According to Wiki, Experiential marketing attempts to connect consumers with brands in personally relevant and memorable ways. The alternative term customer-experience marketing emphasises the idea of communicating the essence of a brand through a personalised experience.

As a marketing methodology, experiential marketing aims to move beyond the traditional “features-and-benefits” marketing, cast to a wide audience that includes not only those who may benefit from a brand or product, but also those who would not benefit at all. (As a result of such traditional marketing, people avoid messages whenever possible and by any means possible i.e. pop-up blockers, the United States National Do Not Call Registry and DVRs (such as TiVo) to avoid exposure to commercials.) In contrast, experiential marketing presents an experience that people choose to attend to and participate in after identifying the relevance of a brand or product to their needs.

To turn the concept into implementation, you can view some examples from Luminous:

http://www.luminous-asia.com/ProjectExamples.html

Some projects are very impressive such as grand opening of The Venetian® Macao-Resort-Hotel in Macau. It attracts many attention. A very good reference about experiential marketing.

Proper public relations and corporate events are more often about making an emotional appeal to your customers rather than addressing product features and benefits.

In many situations, audiences are unable to imagine the advantage of product features and benefits. For example, if your company wants to promote a 2.0 bluetooth headset supports A2DP, salesmen may mention the product features to your customers. However, they may be unable to understand the terminology or visualize the benefits salesmen mentioned. On the contrary, if you organize an art show and use the art show to demonstrate the product features and benefits. Customers can “see” the benefits as well as enjoy an art show. Indeed, memory about your product and the benefits can be more long term.

Whatever you are promoting, you need to explain to your audiences on an emotional level how it benefits them or others they care about. Every good product, every good service is, at its heart, a means by which to help people live, work, or play better.
It is also true for brand building.

Experiential Marketing uses brand relevant experiences to appeal to both the rational and emotional buying triggers of the intended audience. Sometimes, it is also termed as customer experience marketing because the idea is to communicate the essence of the Brand through a personalized experience.

Experiential marketing deals with customer experiences and is quite different from traditional forms of marketing, which focus on functional features and benefits of products. Consumers’ decisions are much more influenced by emotionally generated feelings than by their rationally derived thought.

According to Luminous (http://www.luminous-asia.com), the idea of experiential marketing reflects a right brain bias because it is about fulfilling consumers’ aspirations to experience comfortable and pleasure feelings and helps consumers’ to feel the benefits through interactive experiences, and creates an emotional desire to purchase.

Let me give you an example of experiential marketing:

Cathay Pacific organizes an 60th Anniversary Gala Celebration. Instead of inviting 3000 VIPs to attend a dull celebration ceremony, they invite the VIPs to attend a theatre show with more than 100 performers and 300 crew and staff. The events enable VIPs to further understand their company and let them understand how much they care of their VIPs by inviting them to attend such a grand celebration without the need to hard sell any messages.

If you are not a big company, does it mean that you cannot make use of the concept? No!! You may use your website to host online events, too. For example, online competition games, live online video show, and etc. It really depends on your creativity and whether your event can deliver the proper messages to participants.

Luminous is an experiential marketing company based in Hong Kong. They create many impressive events for promoting corporate images for big companies such as BNP, Airport Authrority of Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific. In case you need to promote corporate images by organizing events such as Art Shows, Expo, and etc. You may contact them.

中國互聯網絡信息中心（CNNIC）今日發布「第21次中國互聯網絡發展狀況統計報告」。截至去年底，全國網民已達到2.1億人，當中77.6%為寬頻用戶。目前中國網民人數僅比美國少500萬，CNNIC預計今年中國將成為全球網民數量最多的國家。
報告指出，內地網民數量上升，令互聯網普及率提高至16%，但仍低於19%的全球平均水平。另外，各種寬頻用戶數佔網絡用戶的85.9%，顯示中國已全面進入寬頻網絡時代。
內地網民首選的互聯網應用出現變化，娛樂已代替電子郵件成互聯網最重要功用。按使用率排序依次是網絡音樂、即時通信、網絡影視、網絡新聞、搜索引擎、網絡遊戲和電子郵件。

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070917/yahoo-zimbra/

Google has completely re-engineered the search engine and roll out the change on May 17, 2007. They have a new infrastructure, new algorithms, and a new look.

The point of the redesign is to deploy Google Universal Search into the field. Their Web search will now integrate results from Google Book Search, Google Blog Search, Google Image Search, Google Local Search (Maps), Google News Search, and Google Video Search.

The core user interface will be slightly enhanced to accomodate the new content, but there will be other changes too as Google adds a universal navigation bar to the top of its pages across all services (to help people move between services quickly).

