Top B2B Marketing Strategies in China
All about B2B Marketing in China in 2024. While China is experiencing slower growth than the meteoric rates of the past two decades, the country’s B2B market size is still expected to reach 2.7 trillion USD in 2025. To hasten economic recovery, China’s government has introduced incentives for growing the consumer markets, which will create downstream opportunities for B2B companies serving Chinese businesses.
While traditionally, B2B marketing is more conservative than B2C marketing practises, China’s fast pace of digital innovation and internet penetration has seen the rapid incorporation of digital marketing practises into the country’s B2B marketing dynamics. Because of these factors, the B2B ecommerce market in China is booming, valued at 1.26 trillion USD in 2023 and expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.3% from 2024 to 2030.
Earlier this year, the Chinese government announced the strengthening of international cooperation in digital ecommerce via the Silk Road e-commerce and joining the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement. These initiatives, encouraging foreign investment and B2B partnerships, present major opportunities for foreign B2B companies looking to break into the Chinese market via digital marketing.
In such a large and dynamic B2B market such as China’s, staying abreast of emerging marketing strategies is crucial for foreign businesses looking to expand their reach and grow operations. Here’s a look at the top 10 B2B marketing strategies we think foreign brands should consider in 2024.
1. Website Localization
Website localization is a crucial step to take for any company expanding operations into a foreign market. For foreign companies doing business in China, the country’s unique culture, written language, and internet regulatory framework make website localization a much more involved undertaking than localization for other regions.
Localizing for the Chinese market will require foreign companies to understand the culture in the country and adapt their content around it. Due to the Chinese language’s vast difference from languages like English, oftentimes simple translations will not be sufficient for localizing your website. For more creative content like slogans and even brand name translation, transcreation will be necessary to ensure brand values are properly conveyed in Chinese website copy.
Aside from translating your website’s content to Chinese and ensuring content is localized, website localization in China also entails understanding the regulatory framework of website hosting and cybersecurity best practises, including how to navigate China’s Great Firewall. For international companies trying to localize their website for the Chinese market, these regulations present an extra step that must be taken for website localization. Websites not hosted in China will experience throttling due to the Great Firewall. We recommend getting to understand the ICP licensing system to ensure your website remains accessible in China.
2. Events and Trade Shows
While digital marketing is important for expanding your business’s potential pool of clients, traditional B2B events and trade shows remain an important avenue of attracting clients in China. The personalized nature of direct face-to-face interactions with potential leads makes them an indispensable marketing strategy for B2B businesses, especially understanding the important of “guanxi” in China’s business culture.
Post-pandemic, there is a resurgence of interest in trade shows and forums in China. For foreign B2B companies looking to leverage these events and trade shows to grow their sales leads in China, it will be important to have sales representatives that understand the local culture and are able to fluently converse with potential leads while gathering information on emerging market needs and pain points.
Need help orginazing your trade show in China? Contact us!
Some of the new trends that are happening now are hologram displays, robotic reception, livestreaming and many others!
3. Understanding How to Leverage WeChat for Business
Over the last decade and a half, WeChat has become the default way to message people in Chinese society, replacing texting for personal messaging and email for business messaging. As a super-app, WeChat contains an entire self-sufficient digital ecosystem, allowing for a variety of digital marketing strategies for B2B companies
A WeChat official account often serves as the secondary official website or a mobile website for a business and is arguably more important than having a traditional website in China. Considering that most clients and leads will be interacting with your sales associates via their personal WeChat account, WeChat also serves as a social CRM platform for B2B businesses.
WeChat also offers a suite of enterprise services: WeChat Services Accounts allow for integration with a business’s official website and Mini-Programs while Subscription Accounts allow businesses to build brand image with more relatable content.
It’s important to note that the WeChat platform is a closed ecosystem. This means that content published on WeChat does not appear in Baidu’s search results, and vice versa, making it difficult for your content to reach new users without running ads on WeChat. Therefore, for B2B companies, WeChat should be leveraged as a tool for maintaining existing client relationships, engaging existing clients, and converting existing leads.
4. Baidu Search Engine Marketing for B2B Marketing in China
Because Google is blocked in China and only accessible via VPN, Baidu dominates the search engine market and is the default search engine for most people China. In 2024, Baidu took home 60.2% of China’s search engine market share. Therefore, is crucial for any B2B business to understand how to ensure their website performs well on Baidu.
The first step for getting indexed by Baidu is to have your website hosted in China. This circles back to the previous point on website localization where we talk about China’s ICP licensing system, which regulates websites in China. In addition, Baidu only indexes websites with simplified Chinese characters, preferring websites written in 100% Chinese. Localized for the Chinese internet ecosystem, Baidu’s weighting system is completely different from Google’s in many ways, so it will be important to implement an effective Badu SEO strategy for your website.
