Why Companies Expanding into Taiwan Cannot Survive without Content Marketing

Hello, I’m Leo Sato (@slamdunk772), the CEO of applemint, a digital marketing agency in Taiwan!

Today, as the title says, I’d like to explain why companies that have just entered Taiwanese market can’t survive without content marketing.

I’m sure some of you are unfamiliar with content marketing. Content marketing is the process of creating contents such as Youtube videos, blogs, and podcast to make consumers aware of your brand and educate them about your services and products for sales.

So why is it so important?

In conclusion, I believe that without content, no matter how much digital advertising companies spend, people will not be interested enough to purchase your products or services. I have seen many companies spend millions of advertisement fee in digital ads in the beginning and they certainly succeed in attracting Taiwanese people’s interest at first. But after a few years, they struggle even if they spend the same amount of advertisement fee.

Why? I believe it’s because they lack contents. In this blog, I will also elaborate on what happened to the Japanese companies that have spent millions of dollars in digital ads but did not create any content.

If you are planning to expand your business to Taiwan in the future, this is worth a look!

Websites and digital ads are like your resume

First of all, to make this story easy to understand, let me compare entering Taiwanese market to job hunting. You are a job hunter, and the consumers in Taiwan are the companies or interviewers. Your goal as a job hunter is to get a job offer from companies which in reality is equivalent to get the Taiwanese consumers to buy your product.

The first thing you do as a job hunter is to think about which company you want to apply to. If you translate this action into the business world, it becomes targeting.

The next thing you do is to send out your resume to the target. In the business world, the resume is a website or an advertisement. It takes a lot of efforts to send out your advertisement to many companies manually so you may spend some money on advertisement.

As soon as many Japanese companies in Taiwan create a website, they try to spend lots of money on advertisement to get the Taiwanese consumers look at their website.

In job hunting, an interviewer cannot tell whether you are good or not just by looking at your resume. That’s why we have “interviews”. So what is “interview” in the business world? It is interacting with consumers but in the business world, companies can’t meet each consumer and appeal their products.

This is where remarketing comes in. Remarketing is the process of showing your ads repeatedly to people who have already visited your website. They have at least shown some interest to your product so the chances of getting conversion is relatively high even if you do not interact with them.

To sum it up, a company that has just entered the Taiwanese market and only focuses on spending money on advertisement can be compared to job hunting as follows:

1. They are sending resume to companies over and over again
2. They are skipping job interviews and trying to get a job offer with just a resume.

I’m sure you may get some offers from several companies, but in my opinion, not very efficiently.

You might think, ” but if you don’t spend money on advertisement, you won’t be recognized by anyone!” I think this is half right and half wrong.

Sending a resume (website/advertisement) does not necessarily lead to recognition. Do you remember any digital ads banners you saw on the website or social media yesterday? Probably not unless you see it over and over.

If you spend money on advertisement ubiquitously (everywhere) over a certain period of time, it will contribute to brand’s awareness. In Taiwan, a company called ONE BOY recently spent a lot of money on bus ads, MRT ads, and digital ads, and consumers saw the ads everywhere.

As a result, I heard that ONE BOY’s awareness has increased in short period of time and the sales are good now. But only a few companies who have ample of funds are able to do such a thing.

In other words, unless you can spend a lot of money to deliver your resume (website/advertisement) to a large number of consumers, it is inefficient to do web advertising from the beginning.

The key is interaction and appeal

So what should you do? In the business world, having a job interview means interacting with consumers offline. Unfortunately, interacting with consumers offline is very resource-intensive and time-consuming that many companies tend to avoid it.

It may be hard to interact with each Taiwanese consumer but there is a way to let them know that you exist. Contents!

If you follow the algorithm of Google, Instagram and Youtube and make your contents in accordance with the algorithm, your contents may be exposed to many consumers. The only problem with making content is that it is expensive and time-consuming.

I’ve seen some companies created their own content marketing website but they stopped updating after 3 months.

However, the good news is that because many companies are impatient and pursue short-term profitability, they do not make contents. So if you do make one, you have a high chance of winning over your competitors.

By the way, there is a way to interact with consumers even online, and that is through SNS, where you show your contents and interact with consumers. Unfortunately, many companies in Taiwan do not use SNS to interact with consumers, but instead try to sell their products.

What about the use of influencers?

If you spend money on KOL or influencers, then their videos or still images posted by them will become a content that supplement your advertisement.

What happens to companies that continue to spend money on digital ads but not contents?

Companies that expand into Taiwan and continue to spend money on advertisement but not to contents eventually struggle. The effect of digital ads fade year by year and the numbers are getting worse and worse.

However, they will not stop advertising because if they stop, they will completely lose sales. Since they don’t stop advertising, they don’t have the money to produce content. It is truly a vicious circle.

Here is the overall conversion rate of a Japanese cosmetic brand over the past 3 years in Taiwan. As you may notice, CVR has dropped.

	2018	2019	2020
CVR (purchase rate)	2.21%	0.957%	0.54%

The decline in CVR means the decline in sales. In order to cover the decline in sales, this cosmetic brand continued to spend even more advertisement fee.

I truly want companies to avoid this so I really suggest you to prepare your contents now.

If you can prepare your contents and get organic traffic from your social network and Google, you may be able to get revenue even if you stop advertising.

Results of companies that prepared contents

Next are the results of companies that prepared contents. I think it will be more convincing if we give you a specific example, so I’ll give you some of our own results (without any PR).

Since we started our business in 2017, we’ve been writing blog contents to communicate our services and our ideas. Also, in December 2019, we started Youtube videos to introduce our services and thoughts to potential customers.

Thanks to this, the number of customers who contacted us saying “I saw your Youtube video and contacted you” has increased drastically since last year. Here’s how applemint’s CVR has changed over the past 3 years.

	2018	2019	2020
CVR	0.13%	0.13%	0.14%

Many of you might think it’s only a 0.01% improvement. What you need to keep in mind is that the number of traffic has more than tripled since three years ago and we actually managed to increase CVR.

If the number of traffic has increased more than 3 times, it means that the number of inquiries has increased a lot (more than three folds!)

It’s no coincidence that this improvement coincides with the timing of when we started our Youtube content.

In addition, applemint does not spend any money on advertising. applemint has tripled its traffic and improved its conversion rate while spending very little on advertisement.

The only advertisement we’ve spent so far is on Google ads for training interns and new employees, which totaled about 700 USD over the past three years.

Also, one of our clients, Karada Factory, started writing blog contents 2 years ago with our recommendation. Last year, they even started Youtube and Instagram, and as a result, they recorded the highest profit since they came to Taiwan.

They manage their own YouTube account but we help with any other things they need us for.

I believe that the reason why they were able to achieve the highest profits since coming to Taiwan last year is because they invested in digital marketing and content in a speedy manner without cutting corners.

Sincere advice from applemint

If you are planning to expand your business to Taiwan, I sincerely recommend that you start working on your contents now. I believe that cost performance is very important for Taiwanese consumers are relatively conservative.

In other words, they won’t buy a service or product unless they know what’s in it. In addition, I believe it is true that Taiwanese people get passionated easily but also get bored easily. So it is common to see how a service or a product sell very well in the beginning but fail fairly quickly.

A sustainable business is one that continues to grow, even if only a little bit each year. The only way to achieve this is to steadily communicate the good points of your company and services to Taiwanese people through our contents.

If you agree with us and would like applemint to help you plan and implement your content, please contact us here. We are very happy to help you!