September 12, 2022

China Digital Marketing Trend Report 2022

【Posted on: 2022 January】

According to the “2022 China Digital Marketing Trend Report” released by the Miaozhen Marketing Academy, the overall marketing expenses of enterprises are stable and bullish, with an increase of 19%. The average growth rate of digital marketing in China in 2022 will be consistent with the growth rate of overall marketing investment, which will be lower than the actual increase of 22% in 2021, but it will still maintain a high growth trend.

Although the marketing budget of emerging brand advertisers is less than that of mature advertisers, the proportion of increased marketing investment is far higher than that of mature advertisers. High-budget advertisers pay more attention to brand goals, especially in brand image building, and high-budget advertisers also pay more attention to “consumer relationship maintenance”.

Short videos, social networking, and e-commerce

From the distribution of different types of resources on the Internet, the short video, social media and e-commerce media will receive the most attention in the future, with 79%, 77%, and 57% of advertisers. However, compared with last year, the proportion of increased investment in live broadcast, search and comprehensive information also decreased to varying degrees. It can be seen from the report that KOL advertisements and short videos with the ability to convert and bring goods are in the first echelon, and the proportion of advertisers who increase the placement of KOL advertisements and short videos reaches 70% and 69%. Performance advertising and information flow still have advantages, and the proportion of advertisers who increase investment in both exceeds 50%.

Digital Transformation & AI Creative Advertising

Advertisers believe that digital transformation of marketing is very important, and AI advertising creativity has more application potential 64% and 33% of advertisers strongly agree and somewhat agree. Overall, the importance of marketing digital transformation is recognized. Regarding the level of digital application in different marketing fields, the report shows that the current application of e-commerce and user operations, KOL placement, and data management is relatively high, but only between 30% and 40%.

More sections are still under development, and there is huge room for digital marketing in China. Through the application of marketing concepts, private domain traffic, short video and live broadcast e-commerce have the highest proportions. In terms of the application of marketing technology, content classification technology is currently the most widely used, reaching 65%. In the next two years, AI advertising creativity, offline advertising programmatic placement, content intelligent distribution and recommendation applications have great potential and are worthy of attention.

Social media continues to grow

According to the report, social marketing in China is expected to grow by 18% in 2022. 76% of mature and 79% of emerging brand advertisers expect to increase their social marketing investment, while 35% of emerging brand advertisers have an increase of more than 30% in social marketing, which is more aggressive.

In 2022, KOLs and short videos will still be the focus of advertisers’ social marketing. At the same time, nearly 60% of advertisers indicated that the operation of official social accounts will be their focus, followed by community operation/private domain traffic.

Comparing the data from 2019 to the present, it can be found that the overall attention of short videos and KOLs is still on the rise. It is expected that the popularity of KOL marketing in 2022 will be more obvious than that in 2021.

Contact us to get the full report in Chinese.