Let’s examine Hong Kong and Taiwan as two Asian markets when you have to perform internet/digital marketing to get new customers for your local business.
The Plan and the channels
Digital marketing in Hong Kong may have to include most or all of the areas and channels.
The big/overall strategy of digital marketing – You always need to set up a plan for marketing.
Content marketing: Not only blogging. All the marketing materials that involve text content, image content, audio content and video content would go under content marketing.
Social media marketing – Main channel of social network should always be Facebook. Secondary channel is Instagram.
Search engine optimization (SEO) – People do consume entertainment content on Yahoo. But Google remains the main focus.
Paid search (PPC / Pay per click advertising) – Mainly advertise through Google Ads with keyword search ads. Keyword search ads are often regarded as direct performance advertising channel. People going to a search engine searching for your product have already shown more than enough intention to compare the product or buy the product.
Display advertising – In Google Ads you can choose to advertise through image ads. Often we associate display/banner ads with branding campaigns, and not direct performance campaigns.
Video advertising – Videos can be for branding. But from a different point of view, look at it as a medium for content marketing or inbound marketing. Through videos, it is easy to show people (and potential customers) what your expertise areas are. From this point, you let them decide whether they would start to trust your expertise and finally a portion of them may start to buy from you.
Website and landing page optimization – It depends on the nature of your website. Optimizing the user experience for an ecommerce website would be different to optimizing the user experience for a business-to-business website.
Website performance – This is about optimizing your website for loading speed. A fast loading website can avoid losing customers.
Email marketing – One area of email marketing is for communication between your business and your existing customers. The second area is to take care of the “leads” that have not yet purchased from your business. You would build an email marketing funnel to convert your leads into new customers.
Analytics – Finally what you have done and what you have achieved must be tracked through a few tools. One of the tools for web analytics tracking is Google Analytics which is free to install and use. For example, you would get data including how many visitors have come to your website, or a certain web page for a specific period of time. And you should be able to track the performance i.e. how many times visitors have made purchase through your website (if your site is an ecommerce business).
Languages
There are slight differences concerning digital marketing between Hong Kong and Taiwan – The languages being used.
The marketing materials in written form for Taiwan and Hong Kong are very similar, except that for Taiwan the Chinese language is more formal, and for Hong Kong you can add a bit Cantonese local slang.
In verbal form (if you are doing videos or live stream), Mandarin is required for Taiwan and Cantonese should be used for Hong Kong.
Of course, there are always a group of population in both Hong Kong and Taiwan would prefer consuming content and information in English. That is another niche market.
Ryan Myers is a business blog author and writer. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 with a degree in Political Science. His favorite topics to write about are blogging for small businesses and becoming an entrepreneur.
