Top 20 Content Marketing Online Courses and Certifications to Enroll in 2020
Content marketing is a vast discipline under digital marketing that consists of strategizing, writing, storytelling, distributing content, analyzing results, and a little bit of search engine optimization (SEO) and design.
Content marketing courses and certifications help marketers keep themselves updated in these areas to cater to the dynamic digital landscape and changing consumer behavior. Considering the factors that demand a marketer’s attention, we’ve compiled a list of twenty online courses and certifications that cover various areas of content marketing to help you win at your content efforts in 2020.
CONTENT THAT CONNECTS: WHY INFLUENCER MARKETING IS THE FUTURE OF GEN Z ENGAGEMENT
Gen Z is a business opportunity you can’t afford to miss. As 40% of the population commanding upwards of $40 billion in spending power, modern marketers need to build compelling strategies to engage with Gen Z.
Download
If you are a beginner, you can get yourself acquainted with content marketing by enrolling in HubSpot’s content marketing course. The course consists of twelve lessons and takes approximately six hours to complete.
The course curriculum covers the basics of blogging and storytelling. It helps you prepare a long-term content strategy, build a content creation framework, and generate content ideas. You’ll learn how to develop the pillar-cluster model, start guest blogging, repurpose and promote content, and analyze the results.
The course also offers a study guide to help you prepare for the test. The successful completion of the test qualifies you for a free certification that you can embed on your website and LinkedIn profile.
This course is a collaboration between Copyblogger, a renowned content marketing website, and UC Davis Extension. This is another primer for anyone looking to get started with content marketing. The course content is organized into five modules and takes approximately 17 hours to complete.
The course explains the content marketing ecosystem and how your personal brand impacts the company’s content strategy. You’ll learn about the strategic context/the 7A framework and how to apply it to your content. Next, you’ll learn how to map content to the different stages of the buyer’s journey. The last two modules cover the basics of content types and content management. While you can study the course for free, you need to pay to obtain a completion certificate.
This content marketing certification is a compilation of six courses that help you understand how to create different types of content. The first module in the series delves into the foundations of content marketing. There’s a dedicated module that focuses on how to write compelling marketing copies. This is followed by a module on viral marketing that shares a six-step framework to craft messages that get shared by people.
The remaining modules focus individually on blogging, podcasting, and creating newsletters.
While this course already covers some of the modules from Become a Content Marketer, it takes you to the next level of content marketing. Become a Content Strategist contains 13 modules to help you explore the composite aspects of content marketing.
The modules cover the fundamentals of online marketing, business storytelling, social media, SEO, and Google Analytics. Taking the responsibilities of a content strategist into consideration, the course also focuses on how to develop an editorial calendar and draft content guidelines from the user experience (UX) perspective for the organization’s digital properties.
Premium LinkedIn users have free access to both courses.
Learn More: 5 Pillars of Audience-Centric Content
If you’re looking for a brief refresher on blogging, this course will give you just that. This 90-minute course by Eric Siu provides a concise overview of the blogging process.
To begin with, the course offers three blogging styles and tips on brainstorming content ideas. Eric shares insights on how to outline your blog posts, add key information, and write great headlines that outperform your competition. You’ll also learn five tips to succeed in your blogging efforts.
The Writing With Flair course is taught by Shani Raja, who has written and edited for publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. The course is more about developing the writer's mindset than building writing chops.
The course shares tips and insights on how to keep your writing simple and clear, yet elegant and evocative. You’ll learn to avoid needless repetition and ambiguous writing and keep your writing clutter-free. The course runs for seven hours, at the end of which you’ll receive a completion certificate. While this is a paid course, before enrolling in this course, you can check out Secret Sauce of Great Writing, a free course that provides a glimpse of Writing With Flair.
This is another course by Shani Raja for anyone wanting to improve their writing.
The course is broken down into four levels, viz. the narrative, paragraphs, sentences, and words. The course provides solid advice on how to structure the narrative, write attention-grabbing intros, give sentences a rhythm, and use precise words.
