Business Watch: One Chinese Company Dominating the Online Markets

For many years now, China has been known for its advancements — and investment — in technology. It’s no surprise Internet marketing is a rapidly growing field in the country. In fact, it’s growing so quickly there are not enough trained professionals to fill the available jobs.

Baidu, a Chinese-based Web company, identified this deficit and has been training Internet marketers since 2010. They train their employees to effectively market anything from computer hardware and financial services to pool guard manufacturing. About 3,000 industry insiders have been trained so far, according to the company.

Expanding Access to Knowledge

The certification programs offered by Baidu will now be open to the general public, since an estimated hundreds of thousands of jobs have not been filled because there aren’t enough skilled marketers. Included in the educational programs will be training on various marketing concepts, SEO, search engine marketing, and account implementation and management. The program will also cover the data analysis techniques associated with online marketing.

The certification program will be offered through relationships with industrial associations in China, universities and other professional education institutions. Large enterprises will also be incorporated into the outreach, as part of an alliance-based project to train people to be professional Internet marketers.

ChinaTechNews.com announced the expansion of marketing education on August 7, 2012. A report from Baidu, however, says the job demand will increase over the next few years despite the number of unfilled positions. Online marketing certification is being targeted at workers currently in the industry and others who are pursuing jobs in the online marketing field.

Knowledge Sharing

The Chinese Web marketing giant has a lot of knowledge to share, since it specializes in a variety of search engine based services. These include a proprietary search engine and Web directory, while image-, video- and news-specific search services are offered too. Baidu also focuses on social networking, user-generated content sites, mobile browsers and software.

Hundreds of millions of people use the Internet in China, and the company has positioned itself as a leader in providing access to knowledge. In addition to educating businesses on how to best use the Web, the current outreach program addresses the need to train the public, giving job prospects an edge when seeking employment.

Enabling Internet access and training people and businesses, is just a tip of the iceberg. Baidu has released products including the first searchable Chinese-language community product, an interactive knowledge-sharing platform called Baidu Knows, and a user-generated, Chinese-language encyclopedia.

Internet and search engine marketing have become so integrated with growing a business that the chance to learn from top companies should not be overlooked, anywhere in the world.