Chinese Tourists in Malaysia: Guide for Tourism Professional
- Malaysia expects 8 million Chinese tourists by 2020
- In 2016, Malaysia received 26.7 million tourists
- Nearly 2,124,942 Chinese tourists visited Malaysia by 2016
Malaysia Tourism
Malaysia is ranked 9th in the world for tourist arrivals, which was the fifth best in Asia. However, most of arrival tourists are Singaporeans who daily cross the border to Malaysia for work and go back at night time.
In order to diversify its economy and make Malaysia’s economy less dependent on exports, the main goal of the government was to increase tourism in Malaysia. As a result, tourism has become Malaysia’s third largest source of foreign exchange income, and accounted for 7% of Malaysia’s economy since 2005.
Malaysia offers two great distinct experiences: the peninsula and Borneo (an island shared with Indonesia and Brunei). The peninsula is a mix of Malay, Chinese and Indian flavors with an efficient and modern capital, Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian Borneo features some of the most beautiful places in Malaysia with a wild jungle, orangutans, granite peaks and remote tribes. Combined with some amazing islands, a luxury resorts and colonials town, Malaysia, for most visitors, presents a happy mix.
More and more Chinese tourists choose Malaysia
The total Chinese tourist arrivals in Malaysia increased by 7.5 percent year-on-year to 551,000 in the first quarter this year and this figure may continue to rise up following some encouraging measures by China and Malaysia.
China ranked third in terms of visitor arrivals to Malaysia in the first quarter. It accounted for 8.3 percent of the total visitors to Malaysia, after Singapore at 48.5 percent and Indonesia at 10.6 percent.
Malaysia had introduced the Electronic Travel Registration & Information or eNTRI and e-visa facilities in March last year for tourists from China. This eVisa and visa waiver programs for Chinese tourists have succeeded in attracting more visitors from China.
Do you want to attract more and more Chinese Tourist in Malaysia? Just trust us and adopt our different marketing strategies like our client: Windows Malaysia.
In fact Window Malaysia is an online portal to a network of fast-growing Asia, both private and government organizations. Window Malaysia is an extension of Visa Malaysia, which aims to offer a great strategy to promote Malaysia as a hub of tourism, education, Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H), businesses and investments.
We built a unique marketing strategy for them,
Their Objectives:
-Reputation
-Traffic
-Business (visa registration)
Our Solution:
-Weibo/WeChat/Offsite SEO
Result:
-2300 Weibo followers in one month/strong interaction
As Windows Malaysia, you have to understand all these approach for better results:
Lead generation is your booster
Lead generation is this process of attracting visitors to your platforms and turning them into potential customers. It’s always important to start a marketing campaign with relevant leads. For your tourist agency, a lead would be a website visitor who asked for more information about your service. It could also be someone who asked a callback.
Every service can become successful when you target the right audience to promote it. The most powerful approach in order to reach this audience is to filter prospects until to get the most relevant lead which will turn into conversions.
Having all these leads, give you have access to their personal information such as email address, name, phone number or even address. Then, with all their information you can contact them and develop a strong engagement.
Online Reputation means a lot in China
Even if you’ve got good traffic on your platforms, you have to keep a good image on internet. E-reputation is very important in China, build it well and your tourism business can be well- known, and try to keep it after you’ve reached fame among the digital community.
So it is important to always keep a good reputation whatever happens around you. Online reputation management is more than just a simple way to fix a damage by erasing the bad contents on the web but it also help to put your business to high level if you apply it properly.
Bad contents have the power to influence customers ‘decision and pushing down your agency image and you could lost your integrity and credibility among Chinese tourist. Chinese consumer is connected and they can get all information about anything and know what people said about your agency and listen to the conversation.
For developing a strong presence, you need to make sure your potential lead in China won’t find any negative reviews and opinions about your product or company.
Baidu SEO is the best approach
All the western search engines such as Google are not allowed by the China Great Firewall’’. So the only issue is Baidu.
Baidu is the most popular search engine in China with 80% market share. Then, if you want to be present on the most popular digital platforms in China, you have to use BAIDU.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the best method in order to generate traffic and leads. This strategy will allow your website to get more visibility at the top of a search result page but it needs expertise.
Consider internal and external backlinks, by having them your website, Baidu will trust you more and to get increase visibility to your website.
Baidu SEO optimized website and content will enable your website to be trustworthy and reliable. Finally, you can use PPC (pay-per-click) which is the fact of paying to rank higher on a set of keywords.
Social media marketing the new trend
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other social medias are all blocked in by the ‘’Great China Firewall’’, instead, you have WeChat, Weibo, Qzone, RenRen, QQ.
Malaysia Tourism professionel have to understand that and start to build a new strategy around the most popular Chinese social media such as Wechat, Weibo.
1- WeChat is a Chinese version of Facebook. It is the most popular app, with more than 800 million active users all around the world. It offers special features such as wechat account for brand, Wechat pay, buy taxi, book reservation…
2- Weibo is a micro blogging platform just like Twitter, With more than 550 million active users. If you want to connect with Chinese customers you have to be present on WeChat and Weibo. You can create on both platforms an official account which will offer you special features.
With All these social media, you can send push notifications to your followers and share unique content in text, video or images. In order to create leads, you have to publish a real storytelling that will push Chinese social media users to share, comment or like. Engage them and some of them may just be leads for your travel agency.
Chinese website is the key
It is clear, Chinese internet users trust more Chinese Website than English website.
With more than 900 million Chinese internet users, China is the most connected countries in the world. They spend nearly 40% of their dailylife on Internet; it means a Chinese website is a good approach to get these potential clients.
Your website should respect a certain “protocol” to be sure that it will be easily found and has a nice design for the Chinese visitor.
You should also, be available for your Chinese visitors. The best would be to have a 24/24h customer service able to reply to any questions anytime.
Now you know the best method to attract Chinese tourists, but the fact is you need a good digital marketing agency, which have a right expertise and Chine market experience to help you to enter in the Chinese tourism market. This is what we are working for.
Chinese tourism market is very competitive and you have to think in term of money and marketing strategy. Chinese tourist is the “king” of outbound tourism, every country want to get them, so doesn’t be late, the decision is now.
GMA is a digital marketing agency
GMA is a digital marketing agency based in Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen with seven years of experience in the China market.
Thanks to our big team composed by nearly 40 experts, we are you best solution to attract more and more Chinese Travelers.
We used to work with international brand; tourist agency over the world like Bali Travel, Jacada Travel, Luxury Beach House Maldives… can be testified about our service and the result in their agency.
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