China Digital Marketing Trends 2021 report, released by Miaozhen Academy of Marketing Science (MAMS), the Global Digital Marketing Summit (GDMS), and Media 360, has pointed out certain important 2021 digital marketing trends and difficulties in China. It is reported that 47% of advertisers, both new and mature ones, plan to raise their marketing expenditure of the China market due to a 12% expected growth.
However, while the global advertisers are optimistic about the performance in China, the far-sighted become more serious about data analysis than ever as they are aware of a variety of problems waiting to be confronted.
50% of marketers fail to quantify the actual effectiveness
For decades, general marketers only feel responsible for being creative, mapping out and implementing new campaigns continuously. They ignored the financial outcomes behind their marketing decisions so they have no clue of the effects of their marketing efforts and costs. With the more intense future marketing competition, it is of significance for all advertisers to justify their decisions of integrated marketing communication with analytics regarding monetary return on investment (ROI) so that they can ensure the effectiveness of their marketing resources utilization. Yet, mass data collection and analysis is a big challenge. According to a CMO survey, only 30% of B2B marketers take analytics into consideration for decision-making owing to the difficulty; meanwhile, 50% of marketers blame the lack of resources to conduct marketing analytics.
Much harder to gain insights into consumer behaviours
Thanks to the unprecedentedly speedy Internet development under COVID-19, it is much more difficult for advertisers to understand the patterns of ever-changing customer behaviours and factors behind these changes, which contain influencers, social habits, etc. Advertisers tend to rely on their own perspectives to make decisions instead of the analysis of the mass data of the actual consumer actions, which makes most marketers fail to catch up with the latest trend. While some leading businesses or giants are aware of the current consumer behaviours and successfully cater to the latest trends of extra short videos, live streaming, Bili Bili marketing and so on, many other businesses are often left in the dark or have no idea about how to follow these patterns.
Left in the dark when conducting competitor analysis
The boom in the use of the Internet also challenges all marketers when it comes to analyzing the competitors’ strategies due to the complicated platform fragmentation. There are more and more marketing channels rising in China, named but not limited to, Xiaohongshu (aka Red), Meitu, Douyin, Weitao and Keep. The more channels people welcome and marketers can utilize, the harder for marketers to keep checking on their competitors’ actions on the channels not only due to the number of channels, but also the different trends and user patterns in different channels.
