Natural Cleaning Products: a Huge Demand in China

With more and more Chinese people paying attention to be environmental-friendly and pursue a way more environmentally and healthier lifestyle, they are trying to buy products with natural ingredients, especially for cleaning.

There is no doubt several cities especially big cities’ air, water, and overall environmental quality is less than favorable, but the degree to which it is detrimental to your health is astounding. Thus purchasing natural cleaning products will be one of the citizens’ prior things to do.

Chinese People Prefer More Natural

Since people want to live a healthier and more environmental life, they have to eliminate processed products and require more natural ones. In reality, the quickest way for toxins and chemicals to invade the body is through the skin as pores directly absorb fumes, carcinogens, and other toxic substances. Thus using more natural and less chemical ingredients would be better for your body and health.

Nowadays people gradually realize the shortcomings of Chemical cleaning products. Chemical cleaning products leave gaseous residues called VOC, or volatile organic compounds, which when breathed in, can cause irreversible brain damage. Human bodies are naturally built to fight off germs and bacteria, but chemicals are a whole new problem. This is especially bad for children since their immune systems are not fully developed. A good solution to this product is to opt for natural cleaning products.

How to Develop Your Natural Cleaning Products in China

Since Chinese people will pay much more attention to natural cleaning products while they are shopping, huge potential market opportunities remain.

Adapt Your Business to E-commerce Platforms 

With over 900 million internet Chinese users online for shopping, you definitely should use this huge consumer basis for your business in China. Foreign brands are already loved by consumers, so it’s your competitive advantage.

Start a store in cross-border eCommerce platforms. Tmall, Taobao, and JD are the giants of e-commerce. They are the bigger platforms and also the bests in terms of quality and safety. Two important points in China.

Because these e-commerce platforms are very popular in China, it’s not easy to sell on that platform. Most of them only accept brands that have already a significant presence and realized high sales in China. That’s why most of the spirits brands failed to sell on the giants’ platforms, Tmall, Taobao, or JD.

If you are a mature marketer with an amount of capital, you can try to sell on Tmall and JD because the 2 platforms want to keep a high ranking and only offer to their consumer’s famous brands and quality products. That’s why they are so selective.

If you have not enough funds yet, the Wechat store also provides good e-shops. It’s a bit more accessible for beginners in the natural cleaning products market.

Establish a Chinese Website and Be Visible on SEO

To be visible by your target, you need to have a website in mandarin, hosted in China, for SEO reasons. Baidu, the leading search engine in China, will not rank websites hosted in other countries or websites in other languages than Chinese.

In addition, your website must follow Chinese standards and Chinese trends. In most cases, with a homepage consisting of a lot of information, written in small characters. If western consumers preferred clean aesthetic, it’s not the standard of Chinese consumers.

For e-commerce websites, Chinese consumers are used to having precise information, with price, product details, comments of buyers and anything to be aware of. Chinese customers hate wasting time looking for information, especially during the payment process.

In addition, 75% of the researches in China are on Baidu. You need to have a good ranking on Baidu to be visible.

To develop your visibility on Baidu, you can use different solutions:

• Pay Per Click (PPC) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM): this solutions are very efficient but can be quite expensive on long-term.
• SEO is better for long-term strategies and extremely efficient but ask you more work. SEO is a long-term process, requiring writing articles and content using keywords, in order to increase presence on the web for search engines.

Social Media Helps Your Business Spread the Fame Around Public

In China, if you want to leverage your ereputation of your natural cleaning products online, the most popular way is to use social media, such as WeChat and Weibo.

• WeChat, developed by Tencent has more than 800 million active users every day. The social media platform is more than only a social media app. Tencent developed a lot of other services to adapt their contents to users’ needs. It’s also very convenient for brands to communicate with their target.

The platform is known for its communication services in which users can send messages, share images and videos, voice call and video call other users on a closed network. Having an account on WeChat enables you to promote your brand via mobile or tablet.

• Weibo is the second-most mass-used social networking site in China, with around 82% penetration rate across the country and more than 50 million active users per day in 2016. Weibo is very popular because it’s the first place where Chinese users can express themselves without suffer of government’s censorship. For the first time, Chinese people can speak about every subject and they love it.

The social micro blogging network has also attracted more than 130,000 companies. It’s very important for spirits brands to create their own Weibo Official Account, and get their account verified. If your account is signed as verified, you will have more followers because it’s a legitimacy proof for Chinese users who know that the Weibo process to have a verified account is complicated and long but ensure the legitimacy of a brand. More than 56% of Weibo users follow at least one brand on Weibo. In addition, on Weibo, you don’t need to be connected first to follow a brand.

Influencers Can Promote Your Brand Image

To gain in visibility and e-reputation, it is crucial to encourage a positive word-of-mouth. KOL can help you.

The Key Opinion Leaders (KOL) are social media users who succeeded to make a lot of traffic on their accounts and became famous. Chinese consumers idolize KOLs and trust them more than brands. Some KOLs have some millions of fans. They are really good to influence mass population.

You can influence spirits lovers using KOLs as intermediaries. Through them you are able to reach your target group. In other words, intermediaries can be a great asset in selling your imported spirits to Chinese consumers.

However, KOLs are not an easy tool to control, it’s definitely one of the most useful ones out there but they are humans with their own thinking power. They can improve the reputation of a brand but also destroy it.

Chinese consumers are influenced when their idol recommends or favors your spirits brand. By doing this your target audience will convince very fast and will eventually buy your products.

By engaging with KOL, your website and your brand will become more appealing through the buzz effect from their followers. The aim is to create a positive influence about the brand.

Gentlemen Marketing Agency is specialized in the digital marketing in the Chinese market. Do not hesitate to contact us if you want to discuss any projects in China.