructure — claiming the title of the fastest Internet in the world, with projects in place to make it even faster in the next five years! Much of South Korea’s population (82.5 percent) is online and searching. In terms of design aesthetic, a very busy-looking page gives you an advantage in South Korea because the population tends to prefer that style (a lot of color and text) for professional sites, so a Korean page can look a little something like Figure 2-3. Because of this push for color and content, Google's clean designs do very poorly in South Korea.
Figure 2-3: The typical Korean website uses a lot of images to engage users.
Operating in South Korea is like operating in Japan and China in that South Koreans prefer face-to-face interaction, and your success is a matter of establishing trust and accessibility. Get a .co.kr domain for your Korean site, and get started optimizing.
You absolutely must work to attract local links. Work on making connections, gaining trust and links, and getting the local search engines to recognize those things. International links are fine, but local links carry more weight in the long run. Remember, relevancy is always key and local is more relevant than non-local.
Naver (www.naver.com) is South Korea’s biggest search engine. It currently commands a 73 percent share of desktop searches in the country, and holds a slightly bigger piece of the mobile search pie at 76 percent. The other contenders are Google with 9 percent of mobile search and Daum (www.daum.net) with 14.3 percent of South Korean mobile web searches.
When Naver was first launched, its founders discovered a real dearth of pages in the Korean language on the Internet. So Naver decided to create content and databases, so that when you would search in Korean, you would be able to find quality content. Naver set up Knowledge Search in 2002, enabling Koreans to help each other in a type of real-time question-and-answer platform. On average, 44,000 questions are posted each day, with about 110,000 returned answers. The tool allows users to ask just about any question, such as requests for recipes or how to subscribe to international magazines via the Internet, and get answers from other users. This tool was used by Yahoo as the inspiration for Yahoo Answers.
Operating in Russia
We include Russia in the marketing for Asian strategy for reasons of geography as well as strategy. Expanding to the Russian market is a lot like expanding into the Chinese market. In order to have a fully successful venture, you’re going to need a person on the ground in Russia.
This means that you need someone who not only knows the language and culture but also actually lives and works there, to provide you with a bricks-and-mortar foothold in the country. Having someone who is based in Russia can also help in dealing with any legal or local bureaucratic issues that could spring up.
About 59 percent of Russia's population is online, which is about 84.4 million people. The largest search engine in Russia is Yandex (www.yandex.com, shown in Figure 2-4).
Figure 2-4: Yandex is Russia’s primary search engine.
Yandex was launched in 1997. The net income of the company in 2014 constituted $440 million USD. As for search engine market share, Yandex receives about 60 percent of searches in Russia, followed by Google at about 30 percent. One of Yandex’s largest advantages is that it recognizes Russian inflection in search queries.
As with all the other countries we mention in this chapter, try to obtain a domain within the country’s ccTLD and hire someone who lives and works in Russia to give you valuable credibility. You must do cultural research to pin down the right tone for your Russian audience.