Russia is the biggest country in the world. China is the 1st world leader in terms of population, and it’s followed by India. Brazil is the 5th country in both population and territory. Imagine turning these amazing countries into your potential markets. Today you will discover some interesting and useful facts about Internet and online-marketing strategy building in the BRIC countries.
There is a lot discussed about how to build an online-marketing strategy in developed countries, and the competition on the digital industry of North America and Europe is already huge. But let’s turn to the developing BRIC countries.
1. Internet penetration in BRIC.
There’s no need to provide you with amazing numbers of total population or GDP of the BRIC countries. Brazil, Russia, India and China are actually huge and they are developing fast, in terms of economic growth and in terms of Internet usage as well. Imagine that nowadays Internet penetration in developing countries ranges from about 10% in India to less than 50% in Russia and China. It means that for the next few years the number of Internet users in these countries will grow rapidly and, according to some sources, it will double by 2015. So, it’s better to start developing your international SEO strategy today to be among the top tomorrow.
2. Chinese and Russian websites.
While India and Brazil seem to be happy with using worldwide known Google, Facebook, Twitter and so on, Russia and China have their own websites that successfully compete with the Internet giants. We have already written about social media and the most popular search engine in Russia. But in China the situation is even trickier, to explain it, we put the most famous Chinese copies of popular world-known websites into a table:
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World |
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YouTube |
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Messenger |
eBay |
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China |
Baidu |
RenRen |
YouKu |
|
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TaoBao |
Existence of all those Chinese websites can be easily explained by “Great Chinese Firewall” – many foreign websites are simply forbidden in China and many other of them (like Google) have had many problems penetrating Chinese market.
3. Social media power in India and Brazil.
It seems like social media is the key of successful online-marketing strategy in Brazil and India. Almost 97% of Brazilians are engaged with social media and over 60 million of them use Facebook. In India Facebook is the 2nd most popular website just after Google. Moreover, Indian and Brazilian users prefer to use social media and customer opinions to search for goods and services.
4. The most popular search terms.
The Top 10 search terms differ from country to country, but mostly people are just searching for social media links. Among other popular requests, in Brazil people search for “jogos” which means “games” and for “download”. In India the most popular requests are: “videos”, “games”, “news”. In Russia people search for “download”, “photo”, “weather”, “games” and “translator”. In China people mostly search for links to Chinese popular websites or for “mobile phone”, “games” and “movie”.
5. E-commerce in the BRIC countries.
China is the country where almost everything can be bought online. According to some statistics the number of online-shoppers in China is close to that of America but it represents only 23% of China’s population and expected to double by 2015. There are lots of online-shops like famous Chinese eBay called TaoBao, Tmall, and 360Buy.
India seems to be going the same way: Indians love to shop online and the e-commerce segment of the Internet market is growing rapidly. Brazilians prefer ordering simple goods and services especially using mobile apps. Russians are not great online shoppers, mostly they use Internet to shop for books and gadgets.
6. Tricky Brazilian SEO.
Brazil is one of the biggest countries in the world and the biggest in South America. Brazil speaks Portuguese that ranks among the top 10 languages in the world. With such a large population, Brazil also has its share of regional search engines, but Google is still number one. However, when adapting your SEO for the Brazilian market you should be very careful as keywords are not always the same and can vary hugely. You should always remember to adapt the content with necessary keywords instead of simple translation. The same can be said about the Indian market.
7. Mobile Internet popularity.
China, the USA and India are on top of the world in terms of smartphone market size. While the usage of mobile devices for Internet connection is a worldwide trend, the developing countries with huge population like China and India present impressive statistics of mobile Internet usage. The number of people accessing Internet via mobile devises has already overtook desktop usage in India, and the number of mobile Internet users in Chine has increased by 10% since the beginning of the year. So, taking into consideration these countries’ online markets, you should think about your website’s mobile adaptation.
These are just some of the interesting facts about Internet in the BRIC countries you should keep in mind when starting your international online penetration and Relevance is here to provide you with the advice and expertise.