How to Enter the Chinese Online Training Market

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There’s something important to note. Not many foreign companies eyeing the Chinese market get this—to do business with Chinese customers, you don’t always need to do business from within the country. So long as you’re not in a straight-up prohibited industry (such as gambling) you can most likely run your marketing, have a China-accessible website, and even accept payments from Chinese payment providers all without having a Chinese business entity or physical office within China.

Here’s the three-point overview:

You’ll need to build trust with your future students. Chinese saudi arabia phone number consumers can be suspicious about the quality of the education offered, especially if it’s from a company they haven’t heard of



before.
For marketing channels, you should use advertising (such as Baidu ads), your website, and social marketing (such as WeChat).
I predict it will cost you 10–50K USD to launch properly in China. There are ways to reduce the upfront costs though (more on that below).

To persuade Chinese people to sign up for your course/program/one-on-one sessions or whatever type of learning service you’re offering, you’d better use Chinese-language content. You probably don’t need your entire website translated, but the more Chinese material you have, the easier it will be.

Of course, this requirement varies based on who you’re targeting. Of the training businesses that have contacted me, the most common service they offer is English-language training. The targeted students have enough experience with English to handle an English-language interface. However, at that point where they first meet your brand, you want to really motivate them to move on to the next step. We recommend that you at least use Chinese to introduce your offer and persuade them of the key benefits.



MAKE SURE YOUR WEBSITE LOADS QUICKLY IN CHINA
From the point-of-view of the Chinese marketing team, the best solution would be to create a separate website hosted in China. This provides reliable speeds for everybody within “The Great Firewall.”

However, I realize this can be a hassle because you’d need to manage two different websites, pay for hosting, get an ICP license, etc.

A shortcut to getting your website to load quickly is to

fix only the components that don’t load well within China, and
use a CDN such as Cloudflare.


OFFER REAL-TIME SUPPORT
Chinese consumers are accustomed to having real-time support available, which is very often offered by most types of businesses. When we take a client that has “email us” as part of th