Shani Raja also offers the following courses that complement Writing With Flair and Ninja Writing:
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, such as The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Besides being a staff writer for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell is also known for distilling complex concepts such as behavioral economics and performance prediction into simple words.
The course teaches you to structure the narrative, research and develop the story, use data to engage your readers, build characters, use tone and voice, and write captivating headlines. Malcolm shares examples and case studies from his books and articles along with key concepts to strengthen the learning.
You can buy the standalone course for 90 USD or become a member for 180 USD that provides access to all courses covering a wide spectrum of topics.
Learn More: What Content Marketing Tactics to Use in 2020
Copywriting is a form of writing to persuade the audience. The Modern Copywriting course covers various aspects of copywriting right from the basics. The first module covers the importance of understanding the product, ideal buyers, and competition. You’ll learn the art of persuasion, how to structure the copy, and copywriting styles.
The course shares the difference between writing for B2C and B2B brands, with formulas to write compelling copy. It also teaches you how to write headlines, emails, landing page content, and social media content.
The course runs for over seven hours and provides 94 downloadable resources.
Conversion Copywriting 101 aims to get you acquainted with the fundamentals of writing high-converting web copy. The course begins by laying out the key distinctions between traditional and conversion copywriting.
As the course progresses, it covers topics such as how to write memorable messages that target the different stages of the funnel. It teaches how to write great headlines and body copy and explains when you should focus on features and benefits.
From a design perspective, you will learn the anatomy of a high-converting page and how to structure landing pages for maximum conversions.
You can sign-up for the course for free.
Persuasive Copywriting 101 by Sonia Simone and Chris Garrett is available in both - audio, video formats along with transcripts.
In the first module, the course dispels some myths of traditional sales and how you can use content to make the first sale. Next, the course shares three, most-fundamental copywriting formulas and how to use them without making your copy sound boring and repetitive. You’ll also learn how you can write your own copywriting formulas that drive the audience to act.
The course also focuses on how to convey the product value through your copy and tweak the campaign that isn’t working.
The course is priced at 397 USD or three monthly installations of 147 USD each.
Shane Snow explains how storytelling is a compelling technique to persuade your audience. You’ll discover the science behind how effective stories build relationships with people.
Shane shares the four elements of effective storytelling, viz. relatability, novelty, tension, and fluency. You’ll learn how to make the audience care for you through the story matrix and the story-relationship funnel.
The course also teaches you to cultivate your storytelling chops using universal storytelling frameworks and the Ben Franklin method.
Learn More: Marketing Storytelling for 2020: Woo Customers With Age Old and Cutting Edge Techniques
Transmedia storytelling is the practice of delivering a coherent story experience across different marketing channels. With omnichannel marketing becoming a widely adopted marketing approach, transmedia storytelling is gaining massive importance to keep the audience engaged.
The course begins with the explanation of transmedia storytelling, along with the anatomy of a story and examples of transmedia storytelling. The course delves into creative thinking techniques to build a narrative and help you understand the transmedia audience. The course also focuses on the importance of transmedia UX to keep the audience glued to the story and the use of creative technologies to deliver that.
The course content is spread across a six-week duration and you can enroll for free.
Brands are prioritizing video content, but producing it on an ongoing basis is a challenge. In this course, Roberto Blake helps you create an end-to-end video marketing strategy.
The course shares technicalities of video content creation such as the video creation process, pre-production, recording equipment, video editing, etc. and explains the difference between social networks and content platforms, and live and recorded videos.
You’ll learn how to understand the audience for video, create a video content strategy, and optimize your videos for SEO and social media. Considering how saturated the online space has become, the course also shares tips on how to build an audience from scratch.
If starting a podcast is in your 2020 content marketing plan, check out this course. Producing Podcasts is taught by Danny Ozment who has produced over 20 podcasts.
