How best to grow your firm when your primary markets are hyper competitive? This is a question many many companies ask themselves routinely.Begs the question; why not look to additional markets? There is absolutely no better place or opportunity for growth than in Asia, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Not only do many of these countries support tremendous populations, but their economic systems are getting much stronger.
That said, today there a 5 speakers discussing how to gain a better presence in Asia, the Asian Pacific, and Latin America.
China:
T.R. Harrington, Director of Strategic Direction & Product Development, Darwin Marketing
China has 210 million users. It has fewer television shows and channels (roughly 30 tv channels), so the Chinese migrate to web. IM is per capita, roughly twice as popular in China as in U.S.
There are 10 different public companies in China for online games … tremendous growth. China has proliferation of internet cafes … Chinese version of video arcades in North America. The percentage of Chinese playing online games is 6x that of U.S.
Chinese IM firm TenCent worth is now $10billion … first company to monetize IM, and is now the number 1 portal in China. Will they move into search next?
Chinese search dominated by:
a. Baidu (68%)
b. Google (23%)
then Yahoo in 3rd in terms of search
Chinese market is small in terms of e-commerce revenues currently, but it is exploding. $961 million expected total ad spend in 2007. Baidu’s revenues. $234 m in 2007, expected to grow to $1billion+ in 2010.
There are currently 70 million content creators in China, many via BBS (bulletin board systems) … and many many are people asking and answering questions. Nearly 12 million searches a day in Baidu’s BBS.
How is Baidu different?
a. all paid ads on top .., less than 3% realize they’re clicking on an ad.
b. Baidu’s paid search uses humam power to organize results.
Baidu now to release an API.
Implications:
a. Baidu does not provide any click through data
b. CPC prices increasing fast (70% in some industries between Jan. and May)
c. Relatively few optimization variables.
Natural Search:
a. traffic estimation tools not reliable
Japan:
Motoko Hunt, Founder, Japanese Search Marketing Strategist, AJPR LLC
40% of world’s internet population is in Asia, yet that only constitutes 13% of Asians. Japan has 68% internet penetration, and 87.5 million people on the internet. 50%+ connect via broadband. Mobile internet is very hot in Japan. SNS is very popular … 17 million internet users.
Video sharing is really big in Japan too. Last year, they launched YouTube Japan.
Top 5 internet properties in Japan:
1. yahoo 42,6 mo users
2. Google 27.1 (big growth here)
3. Rakuten 27.0
4. NTT Communication 24.2
5. Microsoft 23+
75% of people going to Google Japan go to to search. Only 6% of people going to Yahoo go to search. Interesting point when considering motives and promotion potential.
Google and Yahoo Japan search options:
a. Search All the web
b. Search Japanese language sites
QR code becoming really big. Scan image with cell phone, and a specific web page opens up automatically. In fact, she has blogged about this previously in a post titled Back From Japan where she says QR codes have taken over, and internet penetration is 70+%. QR Codes used to show discounts at restaurant tables.
More internet access from cell phones in Japan than from PCs today. E-commerce is huge … lots of people buying from their cell phones. So, mobile SEO and SEM is big but there are some challenges too:
Language issues:
a. 4 different sets of letters and characters
b. no spaces segmenting the words
c. many different spellings for many words, and some words spelled the same (eg. vote and boat).
The second post to follow momentarily on this topic will look at Latin America, Australia, and Singapore
Jeff Quipp is President of Search Engine People Inc..
