5 Marketing Tips for Newly-Arrived Chinese Corporations in the UAE

These days, more and more Chinese companies are tempted by what the UAE has to offer in terms of investment and new business development. Making the most of the Belt and Road (B&R) initiative, a number of large Chinese multinational companies have chosen to establish regional headquarters in the Emirates, with a lot of small to medium-sized chinese firms following suit.

When in Dubai, do as Dubaians do

For Chinese corporations newly arrived in this Middle Eastern powerhouse, what’s the best way to start your marketing journey? If you have a large budget for marketing, you’ll probably go down the tried and tested route of spending a lot on advertising on billboards and TV commercials. For the rest of us, how can you maximise cost savings while letting local consumers, governments and businesses know of your existence?

In this post, we want to present you with five easy and cost-effective ways that can raise your profile in the UAE and get people talking about your business. Even big marketing budget companies can learn a lot from our alternative solutions to large-scale advertising campaigns.

1. Target your audience.

With a city as large and diverse as this is, Dubai presents a potentially huge customer base. However, if you want your marketing strategy to be truly successful, it is very important these days to identify and invest only in targeting your company’s potential audience. Rather than spreading yourself thinly, focus on those customers with interests that seem most ripe for conversion. Get to know them better, whilst collecting as much information about them as possible so that you can target them more effectively.

2. Websites as information hubs

Never underestimate the importance of your website as a tool for marketing. More than just a company welcome page or a pretty page to look at, your website is the port of call for customers wanting to find out more about what you do. In fact, the most important function of your site is to work as your content distribution centre so that your target audience can find you easily and browse your information.

3. Optimise your website, jump to the top of the results’ page

With customers using search engines at the outset of their own research into products, it’s important that customers can find your website and that it stands out from the others. You want your website to appear near the top of the search results page, not further down or on page 2 where 75% of searchers will have already lost interest.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is your friend in this case.  It helps improve the click-through rate by pushing your company’s site to the top of the search results page. The way this works is as follows: regularly publish relevant content on your website, optimize it for search (ask us how!), then sit back and let the search engine find you.

4. Use Social Media properly.

You might say “social media is only about getting likes and comments on Facebook“ but there’s a lot more to it than that.

Companies can reach out to customers more meaningfully than ever before through social media. Knowing how influential social media is in people’s lives, Chinese companies already see social media as a key component to their marketing strategy, setting up local or UAE-specific pages on social media platforms.  

To begin with, there are other various different platforms that are very popular in the UAE (Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat). Within that, each platform has its own positioning and user types. This means that it is important to post the right content to the right channel for your audience. You want to post interesting content that is relevant to that audience, so that they’ll engage with the posts (more than ‘likes’; comments!) and come back for more.

That being said, recent changes to Facebook mean that posting alone might not be the best way to reach out to your audience. Keep updating your page and linking it back to your website but don’t let that be your only marketing tool. Pair it with some boosting and paid ads to raise visibility from time to time.

5. Consistently create and publish remarkable content.

If your marketing strategy is a machine, great content is the generator.

People are embracing good content while pushing advertisements away. Whether it’s a website or social media official account, it needs to be filled with great content.

Forget about cold, impersonal advertising or product descriptions: create content that is relevant and valuable to your potential customers. Your content can be a solution for problem, a valuable infographic, a smart video, a funny and philosophical story. Increase traffic by creating content that resonates with your audiences.

In addition, you need to keep content sustainable. The occasional article or social media post clearly won’t convince your potential customers. Keep publishing content regularly and consistently.  

Once your content has been published, do you know how many people have read it? What was the response like? You can find this out by using an automated real-time monitoring platform like Hubspot  to track traffic and data. Once you’ve got a better idea of how much people engaged with your posts (and liked them!) you can go ahead and optimise future content accordingly.

Your goal at these early stages of business development is to be seen by your target audience and to give them an easy way to find out more about you.  If you have already started working on any these five things, congratulations! You are well on your way to greater visibility and building up a following!

In our next blog, we will tell you how to keep visitors glued to your online platforms, plus how to make them trust you and become your customers; even more, how to convince them to eventually become your fans and promote for you.

How do you implement your marketing strategy in UAE? Share your ideas or experiences with us in comment box.

If you like this blog, fill the form at the top right corner to subscribe our blog! Let’s rock marketing!