Similar to the above video production course, Producing Podcasts explains the podcast planning process that includes ideating a show, creating SEO-friendly titles, choosing a content format, and so on.
You’ll learn how to record, mix, and master podcast episodes, and the tools and applications you should use. The course will also guide you to pick podcast hosting services, directories, RSS feeds, and measure the results.
This four-week, self-paced course is offered by The University of Pennsylvania and shares key insights on what makes ideas go viral and the six factors to make your message sticky.
You’ll discover how social influence drives people to stick to societal norms. The course further delves into word of mouth marketing and provides a six-step framework that drives people to share content.
Lastly, the course focuses on how information spreads on social media and what type of content gets shared. Jonah Berger teaches the course and many of the concepts are from his book – Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
Learn More: 5 Steps to Generating ROI With B2B Content in 2020
The course by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, teaches you how to create an influencer marketing strategy for your organization, whether you’re a B2B, B2C, or non-profit organization.
The six-week course covers the importance of content marketing in the success of influencer marketing. You will learn how to find influencers in your niche using three different tools. The instructor, Greg Jarboe, shares schmooze optimization, a process to initiate conversations and engage with influencers. You will also learn how to identify the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for the influencer marketing campaigns and how to measure them. The final project will help you create a social media influencer strategy pitch deck.
SEO is an essential aspect of content marketing that deserves special attention due to the constant changes in search engine ranking algorithms. This specialization is a compilation of five courses that teach website optimization techniques to rank well in search engines.
The first two courses cover SEO fundamentals, while the third and fourth courses focus on keyword research techniques, optimizing content for local search, and how to use content, influencer, and social media marketing to turbocharge SEO activities and boost the website’s credibility.
The fifth course helps you apply the tactical aspects of SEO; you get to pick a website, choose optimization opportunities, and develop a customized SEO solution for it.
The success of your social media strategy largely depends on the content you produce. The Social Media Certification will help you build an effective social media strategy for your organization.
The course has a dedicated module on how to create content for social media that builds customer loyalty and drives sales. To supplement the learning, you can also check out HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification.
Tracking the effectiveness of your content efforts allows you to tweak the content strategy. Google Analytics for Beginners helps you get acquainted with the most basic functions of Google Analytics.
Along with understanding the audience, acquisition, and behavior reports, this course will teach you how to measure custom campaigns. With the help of the URL builder, you’ll be able to assess the impact of your content across different distribution channels.
Learn More: Five Ways of Presenting Great Content
Whether you’re a seasoned content marketer or a marketing generalist, we hope this comprehensive list of content marketing courses and certifications will help you grow in your career. The courses cover a wide spectrum of topics in content marketing, so pick the ones you find most interesting and build from there.
Do have any other content marketing courses to add to this list? Tell us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
Marketing on a Budget? Here’s 8 Ways to Lower Facebook Ad Costs
There are plenty of resources on the internet that talks about how to reduce Facebook ad costs. Articles like this provide beginners with plenty of new ideas to reduce costs. However, they stop right there. In this article, I’ll go one step further. Not only do I intend to write about the most common techniques to reduce costs but I’ll also talk about my process, through which I come up with new ideas to reduce cost.
But first, how does Facebook determine costs?
There are plenty of factors that Facebook measures to determine ad costs. Factors like ad placements, bidding strategy, and creatives, all play an important role in calculating the cost. But the most basic foundation of ad costing comes down to this:
As the name suggests, Facebook’s bidding system holds a virtual auction for every placement, audience group, timing and more. This results in high CPM’s and CPC’s when you are bidding for a slot that is highly sought after by advertisers.
Additionally, consider the following factors before creating ads because they will impact your cost metrics down the line:
Audience: When it comes to audiences not all are created equal. Some audiences on Facebook are ought to be more expensive than others and vice-versa. Generally, costs will add up when you either target a highly sought after audience or a highly targeted one.
