China is an ever-flourishing marketplace, one that is being tapped into by foreign businesses relentlessly every year. Entering the Chinese market has many implications to your business, the highest of which would be a much larger target audience. Expanding your business into China may seem like a tempting option, but keep in mind there are multiple factors to consider before jumping the gun, one of which is Baidu advertising (adstochina.westwin.com/Baidu-Advertising)!

What Is Baidu?

Let’s start at the beginning; Baidu is a successful Chinese company that focuses on web services. Established in the year of 2000, it is currently one of the largest internet companies in the world. Offering a wide range of services, Baidu is most popularly known for its efficient search engine. You may think of Baidu’s search engine as the Chinese equivalent of Google.

Baidu is responsible for over 70% of the Chinese internet-search queries, which comprises of over tens of billions of searches on its search engine in just a month. Additional to its methodical search engine, Baidu also offers data storage capacity, music-streaming services, images, and maps. From a marketing standpoint, Baidu’s most interesting service offered is its pay-per-click ads!

Baidu Advertising: A Recipe For Success

Evidenced by what you’ve read so far, marketing with Baidu is no joke. Most of Baidu’s revenue is generated from marketing and advertising. There are multiple ways in which you may use Baidu advertising and marketing services to not only promote your brand but also tap into the burgeoning and ever-growing Chinese marketplace. Here are three common ways to take advantage of Baidu advertising:

1. Baidu Tuigang

A Baidu advertising platform (quite similar to Google Adwords or Adsense) which enables advertisers to promote their ads by displaying it on search result pages and other websites while on the Baidu search engine. Now, even though the main admin interface for Baidu is in Chinese, you can now develop an English version of the same. However, if you’re looking to tap into the Chinese market, it might be more beneficial for you to keep the interface in Chinese.

2. ProTheme

This type of Baidu advertising involves displaying of promotional links and ads on specific web pages (that are under the Baidu Union). It is a much more specific way of advertising through Baidu, than say Tuigang.

3. Pay-For-Placement

Pay for placement is a very good advertising technique, one that is shunned by Google. Luckily, Baidu promotes it, and if you wish to promote your brand using P4P, you may do so with Baidu! This allows companies to reach out to customers after specific searches. Companies may bid on keywords to have their ads/website information displayed on search engine result pages.

Now that you have an idea about Baidu advertising and how it could be beneficial to your brand’s promotion, let’s find out why one would choose Baidu advertising over the rest?

Why Choose Baidu Advertising?

Let me put it this way: Baidu owns over 70% of the Chinese market share, making it impossible for other competitors in the market to come close to this figure. Much like Google rules the Western world, the Baidu market share is just too big a slice for anyone else to come in and steal the spotlight.

Now, here’s the interesting part: research proved that Chinese consumers do not mind having online ads and website links on their search engine result pages. They further believe that any company willing to promote their promotes using pay for placement must be reputable and respected. This is surprising, given that the customers in the West have varied responses.

With Baidu ads splashed over 600,000 Chinese web pages, you don’t even have to think twice when considering the potential growth factor it would have on your company: the marketplace for new business is truly enormous.

The Success Stories?

Many foreign companies have reported massive rates of success from Baidu advertising, especially when compared to other forms of advertisement; this just goes to show how popular Baidu advertising is among the Chinese population: not only ads target PC users, but also other users that access the Baidu search engine web pages via mobile and tablets. Google claims less than 2% in the Chinese market today. Even with other players in the Chinese market, like Sogou, Haosou, and Shenma, Baidu has got to be the first port of call when it comes to search marketing campaigns and advertising in China.