2022 marks the 15th anniversary of Landelion. In the light of tremendous changes at home and abroad, we, among many players, are trying to find a way to promote cross-border communication.
Since 2018, the ongoing disputes between China and the United States as well as enormous downward in international exchange activities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic led to slower localization of foreign-owned enterprises in China. Meanwhile, Chinese domestic enterprises have developed rapidly, with a clear trend of globalization. Over the past year, our branding and marketing team has received globalization demands from over 100 Chinese enterprises who want to promote their brands and products to broader overseas markets.
Affected by the continuous pandemic, the communication methods of these brands and products are shifting to online platforms in large numbers. Chinese companies are also considering and trying to use FB, Twitter, Linked-IN, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube and other online social media to deliver their brands and products to the world.
There are two main types of enterprises with demands to go global. The first are the SMEs. A large number of SMEs, mainly featuring manufacturing, with annual revenue ranging from RMB tens of to hundreds of millions, are new players in overseas development. They may have no experience or reflect poor results after their internal teams' attempt. Some of them have even tried cross-border communication methods such as AliExpress, Amazon, Shopee, FB and IG.
The demands of SMEs for overseas development, in Landelion’s opinion, mainly focus on the delivery of their brands and products to local target users through overseas social media platforms and attract local consumers or business distributors required for their overseas expansion. In short, their main purpose of globalization is to sell goods and attract investment, currently with a tight budget on brand communication. To attract more users, SMEs may have invested in advertisement before, including paid keywords on Google, or ads in online stores such as Amazon, but higher advertising costs have made them overwhelmed. A client from the manufacturing industry told us that the initial price of obtaining a customer lead through the Amazon store has exceeded RMB 1,000.
Therefore, SMEs increasingly hope to find a lower-cost and more sustainable marketing method in addition to expensive paid advertising, preferably one that can convert target users in the public traffic to private traffic progressively. In such context, the operation of overseas social media platforms gradually attracted their attention. Some SMEs have started internal discussions and experiments and recruited employees for social media operation. However, there are fewer proficient talents specialized in the operation of overseas social media platforms in China, and most of them are in first- and second-tier cities while most SMEs are in third- and fourth-tier cities. As a result, the insufficient quality of internal personnel and the lack of experience or investment in overseas social media operations have made it difficult for these enterprises to succeed solely with the efforts of their internal teams. At this time, an external partner adept at overseas social media operation has become a wise choice for enterprises to accelerate their overseas development. That’s why Landelion has received massive demands for globaization recently.
The other type is large enterprises seeking for overseas development. Endowed with mature globalization strategies, flexible external resources and ingenious layout, they adopt the traditional advertisement delivery and follow the rapid growth of overseas social media platforms in the past two years. By virtue of its clear strategies and rapid implementation, they also continue to increase their budget in the investment of overseas online social media platforms as they believe that those platforms play a more prominent role in reaching local users and redirecting traffic to product stores and independent websites.
For example, a large energy company listed in China cooperated with Landelion in 2022. Through the daily operation of our social media operation team, we promised stable and high-quality content output and the client’s accounts have attracted more followers and received more messages for product distribution and cooperation. A world-renowned sports brand also cooperated with us in the same year. We provided operation service for its IG accounts targeted at the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets. Those accounts have attracted more attention from local users to shop in its offline stores with the help of our reliable and premium graphic contents and texts. These pioneering large companies and notable brands have got the first piece of the cake in overseas social media operation.
To sum up, these two types of enterprises stand in different stages of globalization and have varied demands. For large companies, they adopt clear strategies for their outbound business focusing on brand value, with a desire to enhance brand value and thereby to promote product sales. SMEs pay more attention to their products. They hope to try and explore their overseas business, in pursuit of broadening channels for product sales and investment promotion as well as improving their brand image incidentally. According to Landelion’s research, overseas social media platforms have reflected an important position for the globalization of Chinese companies, and are still growing with marvelous upside potential. Go-global companies should follow the trend and draw their map for international development immediately. It will be too late to take action after their competitors have occupied the local market.
Based on such market demands for overseas communication, Landelion began to consider new business in 2019, and restructure its business system in 2020. We launched a cross-border communication service system integrated with four business units, from initial multilingual translation to localization of different media ranging from website to audio/video, software, and APP, and to content creation and operation for brands and products in the online social media platform. We can also provide transnational corporations with professional talents required for cross-border communication. By virtue of our expertise in service experience for international companies and localized marketing thinking, we can connect various communication methods, thereby achieving integrated communication of global business and assisting the decision-makers of cross-border enterprises to allocate their limited market budget to long-term effective communication methods of their brands and products.
Established in 2007, Landelion is now embracing its fifteenth anniversary. During the first decade, we mainly followed the pace of China's globalization and helped foreign-owned enterprises enter the Chinese market. Localization was our main task at that stage. On our first acquaintance, Landelion was a provider of multilingual document translation, simultaneous interpretation, consecutive interpretation and shorthand of conferences and other services. After several cooperations, we became popular among our clients and they purchased more services we later launched, including social media operation, video localization, professional talent assignment, and graphic design. Market trends have changed significantly in the past five years since 2018, which facilitates the transition of our mission to help Chinese enterprises better going global. In other words, overseas communication becomes Landelion’s new business direction in the future.
Like Ogilvy, Edelman and other international 4A companies accompanying the global expansion of American enterprises, Landelion hopes to participate in the globalization of Chinese enterprises in the next ten years. Embracing the coming future, in the next fifteen years, we hope to leverage our professional services in overseas communication to accelerate the global development of Chinese enterprises.
Please feel free to contact us via phone: 400 097 8816 or email: marketing@landelion.com.