Brand marketing overseas

Well the Shanghai part of my tour of Asia is now over. It all went to plan and we had some great feedback from participants. For me, without question, one of the major things I can pull out is the absolute necessity in understanding how users in different countries search online and what search engines they use. Basic stuff really, but if your site is not tagged appropriately and for the correct search engines, then it will not be found.

One of the most popular search engines in China is not the ubiquitous Google but a site called Baidu.

When users are searching for a particular brand or company using a search engine, they will undoubtedly enter the brand name into the search field. Effective tagging of the website will ensure that it is optimised for returning the branded site for both natural and paid searches. Companies with a strong brand presence may feel that the brand is weakened if it is not written in its original Latin alphabet form – such as in English. However, users in places such as China will mostly enter Chinese characters using a phonetic transcription system such as Pinyin. They will translate the brand name into Pinyin and enter it in this form.

Users in China expect a Chinese brand name and indeed, some of the biggest brand names in the world have a Chinese equivalent:

Consequently, if the Pinyin version of the brand name is not tagged in the same way that the English version is, then problems such as these will occur:

1. The search engine will not return the official branded site as a top result but as exemplified in China, will return some very dodgy unofficial ones.

• Users in China are very careful where they buy branded products from, most likely due to the saturation of fake goods on the market. If they have reservations about a website e.g. the website did not come up as one of the top search engine results, then they will be unwilling to trust the brand.

2. The search engine will most likely return the English website and not the one that has been developed to appeal to a local market. Users may not be able to understand the English and will either not click into it or if they do, will click off of it in confusion.

Watching users go through the pains of finding a particular site was fantastic feedback to give to a client who may not have realised from their offices in places such as London, how ineffective and wasteful their marketing expenditure is overseas.

Originally written by Amanda Roach