Chinese search engine market share pie chart
One of the most common playbooks for B2B marketers can be described as “Google ads + landing page + contact form”. Luckily, this playbook can be replicated in Chinese, although we would recommend some adjustments.
If you’re trying to replicate the success of a Google Ads campaign with Baidu Ads, here are the most common changes we recommend:
Build the Baidu advertising account from the ground up. Due to differences in language and the technical aspects of Baidu SEM, we avoid simply translating English-language Google Ads campaigns. This starts whatsapp japan number with a basic marketing plan and ends in a fully-formed Baidu account structure.
Get started a month ahead of your launch date. It will take a week or two to set up an account with Baidu (you can do it through an agency). Plus, it will take some time to plan out the campaign.
Offer additional contact methods (as mentioned above in the email section), and make sure to be available to talk right away.
Transcreate the website, landing page and any content assets specifically for China. More on that in the next section.
Here’s an example of a website we promoted via Baidu ads for years. As you can see, it’s clean, easy-to-use and uncluttered. This is important to note, because there’s a misconception that Chinese users like websites that look like a web portal made in 1999. More on this in the next section.
‘Transcreating’ Your Website For China
Chinese people read Chinese. Even if they’re English-speaking professionals that work with global colleagues, they will still show a strong preference for Chinese-language content.
For this reason, we always recommend creating Chinese-language versions of key pages including a landing page, homepage, ‘About Us’ page and key service pages. Polished, persuasive Chinese pages will greatly outperform English-language pages as well as machine-translated content.
As for language, Mandarin is the primary spoken dialect in China, while Simplified Chinese script is used across all regions of mainland China. In the Chinese business environment, it’s possible that many of your potential clients will speak local dialects as well; nevertheless, almost all of them will speak Mandarin, as well as read and write Simplified Chinese. Learn more about how the Chinese language works with these videos (1, 2).
As for the website, it should ideally be a separate website that is hosted in China, which will require an ICP license. But there are trade-offs between cost, efficiency and marketing effectiveness, so it’s important to strike the right balance for your situation. In general, we’ll simply check whether a company’s current website loads quickly in China or not. If it doesn’t, we look into options like hosting in China or making optimizations to the website.
Here’s another example of a website that we’ve worked on for years, and it gets results. It’s a simple WordPress-based site that loads quickly in China (although not so quickly outside of China.)
Baidu SEO for B2B