Relevance: The relevance metric can be seen in the ad manager panel after an ad has been seen more than 500 times. Relevance is Facebook’s way of telling advertisers that your ads are being seen by the right people.
Additionally, the higher the rate of engagement on your post, the higher Facebook scores you on relevance. Scoring high on relevance signals to Facebook that your audience wants to see this content and Facebook follows up with this request by showing your ad to more of your audiences.
Bidding strategy: Facebook displays ads to viewers based on an auction system. This means, that your ads bid against other ads in a race to reach your customer. Usually, the bidding strategy is automated by Facebook. If you choose to manually handle the bidding you can optimize your strategy to your desire cost per metric.
Ad Schedule: Costs can vary depending on the time of the day, week, month or year. Generally, if you are advertising heavily during the same time as other advertisers (like holiday seasons) your expenses will rise.
Understanding how Facebook works is the first step to reduce your Ad spend. Knowing your customer comes close second. So, now that you have a fair understanding of how Facebook charges for advertising, what can you do about it?
Choose the right audience:
Choosing who your ads are shown to is a difficult task. Select the right audience and your conversion rates go through the roof. Choose the wrong audience and all that ad budget just goes down the drain.
When creating an audience keep in mind that the size, interests, location and prior connections to your page can affect the costs. Here’s a general rule of audience selection:
Now that you have the basics down its time to create an audience. Your goal here is two-fold. Find an audience that is likely to buy your products aka the target group and find different subsets of your target group, that are not highly-contested by other advertisers.
Use a targeted audience for relevance
Facebook recognizes content that does well with a certain audience and promotes your ad to that audience. By selecting an audience that is specifically targeted towards your product, you might be creating ads for people who are actively searching for your product hence more likely to engage with your ad.
Retarget your ads
Retargeting or remarketing is a form of advertising where you show ads to people who have already engaged with your brand via the website, Facebook page or ads. You can use the Facebook pixel to track people who have previously engaged with you and create an audience solely consisting of such people.
Pick your placements
By default, your ads are set to be displayed on all platforms within the Facebook ecosystem. By choosing platforms to display your ads, you can eliminate channels that are not performing well and costs relatively more.
You can head on to ad reports in your business manager to find how your ads are performing for different platforms. I have narrowed down the average CPM and CPR for the last 30 days to see where my ads performed the best in terms of costs. Note that you can go deeper into ad reports and find out how different content types compare across placements. This will give us a better idea of where to publish our ads.
Test out campaign objectives
Set your goals ahead of publishing content. What is the goal of your ad? Are you trying to let people know you exist? Or do you have a new promotion that is designed to drive customers to your website?
Having your goals set will help you optimize ads on ad manager. By default, Facebook sets ad objectives to Engagements. This could be great for getting more likes and shares on your post but it may also result in your CPM going up quite rapidly.
Instead, opt for brand awareness or reach objective if your objective is to simply send ads to people’s newsfeed at the lowest cost possible.
Optimize your ad delivery
You will get to optimize your delivery at the ad set level. Choose from either impressions or daily unique reach to find the lowest CPMs.
Here’s what the two delivery optimization option does for your ads:
Impressions
By optimizing for impressions you can lower your CPM quickly. But be warned that this might come at the cost of lower engagements and conversions. Choose this delivery strategy when you’re trying to increase brand awareness rather than increase sales.
Daily Unique Reach
The daily unique reach optimization shows your ad only once per day per viewer. This can drive costs down when you have a large audience and Facebook has enough options for choosing who to display ads to.
Use bid caps
Bid caps are also available at the ad set level. If you choose to keep default settings Facebook will try to keep bids as low as possible but raise the costs as we move farther along the campaign. You can test out a bid cap in this scenario to keep costs below a certain threshold. The only drawback to this strategy is that at a certain point, Facebook might refuse to show your ads or reduce the number of impressions per day.
Did you know that you can choose when to show your ads down to specific hours of the day?
Your customers might be more active during certain periods of the day and likely more responsive as well.