They also announced the function “Cross Language Information Retrieval”. Starting with 12 languages, Google will open up the Web to cross-language search, and allow users choose to translate webpages into their familar language. I yet to test whether the translation is powerful but it is an important milestone for search engines to break language barrier in search results.

Reveals Baidu Optimization secrets

Introduction
Baidu is most popular search engine in China. Google China is second to Baidu. Lots of Internet marketers in the West do not know much about Baidu, and assume its’ranking algorithm is similar to Google China. It is purely based on the assumption that when it can beat Google in a large market, its’ search engine ranking algorithm should be comparable to Google. Unfortunately, it is wrong. Baidu’s search result is mixed up with lots of paid links and natural links. It is difficult to distinguish them. In addition, the natural ranking algorithm is not very sophisticated and many spamming and illogical results can be found. According to a study by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in year end of 2006, Chinese users perceived that Google’s search relevancy is much better than Baidu.

Why Baidu can be No.1 in China?

If its’ ranking algorithm is much inferior to Google, how come Baidu can be more popular in China market? There are 4 possible reasons I can think of:

1. According to CNNIC, Google China has server down time and frustrated users.
2. Baidu is developed by local Chinese, driven by patriotism and language friendliness, general Chinese users tend to use Baidu.
3. Baidu was established before Google entered into China market. Thus, Baidu has first mover advantage.
4. Baidu is famous for its’ strong MP3 search and lots of young internet users are searching for songs in MP3 format daily.

However, CNNIC also revealed that white-collar urban professional in major China cities, and citizens with overseas study background tend to use and love using Google China. Usually, their spending power is much higher, and Google China has advantage in this niche.

You can also click here to learn more about Internet usage in China (http://www.agogdigital.com/blog/archives/55).

SEO Tips You Need to Know for Baidu

1. Title and Meta Tags

Like Google, Title tag is also very important for search engine optimization. Unlike Google, Meta description and Meta keywords tags are still very useful in improving ranking in Baidu. As always, we do recommend clients add meaningful Meta description and keyword tags because they are still important for some popular localized search engines.

2. Content

It is similar to other popular search engines. Your website copies should have keywords you want to optimize. The higher the keyword density, the better is the result. If your keyword density is too high, it can adversely affect search engine rankings in other search engines, however. Therefore, we recommend 6-12% for Baidu optimization.

3. Linking

Unlike Google, Baidu does not have a sophisticated algorithm to determine link relevancy and link quality. Quantity seems more important than link quality. Incorporating keywords in internal anchor text has some positive effect on Baidu ranking.

4. Content Language

Since Baidu is developed in Mainland China, if your site has simplified Chinese, you are easier to get exposure in Baidu.

People may also wonder if English keywords are used in China. From our experience, it really depends on your industry and targeted visitors. For example, English keywords are used by high income office workers, manufacturing and trading firms, or banking professional. If your target is general mass market, Chinese keywords are dominant in frequency of use.

5. Alt Tag

Alt tag with keywords incorporated into Alt text is good for Baidu optimization. However, it is not advised to stuff too many keywords inside.

6. Server

If your site is mainly targeted for Mainland China, we recommend you hosting your site in Mainland China. It helps your Baidu ranking significantly.

It is not essential to get .com.cn or .cn domain names, however.

7. Geographical Market

China is a very big company. Internet marketers are difficult to target every province and city of China. You must determine the location of your high value customers. If they are mainly based in Mainland China, your site should use simplified Chinese. If you are targeting Hong Kong and Taiwan, your site should use traditional Chinese.
Of course, it does no harm if you include both Chinese versions. If the wordings can be more localized to the city or province you target for, it can yield better conversion rate.

Also, Baidu is only popular in Mainland China, particularly in the northern part. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, Baidu is an insignificant search engine player.

Author:
Jimsun Lui is working in Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd, a company offers professional Internet marketing and SEO services.

According to CNNIC, there are 1.6b internet users in China currently. Every minute will increase 100 Internet users.

There are more than 44.3 millions mobile internet users in China too. The increasing rate is very high partly due to decrease in mobile surfing fee. Mainland has 1.31 millions website, and the increasing rate is over 137% per year.

Internet usage in China:
20% users use Internet banking and online stock trading.
77.3% reads online news.
74.8% uses search engines. (So it is important to make your site accessible in search engines, and it is the value of SEO)
69.8% uses instant messaging. Current leader in the market is qq
47% plays online games
25.5% shops online regularly. (trend is increasing and encouraging to online business)
55.4% uses email (mainland people tends not using email and it is a trend quite different with Hong Kong)
68.5% enjoys and download online music.
61.1% download or watch video online.
15.5% uses online job search.
24% participates in online education and training.