5. Zhihu and Weibo as Secondary Tools for Brand Awareness
Zhihu is a Q&A website and news aggregator that most closely resembles Quora. With a large userbase of white-collar professionals, Zhihu presents a great space for B2B companies to showcase their expertise and gain brand recognition via long term content marketing. In addition, Zhihu posts consistently appear at the top of Baidu searches, helping boost organic awareness on Baidu for your brand outside your official website. That means, using Zhihu for account registration or collaborations with existing accounts would help your brand awareness on Baidu!
Weibo is China’s answer to Twitter. While Weibo has become less popular with the rise of newer social media platforms in China, it is still widely used by white-collar professionals with a gender distribution that heavily skews female. For B2B marketers, Weibo is an important social media platform for establishing brand presence and running targeted ad campaigns. Hard to believe, but Weibo is still generating leads and sales for B2B sector, even though it is a very “been there, done that” type of platform.
6. KOL Marketing for B2B Companies
While Key Opinion Leader (KOL) marketing has long been commonplace in B2C digital marketing, the strategic utilization of KOL marketing is gaining traction in the B2B industry as well. B2B KOLs, unlike B2C KOLs who are often public figures with large followings, are usually respected industry experts such as CEOs, academics, and doctors. For foreign B2B companies in China, a KOL operates as a brand ambassador, acting as a bridge to localize your company for your industry niche in China.
For B2B companies, KOL marketing should not serve as a primary marketing tactic, as immediate sales are less common in the B2B business model. Instead, it should be part of a holistic brand e-reputation building or lead generation strategy.
7. Utilizing New Chinese Social Media Platforms
With the growing popularity of Xiaohongshu and Tik Tok, especially for B2C marketing, B2B companies have also begun finding ways to leverage these platforms. These platforms are more visual heavy, suitable for short form video marketing and image-based marketing campaigns. Like WeChat, these two platforms are walled-garden ecosystems that require businesses cater their marketing content and format specifically for these platforms.
For B2B marketers, Xiaohongshu can be utilized to showcase industry expertise through in-depth articles, product reviews, and case studies. Content can be tailored to highlight how products or services can solve specific industry problems, thereby educating and engaging potential business clients. In addition, as a product review focused platform, Xiaohongshu is also a great platform for growing brand reputation via KOL partnerships.
To market on Douyin, B2B companies should focus on creating short, compelling videos that demonstrate product functionalities, behind-the-scenes processes, or even educational content that addresses industry pain points. The key is to maintain professionalism while being engaging enough to capture the viewer’s interest quickly. To this day, Douyin is showing surpeisingly good results in B2B marketing, compared to any other platforms.
8. Growing Your Brand’s E-Reputation
To grow your B2B brand’s e-reputation in China requires a strong understanding of what types of content matches what type of platform in China’s vast digital ecosystem. Because of the walled-garden nature of China’s digital ecosystem, marketing strategies on one platform will not be accessible via a simple web search. Because it takes a lot of work to create separate marketing strategies for each platform, B2B companies should be mindful in choosing only the most relevant platforms for their industry to grow brand e-reputation on.
Outside of growing brand e-reputation with social media, more traditional industry niche media outlets are important to grow trust in your brand. Like how Zhihu presence can help drive organic traffic to your brand, coverage by industry niche media outlets provides third party recognition of your brand, increasing consumer trust.
9. B2B Marketing with Bytedance’s Ocean Engine
Ocean Engine, the integrated marketing platform that serves ads across ByteDance owned platforms Douyin, Toutiao (China’s AI-based news aggregator site), and Xigua Video (livestreaming and professional long form video platform), offering a unique avenue for businesses to reach their niche markets effectively.
Ocean Engine’s integration with e-commerce functionalities offers a seamless path from marketing to sales, a critical advantage in B2B marketing. By linking content directly to product pages or incorporating QR codes that lead to contact forms, businesses can streamline the lead generation process. In addition, analyzing performance data through Ocean Engine’s analytics tools allows marketers to refine their strategies, improving content delivery and ad targeting based on real-time feedback and trends.
10. Professional Networks in China – Maimai and Employee Marketing
In 2021, LinkedIn shut down the full version of the website for users in China and rolled out InCareer, a version of LinkedIn without the social media aspect. In 2023, that was shuttered too as the company completely shuttered operations in the country.
With over 110 million users, twice that of LinkedIn at its peak, and an 83.8% penetration of the professional networking market in China, Maimai is now China’s foremost professional networking platform. Unlike LinkedIn, users can post anonymously on Maimai about industry news and insights into their workplace. This makes the platform an important source of market research opportunities for B2B companies.
HI-COM is a digital marketing agency that provides businesses around the world with China-specific strategies, social media communications services and e-commerce marketing services. Working with more than 100 brands, HI-COM is the preferred partner for companies wishing to enter the Chinese market!
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