How to Market Your Content on the Asian Internet

Asia represents a growth market for those working in e-commerce. It contains more than half of the world’s population and 1 billion of the 4 billion people living in Asia are Internet users.

Expanding a marketing strategy to newly emerging economies like China and India may seem like a natural extension for any online business looking to take advantage of the global economy. Yet while a company might be adept at content marketing in the U.S., U.K., Europe, or Canada, the same techniques and practices are not replicated in Asia.

What’s Different?

To many, content marketing is a vital part of any online campaign. Tailoring written content, video, images, or podcasts to encourage hits and engagement requires a basic understanding of how the target market works. How will they share information? What social networks does your target market use? To make a website more visible using SEO and keyword research is vital, as is an understanding of what principles the search engine uses to pick up sites and include them in search directories. Largely in the West, we use Google, and its keyword services and translation apps mean many feel fairly confident about translating those key skills to any corner of the globe.

Yet when we work online in the West, most of the time we’re writing and communicating in English.

Not so in Asia. For a start, there are more than 40 main languages (not including local dialect forms!) used across Asia including the ever popular Mandarin and Arabic, through to Uzbek and Vietnamese. This not only has an impact on the content but also on the keywords embedded in the site architecture. Add to this the fact that you need a solid understanding of the right sites to encourage link building, and it all starts to looks a bit complicated.

Making It Relevant

The key tip is brand consistency but local relevancy. Expanding into new markets does not mean undermining your identity or brand, but it may mean tweaking it to understand your new target market. So how to tweak?

Well that comes down to research. Aside from identifying which regions are key targets, work out which languages are the best to use to reach those key markets. Cantonese, Korean, Urdu? Once that decision is made, the next step for content marketing is keywords.

Again, you’re going to need to research. Google has extensive services for researching keywords in Asia, but it is worth noting that Google is not necessarily the most popular search engine in Asia. Baidu is China’s largest search engine; Yahoo is popular across Japan and China; and Naver dominates South Korea.

Each comes with its own search directories and strategies for incorporating keywords and translations of character sets. Researching the most popular keywords within each search engine gives an idea of online practice and how you might reach your target audience in each region.

Get the Translation Right

Identifying with a target market, once you have managed to get them to your site, is about communication. You need to understand the nuances of language, including the latest online abbreviations that – particularly in China’s simplified characters – change frequently. Online translators might work for the odd message, but for something as complex as web content, it is much more important to make sure it’s right, rather than free. Subtlety, symbolism, and humour change in different areas and the key to great translation is understanding these nuanced differences.

Content Is Key

Similarly, understanding what you can and can’t do in terms of content is vital. While U.S. audiences might be big fans of direct advertising, it’s not as popular in Japan. An advert that describes a product as being “so easy a woman could use it” might not go down well at all in the U.S. or the U.K., but it has proved to resonate with consumers in Japan and China. Knowing the law is also vital. Comparative advertising, while used to good effect in the U.S., is banned in most Asian countries.

Building Links

Once the content is finalised, link building is the next step. In the West, much link building comes from social media and engagement with the marketplace. This is the same in Asia, but it is worth noting that sites like Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China. Chinese bloggers, in comparison, provide real endorsement and are key to gaining traction and online visibility. Kaixin, Renren, and QQ are popular networks. Over 68 million Asians are on Facebook equivalents like these. Bloggers in Japan are equally important, where although Yahoo has incorporated Google’s algorithms, good quality links are generated by good content.

Like most other business strategies, content marketing is all about understanding your marketplace. As more businesses turn to the East for expansion, research, knowledge of the culture, and language will be key, along with comprehension of online and social trends on the Internet. Get these right and the ambition for growth will surely be matched with success.