This is a burgeoning market in China with Emigration and overseas real estate investment a hot topic amongst high-net-worth individuals. Indeed, there are now over 350 million ‘middle class’ citizens in China with the top 100 million being financially able to purchase property overseas.
With this sizeable market in mind, it’s not surprising that so many luxury investment events are springing up to cater to the demand. Many seminars, conferences, or events are held in China whilst others are hosted in luxury venues around the globe.
The key is how you market and promote these events to the right target demographic in order to convert prospects to pre-sale ticket buyers. The answer is online in the digitally-led Chinese luxury sector.
What is the appeal of Luxury Investment Events?
For the Chinese, this is a great chance to network with like-minded, discerning individuals who are also looking to manage their wealth internationally as well as businesses that can offer high-quality services to facilitate this.
It’s also a case of presenting ‘face’, status and reputation are vital in this modern society, and attending prestigious events is one avenue for showcasing this. In short the wealthy tend to look for opportunities to display this, where better than a luxury event?
Developing a prestigious reputation
To attract high-net-worth individuals you have to have a prestigious reputation. Branding, image, and trust are at the center of any intelligent events marketing campaign.
The key is to raise your visibility and reputation online on the right platforms (and through the best selection of keywords) to place your content straight in front of this target demographic.
The Chinese research extensively online in a digital eco-system that is the most active in the world, the Chinese spend on average 1.5 hours per day browsing online.
A Quality Website & Landing Page
This is step one, your official Chinese site needs to be branded and developed to reflect ‘luxury’ visually. The choice of images, text, and color palette is vital.
For events users typically will have a lot of questions, thus building a live chat tool function into the site is important for instant messaging and faster communication.
Website formats are typically different in China and need to be built for Chinese searches on Baidu, the largest search engine and your ‘portal’ when it comes to tapping into this market.
It’s therefore integral to optimize your site for Mandarin character keywords that link to the search terms you are optimizing, this includes auditing the meta tags, titles, and descriptions.
A Mandarin contact form for event registration and sign-ups is also a necessity, prospects can leave their details to be contacted back if they have further questions or can sign up directly.
Visibility on Baidu (China’s Google)
There is no point in building an attractive site without making it highly visible. 75% of all research in China is conducted via Baidu. To increase site visibility for the event you need to engage in SEO, this takes a coherent strategy over a series of months to rank highly in the natural search results, therefore ample run-up is required if you seek to rank highly in the organic results (where the most qualified traffic is driven).
You can also work on PPC (pay-per-click) ad links at the top of the Baidu results based on certain keyword searches. It’s important to consider ad copywriting, link management, and monitoring & analysis of click-through rates for campaign feedback.
Please note registration for Baidu takes 4-6 weeks so allow ample time in the run-up to the event for set up in this very different marketplace.
Reputation in Financial, Real Estate & Emigration Forums
Forums in China are more important than in the rest of the world. Sites such as Baidu Zhidao, Zhihu, Baidu Tieba & Tianya boast highly active communities on specific threads. Here you can create user-to-user recommendations and testimonials about the event from third-party accounts, conversations tend to follow a Q&A format but this can be powerful as perceived as coming from other locals directly. It’s an important part of managing your reputation and building active conversation around the event.
Then it also assists with SEO, Baidu’s forums (Tieba & Zhidao) automatically rank highly in the search results so relevant content here is more highly visible. Forums in this sense play a supportive role in your event’s Baidu ranking.
WeChat – The number one communication tool
In terms of visibility focusing on Baidu is the best method, then there is WeChat, the country’s largest social network with 877 million daily active users. It is a closed network, users can only see your posts from an official account if already connected but it certainly pays to drive traffic from your site/contact form directly to WeChat, most companies now offer customer services via IM on this nifty app.
more information on Wechat Marketing
PR – Exposure for your event in the Media
If your event is deemed to be newsworthy it can gain significant traction. Outside of China, your English content will likely not be seen with the vast majority of searches in Mandarin.
Exposure to selected, targeted Chinese media sources is the next step. News platforms such as ‘Sohu’, ‘168’, or the reputable ‘Ifeng’ (finance and real estate-focused site) can be targeted with quality content curated and published. For reaching your target demographic you need to ensure articles are featured in the right news sections. The quality has to be high, direct translation will never suffice as content needs to be adapted and tailored.
News Application Advertising
If your budget extends to higher-level ad spend you can gain huge exposure on news apps through targeted ‘ads’ embedded in users’ news feeds. This approach is focused on what users select as their categories of news, for luxury events of this nature it’s best to target real estate, financial, investment, lifestyle, and travel feeds.
Ads appear within the news feed as an article, this has the benefit of legitimizing the event as newsworthy, and prospects then click through to a contact form to leave their information.
Tailoring your offering to the Chinese market
It’s important to understand how your target demographic behave online and what they look for in an event, either inside or outside of China. When it comes to branding and promotions you need to collaborate with a local specialist in terms of how the event is stylistically and linguistically sold. Reaching your target in the most effective way is vital to delivering Return On Invest.
Need a Partner in China?
We are a specialist marketing agency based in Shanghai with a wealth of experience in real estate, emigration, events, and investment-based marketing campaigns.
For more information please contact our experts for an in-depth discussion.
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