September 12, 2022

A China Digital Marketing Trends 2021 report

【Posted on: 2021 February】

A China Digital Marketing Trends 2021 report is was recently released by the Miaozhen Academy of Marketing Science (MAMS), the Global Digital Marketing Summit (GDMS), and Media 360. The report was a forecast on China’s marketing trends and investments in 2021 with the objective of helping advertisers and industry partners in planning their digital marketing strategies.

Key insights from the report:

Overall marketing trend

According to the report, 47% of advertisers believe marketing spends in China will increase in 2021 with a 12% expected growth which also showed optimism from new advertisers.

Combining branding and performance campaigns is the trend in 2021 . Top brands focus on long term branding goals such as building of brand image and recognition. While majority of top and mid-level management agree that “Branding remains important in the digital age” but equally important is customer relationship management.

However, the biggest challenge in 2021 is selecting a media platform to increase marketing communication ROI followed by measuring and verifying effectiveness. While new advertisers pointed to a shortage of marketing talent.

Trends of major marketing investment categories

Mobile remains the platform most advertisers will invest in, with 67% of advertisers indicating towards increasing spend on mobile marketing. Three platforms have the highest potential for growth – Connected TV, Display and Out of Home advertising.

78% of advertisers indicated an increase in their digital spend as the pandemic did not affect investments and is expected to grow by 20% in 2021.

In terms of digital platform, usage of short-form videos, KOL, newsfeed, and performance-based ads are popular formats and they are the current focus on social marketing investment. Interest of advertisers in short-form videos has steadily increased each year, while interest in KOL marketing has been constant.

Trends of future outlook and marketing technologies

The report shows that 56% and 47% of advertisers respectively indicated that they were already using data middle to end and content tagging, the highest usage out of all technologies. 60% of senior level management are aware of the importance of building a data mid-end.

With the high expected usage of new technologies in the next two years, offline programmatic ad buying, smart content distribution and recommendations, and AI ad creatives are worth paying attention to.