Select the optimal hours to reach customers and improve your cost per desired results significantly. In order to find the best times to schedule ads, head over to ad reports and set your parameters to find out when your ads got the best results. Historical indicators can serve as a great guide for letting us know when our ads will perform the best.
Recommended For You Webcast, March 5th: How AI Can Find Opportunities and Shorten Your Sales CyclesRegister Now
Video viewership has increased steadily in 2019 and will continue to do so. Videos are significantly more powerful than other content types to express your brand and tell your story in a medium that engages your customers. Use more videos in your content strategy, with an average of 6.13% engagement rate videos that can help increase your ad relevancy in the long run and reduce expenses.
Create relevant content
Your customers are not seeking ads on social media. They are searching for content. Create your content in a way that satisfies both your objectives and the customer’s need to enjoy the content they are interested in.
Incorporate current trends and customer interests in your ads to get them to engage with your ads.
Recall NASA’s reveal of the black hole image last April? Popular brands had a field day with their content.
4 effective ways to design your own ad strategy
There are plenty of advertising strategies you can use to lower your expenditure. While you have some of the most commonly used strategies listed in this article, you will also need to customize your own strategy for your products and services.
It’s important to understand that every product has its own target audience who behaves differently and will require its unique content to attract capture the customer’s attention. So test out different ideas and find a mix of content and advertising strategy that works for you.
So how do I approach a new product or service?
Every new process has its own set of challenges but the strategizing process is usually the same. My process can be described in these 4 steps:
Create a buyer persona
A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents your ideal customer. Advertisers imagine these fictional characters to better understand their ideal customer and mold their strategies around them.
The buyer persona also plays an important role in advertising strategy. A well-made persona tells us how to reach our audience, the type of content they like and possibly the best time to reach out to them.
You can ask your customers these following questions to build your persona:
Why it matters: Finding how your users log into Facebook will help you create better audiences. Also, knowing which devices your users don’t use will help you eliminate non-buyers.
Why it matters: This is one of the most important questions you can ask and also the most difficult to answer. Looking into your customer’s lifestyle will tell you the best time to approach them with an ad (or find leisure hours). It also helps to find their hobbies, daily jobs and any activity that they try to do regularly.
Why it matters: Talk about things your customers are passionate about. Create content based on their answers. Someone who talks about veganism might be in a lookout for vegan recipes, whereas someone who talks about skating might also be into skate shoes.
Create your content according to what moves them. Relevant content tends to get more engagement, drive up relevance score on your ads and decrease your costs.
Use listening tools to get content ideas
Creating fresh content is no rocket science but it does have its nuances. When I create content for my ads, I always keep an eye out for current trends for inspiration.
Here are a few tools that can help you with gathering content ideas and new trends
Social Pilot
Social Pilot is a Social Media tool that lets you manage your social media accounts and curates content ideas. The content curator looks up relevant articles, posts, and blogs based on feeds you set up for your account.
Feedly
Feedly can curate content from YouTube, Twitter, and other social media websites. Its content stream arranges a content stream that brings plenty of relevant content together and provides inspiration for generating new content ideas.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo can do everything Feedly and DrumUp do and also partner with other content creators to create engaging content.
Google Trends
Google Trends displays the most searched keywords throughout the year and highlights trending topics in a variety of fields including most searched actors, musicians, recipes and much more.
Twitter Trends
You can search for the latest conversations on twitter’s trending feature right from your iOS and Android App. Live updates help you keep track of the liveliest conversations of the day and provide ideas for relevant content creation.
Analyze historical performance on Ad reports
Ad report’s application has been covered many times in this article. From finding the best times to schedule ads to best-performing platforms, reports can guide you in creating better performing ads and optimize campaign strategies.
From my personal experience, ad reports are a great starting point for research. The reports panel allows you to see performance metrics for everything from the day of the week, time of the month, age, gender, and countless other variables.
