China is fast becoming in the next few years the largest market in terms of cosmetics and especially skin care in the world. Despite the slowdown in the country’s growth, the beauty products sector has seen a total increase of 5% over the last ten years. Demand and beauty trends keep evolving offering businesses a relevant niche market to exploit.
Every new cosmetics or personal care brand in China usually face a lot of problems: lack of branding, high marketing expenses, logistics, and certification problem… But if people don’t even know your product exists?
The main problem for this kind of product is not only branding, but the main problem is also how to sell something to people they have never used before. Which channels they should use to get visibility and target the right audience?
Let’s look through Veet (shaving products for women) marketing activities and how they adapt their west marketing strategy for Chinese consumers.
STRONG OFFLINE AND ONLINE PRESENCE
Veet launched an extensive online and offline campaign in 2019. Shanghai residents could notice a fully stylized subway station made by Veet with bathrooms, real-size baths, and beach views. This subway station became a popular spot for young girls making a dozen number of photo and sharing them with their friends on social media platforms.
Veet’s solution for targeting people who are not in Shanghai is to collaborate with bloggers on the popular social e-commerce app Little Red Book.
Little Red Book (小红书) is one of the largest and fastest growing social e-commerce apps in China. The platform is based on user-generated content (UGC), including recommendations and reviews. This is a kind of online community and a reference application for a lot of young people (mostly between 16 and 35 years old). Little Red book counts now over 70 million active users, who are participating actively in its promotion through sharing, commenting, and creating content. Besides being mentioned naturally, a lot of brands started to leverage Little Red Book for their Marketing Mix strategy.
Actually, this new generation stays informed about the last trends by browsing online platforms. They are 55% look for beauty trends through social media.
Veet chose lifestyle and beauty blogger Jessica with more than 500.000 followers on Little Red Book to engage young girls across China.
A CHINESE WEBSITE FOR EDUCATION
Another key component for a starting business is to get discovered and noticed by Chinese consumers. For a new company, it’s not easy to get noticed and to be top of mind with your target group. However, you should absolutely fight for this because if you don’t get noticed, your brand will not exist for Chinese consumers.
A great way to get discovered is to invest in optimizing for Chinese search engines like Baidu, also known as the Chinese version of Google.
Any brand needs to build brand trust and credibility, and get engagement from traffic, but at the end of the day, convert website traffic into actual sales. This is not an easy task, it takes time to develop a brand and offer content that attracts the reader’s attention. Of course, the brand has to propose quality content marketing, but at the same time make sure that it won’t be a waste of time and money.
Create appealing content, especially dealing with marketing: your posts must reflect the innovation and professionalism of your company. The readers have to feel that you are trustworthy, and after reaching this point, those leads will naturally convert into sales.
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DOUYIN FOR REACHING GENERATION Z
Douyin was launched in September 2016 and, in less than a year, began expanding internationally under the name “TikTok”. In China, Douyin, the popular short-video social platform, allows users to quickly and easily create unique short videos to share with friends and followers, grew from 30 million to 500 million daily active users within a year, each user on the platform opens Douyin 5 times a day on average, spending about 30 minutes per day watching the video there.
The app has already shown its potential in marketing to Generation Z – the generation born between the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Brands, frustrated by the high cost and increasing difficulty to reach a young audience on established platforms such as Sina Weibo and WeChat, have been eager to experiment with Douyin. KFC, BMW and Tesla, and other big international brands have already worked with the app for advertising and marketing campaigns.
During the pretty girl was dancing, Chinese users “shaved” hairy legs and armpits by shaking the phone. More than 60000 Douyin users played this game these days.
Chinese users really love to play mobile games. First, games give you something to bond with other people over. Finished playing the Veet game every user could share the results on Wechat and ask a friend to join, it makes this kind of game viral and gives the brand an opportunity to engage potential consumers and be visible not only in Douyin but everywhere outside of the platform.
Gentlemen Marketing Agency is specialized in digital marketing in the Chinese market. Do not hesitate to contact us if you want to discuss any projects in China.
Read also:
- The Chinese love video games
- Introduction to Douyin Marketing
- 5 tips to build a good website in China
