“China represents more than 18% of the world's population. The country is by far the largest crude steel productor, which accounted for 53.3% of world steel production in 2019, with six of the top ten steel production companies in the world from China. Seven of the top ten container ports in the world are in China. China accounted for 28% of global manufacturing output in 2018. It is the leading mining country worldwide based on mineral production value. A leader by far as well in global casting production and the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is larger than all of the European Union’s countries combined and almost doubles this figure if we limit this comparison only to the Industry sector,” said Esteve Fornells marketing manager, elebia.
“This is just a small sample but it gives you a good idea of the existing potential. A big chunk of our sales leads are generated via the internet. Yes, trade shows, magazines, referrals, word of mouth also help in this direction, but one must make itself visible through the internet, and we’ve done an excellent job in this area in the past few years in this Google dominated era. After this consolidation, the next step was China.
“We proposed a new digital strategy with the aim of expanding our presence in the Chinese market, a constantly boiling market, with the industry and services sectors being two of the growing business pillars for the region. It is precisely in the industrial sector, with high competitiveness and in general a high fidelity of companies to their suppliers, that we intend to make ourselves known thanks to, on the one hand, an important digital strategy not only adapted to the language, but to the culture most deeply rooted in this market, and on the other, with our range of lifting products and smart lifting solutions.”
According to Fornells, the strategy for launching www.elebia.cn has been based mainly on two points: web development and positioning in Baidu (the equivalent of Google in China) of the website. It has also created its own channel on Youku to complement its SEO strategy with all its graphic and video material, where it shows how its products are used in different applications and sectors.
“Undoubtedly, the positioning in Baidu and the increase in organic visibility for a whole range of search patterns will be fundamental in the Chinese market. Baidu protects the privacy of users logged into its service, making it difficult to attribute by organic,” he said. “Advertising in the Chinese market is extremely regulated, as the government still exercises final control over content, mainly in media such as press, television and radio. For this reason, the most direct and fastest option to reach the Chinese end user is through the Internet.
“The most challenging part of the whole process has been the difficulty in accessing all the necessary certification required for the project to start, bearing in mind we are a foreign company. In addition, the start of the project coincided with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in China, which later affected the rest of the world, and significantly affected our initial timings.”