Split test your hypothesis
A hypothesis is a proposed idea that is subject to experimentation.
In advertising, we can hypothesize several ideas:
Advertisers can create several other hypotheses to test during the lifetime of a campaign. In fact, the purpose of discussing this process is that you can create your own hypothesis and test them.
Ideally, after you create an initial hypothesis, it is time to split test (aka A/B test) your idea using Facebook’s split testing feature.
The split testing feature allows you to test two or more audiences, delivery strategies, placements, and creatives.
Note that not all variables can be tested within the split testing option. In this case, you can still test other variables by simply duplicating an ad and changing the variable you want to test.
Conclusion
When I started writing this article, I wanted to write about more than just the best ideas to lower costs. I wanted to show my process and hopefully instill a framework for readers to come up with their own strategy.
This wasn’t always the case. When I started off my marketing career, most of the common tips listed above worked great. However, as I progressed to more challenging markets, I felt there was more that I could do as a marketer.
So if there’s one thing to take away from this article, it is that you should “always be testing” and find out new ways to revamp your marketing strategy. The results just might surprise you.
Author: Kazi Hassan
Kazi Hassan is a digital marketer, content creator, and account manager at http://codesign.com.bd . He writes regularly about topics closely related to Marketing and likes to share his unique experiences in his writings. … View full profile ›
Your Blueprint to Marketing in China in 2020 (Chinese New Year Special)
China’s substantial population, its thriving economy, and unique cultural norms make it an exciting region for marketers around the globe. In our Chinese New Year special, we discuss:
As the world’s second-largest economy in terms of GDP, China is now a key market region for brands. However, marketing in China can seem difficult, due to regulatory complexities and unique cultural norms. For example, commonly used social media marketing platforms, such as Facebook or YouTube, cannot be accessed in China. Also, the influencer marketing community in China is organized differently, with niche segments and norms.
On the occasion of Chinese New Year 2020 (January 25), we take a closer look at marketing strategies for Chinese consumers and bring you useful tips and insights.
Learn More: 10 Best Social Media Marketing Books to Read in 2020
Why Marketing to China Is a Key Priority for Businesses
Several factors have made China a popular region for businesses going global. To begin with, it has a large number of high net worth individuals (HNWI) – between 2016 and 2019, the number of Chinese adults in this bracket increased by 80.8 million. Further, China boasts exceptionally high mobile penetration making it ideal for mobile marketing strategies. With approximately 1.2 billion subscribers, China now has the largest mobile audience globally.
Here are a few important metrics from McKinsey’s China digital consumer trends 2019 report that surveyed 4,300 digital consumers across the country. They precisely indicate why brands need a well-defined strategy for this region:
These metrics reveal an interesting picture. Unlike other market regions, the Chinese consumer is truly omnichannel, and the lines between digital and offline are increasingly blurred. In 2020, brands need a robust, reliable brick-and-mortar presence, bolstered by a well-articulated digital marketing strategy, to win in the Chinese market.
Let’s look at five tips to make this happen.
Learn More: Can Better Online Visibility Disrupt Offline Retail?
5 Tips to Remember When Marketing in China
Despite its localization complexities, large brands do not shy away from investing in marketing to China. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported how Chinese shoppers played a significant role in maintaining Gucci’s global revenue levels. And last year, PepsiCo made a major investment in one of China’s largest natural food companies, buying 26% of its shares for $131 million.
For marketers looking to take advantage of China’s promising consumer base, here are five useful tips:
1. Use a dedicated platform for influencer marketing in China
Influencer marketing in China is different from the standard approaches in other market regions. It has a highly organized influencer community, with specialized influencer agencies, consultancy groups, and incubators to hone social media talent.
And, there are various levels of influencers, like key opinion leaders (KOLs) who are recognized for the validity of their opinions, in a specific domain. There are Wanghongs or influencers who gain popularity for their online appearance. This is in addition to traditional celebrities who also have a large social media following and influence.
