The Chinese digital marketing landscape is vastly different to that anywhere else in the world – so it makes sense that when entering the Chinese market for the first time, you’ll want to enlist the help of experts on the ground. In these early stages, partnering with a digital marketing agency in China can help you establish a foothold and learn the ropes while avoiding potential pitfalls and costly mistakes.
Once you’ve been in the market for a while, however, and you’ve got a reasonably good grasp of SEO, the social media landscape, and your target audience, it may be time to think about bringing your Chinese digital marketing in-house.
Here are 5 reasons why you should consider bringing at least some of your Chinese digital marketing in-house.
1. You can make your marketing budget stretch further
Yes, hiring and onboarding someone to manage your Chinese digital marketing does take time and effort. But once they get up to speed, you’ll find you get so much more done.
In digital marketing there are lots of slow-burners – activities that need to be done continuously in order to achieve ongoing online visibility and audience engagement. This includes things like content creation, email marketing, SEO and social media. A digital agency can help kickstart these activities, but as these activities are constant, it makes financial sense to bring them in-house at some point.
Bringing your Chinese digital marketing in-house can also be much more financially transparent – it becomes a lot easier to see where your money is going, and how much return-on-investment (ROI) you’re generating. Agencies, on the other hand, can sometimes be driven by the wrong incentives, such as spending the budget rather than optimising campaigns or ad spend.
2. In-house marketing are 100% focused on your business
When you work with a digital agency, you have to share all their resources with the agency’s other clients, and their focus is always going to be pulled between multiple projects and campaigns.
With in-house marketing, however, you’ll have someone whose entire focus is your business’s Chinese digital marketing. They will also have much more ownership on their marketing activities, and will be more determined to see their campaigns succeed.
Many of the ‘slow-burner’ activities mentioned above also tend to benefit from have a consistent brand voice, which is much more easily achieved if you have someone in-house concentrating much of their efforts on maintaining these activities.
3. In-house marketing know your business inside and out
A digital agency – particularly one located overseas in China – is likely not going to have a well-developed sense of your business.
With in-house marketing, however, you have someone who’s fully immersed in your company. That means they’re part of the culture, they share the same values, and they have a much better idea of what is going on in other areas of the business. You’ll be amazed at what a casual chat over coffee in the break room can lead to, and how much more focused and effective campaigns can become when employees across the business are able to collaborate more easily.
4. Owning your data means owning the customer relationship
When it comes to building a relationship with your customers, data is key. Yet when you work with an agency, much of the data goes through them, giving you less ownership and insight.
Bringing marketing in-house means the business can capture direct, unfiltered information about their various customer touchpoints, and make their own decisions about how they put this data to use, whether it’s to improve content strategy, assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns or make smarter media-buying choices.
Keeping this valuable data in-house also means it can be shared more readily with other areas of the business, such as customer service or product development, so insights can be acted on more quickly.
5. Your marketing efforts will become so much more effective over time
Having someone within the business with 100% focus and ownership over your Chinese digital marketing, as well as a deep knowledge of the ins and outs of the business and a handle on all the data, means your marketing efforts will only go from strength to strength. Your in-house marketing will quickly develop a strong sense of what campaigns and content resonate with your target audience, and will be able to adapt quickly to audience sentiment and new trends. Content will also become much relevant and campaigns more targeted, and soon your in-house Chinese digital marketing team will be running like a well-oiled machine.
Sinorbis can help
If you want your in-house team to succeed, you need to give them the tools they need to do so. Luckily, there’s one platform that allows you to easily manage your Chinese digital marketing without the need for an outside agency: Sinorbis.
Whether it’s managing SEO, building landing pages or analysing WeChat campaigns, Sinorbis gives you full visibility and control over many aspects of your Chinese digital marketing, all within a single platform.
With all these tools at your fingertips, you can not only increase your speed to market and quickly optimise your marketing efforts, but also reduce costs by focusing your resources more smartly and gaining fast insights.
To find out more about how the Sinorbis platform can help your in-house marketing team perform at its peak, contact us today.