In 2020, marketers can use a dedicated platform like Parklu or Robin8 to navigate the influencer community and find the best online advocates for their brands and marketing needs.
2. Live-stream short videos as part of your social marketing strategy in China
Last year’s edition of the Internet Trends report by Mary Meeker highlighted the critical role played by short-form videos in China. Chinese consumers spent a total of 600 million hours per day watching short-form videos in April of 2019. Popular apps for video consumption included Douyin (or Tik Tok), Kuaishou, and Haokan.
While there are other social media platforms for long-form video consumption like Youku and iQiyi, short-form is the trend to follow in 2020. You can work with KOLs, Wanghongs, and other types of influencers to create short videos of your product. These can be live-streamed through social media at regular intervals to garner a loyal audience.
3. Leverage WeChat for B2B marketing in China
B2B marketing in China involves several foundational steps, like hosting B2B websites on a Chinese server and optimizing website content as per Baidu’s SEO norms. The content should also be available in Chinese so that it can be accurately indexed. B2B marketers also need a special license called the ICP Beian License to host their websites in Mainland China; this also entails a local offline entity.
To streamline B2B marketing in China, we recommend leveraging WeChat for customer communication rather than website updates or emailers. Email marketing in China isn’t a good area of investment for B2B brands as the number of email users in China is surprisingly low.
WeChat is a messaging app with integrated services for networking, online shopping, and payments, where users can view posts published by accounts they have subscribed to. Leverage WeChat to send newsletters, new product updates, service recommendations, and other marketing messages.
4. Take advantage of Chinese shopping festivals for affiliate marketing
The first thing to remember here is that websites that work with the affiliate platforms outside of China cannot be promoted in the country. Once you have an alternative website domain in place, one with China-supported payment methods, such as Alipay or WeChat pay, you can get started with your affiliate marketing strategy. The operations are pretty simple – you partner with an affiliate network under the CPS Union.
To make your affiliate marketing strategy a success in China, take advantage of localized shopping festivals in the region. Keep an eye on Double Eleven (Single’s Day in China, celebrated on November 11) – it was popularized by Alibaba in 2009, making it the Chinese equivalent of Cyber Monday. There’s also 618, a mid-year shopping festival that usually falls in June.
Events like these are perfect occasions to share promotional content and hold private sales through your affiliate marketing networks.
5. Replace multi-level marketing in China with direct sales
There are no two ways around it: multi-level marketing in China should be strictly avoided. Pyramid-like sales structures that employ an undefined number of resellers (on the lines of Amway) were banned in China in 2005. And as the Chinese economy has grown, publicly-traded multi-level marketing companies, including Herbalife, Nuskin, and Usana, have dipped in valuation.
You can replace multi-level marketing with a stronger direct sales strategy, explicitly focused on brick-and-mortar locations that are complemented by online content. This will allow Chinese consumers to confidently buy products from your brand while utilizing digital assets for additional research.
Remember, direct sales channels require a business license, as well as training courses for all resellers.
Learn More: Navigating Growth at Home and Overseas - 3 Tips for Mobile Marketers
In 2020, Digital Marketing in China Will Take Off – Are Brands Ready?
The future of digital marketing in China looks optimistic, to say the least. A 2019 survey of 240 marketers in China revealed that 79% of professionals were looking to increase their digital marketing spends. Social marketing spends in China was expected to grow by 21% on average, with special attention on KOLs, short-form videos, live streams, and official WeChat accounts.
The writing is on the wall – businesses eager to scale fast must make deeper inroads into the Chinese marketplace in 2020. This includes a careful blend of digital marketing and offline activity and compliance with the country’s regulations. Keeping these five tips in mind, you can articulate an effective strategy for marketing to Chinese buyers, gain from its large (and fast-growing) segment of affluent consumers, and build a robust brand in the region.
Happy selling, and have a great Chinese New Year!
Do you have a recommendation for marketers who want to enter the complex Chinese market? Tell us on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment