Complete Marketing Strategy of Yili – A Chinese Dairy Producer

About Yili – Company Overview

For numerous years, the Yili Group has been named No. 1 in the Asian dairy business, making it one of the world’s most successful dairy enterprises. It is also China’s largest dairy company, with the widest range of goods.

Yili is China’s sole dairy company that has satisfied the requirements for servicing Olympic Games, and it provided services for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It’s also the only dairy company to meet the World Expo’s requirements, and it was the exclusive supplier of dairy products for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Yili has always emphasised, “internationalisation” and “innovation” as well as the two fundamentals of “quality” and “responsibility” throughout its history. Consumers have given it their trust.

With its high-quality, high-tech, and high-value-added varied dairy products, it has earned the trust of consumers. Over 100 million Yili items are shipped to customers every day. Yili goods are consumed by about 1.1 billion Chinese people each year.

In the first half of 2019, the company achieved a net profit of 3.8 billion yuan, up 0.33 billion yuan year on year. Furthermore, it generated total operating revenue of 45.07 billion yuan in the period, up 5.13 billion yuan from the previous year.

Marketing Strategy of Yili 

Concerning the brand, Yili dairy follows a “customer-centric” approach and puts brand building at the heart of the company’s strategy. Not only this we will learn about the company.

Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning

Yili decided to break their overall market into smaller segments and groups based on the similarity of their attributes, buying nature, social and economic background, etc. The main objective of segmentation in the marketing strategy of Yili is that it will help them reach out to their desired group of customers more precisely and effectively. MSSL divided their segments and their customers based on demography which is based on gender, income, age, occupation, etc, followed by a Cross market segmentation (based on similar customers in different markets) and a psychographic segmentation (based on buying nature, characteristics, personality, etc.

After the identification of various segments based on different factors, the marketing strategy of Yili’s focus target is the global market and internationally manufactured products. Owing to their tagline, they target globally made products. 

Positioning is an important step in finding and building your own unique and distinct place in this industry. The marketing strategy of Yili positions their brand and product in their market which helps in the future. Many factors are involved in the positioning of Yili such as the relevancy of the position and the corporate image of Yili. It generally positions its products slightly higher than market prices to maintain its corporate image.

Marketing Campaigns

Yili does not have a great online presence even though they haven’t conducted any kind of campaign. They don’t conduct any kind of advertisement campaign to promote their dairy company. 

Yili can use the same marketing techniques as its competitors are using. The marketing campaign which they can follow from their competitors is advertising on television, launching an advertisement in newspapers, launching a short corporate film, and other marketing ideas.

Yili can launch such advertisements and other media campaigns to increase its presence in India and other foreign countries.

Social Media Marketing

Yili dairy now only started entering the social media era like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

• Facebook – Yili_global, 21 followers

• Instagram – Yili_global, 16 followers & 5 followings & Yili.career, 9,341 followers & 1 following.

• Twitter – Yili_global, 9 followers & 13 following

• LinkedIn – Yili Group, 26,464 followers

From the above data, we collected the Yili dairy is very poor on social media. 

But they are famous for China’s leading social platforms like Weibo, Douyin, and WeChat. The social media campaign generated over 345 million impressions, with 5 million views on the short video-sharing app Douyin alone.

SEO Strategies

As for SEO ranking, it is said that the Number of keywords – below 500 is poor, above 1000 is average, and 10,000+ is amazing. As we can see that www.yili.com has only 373 organic keywords and it’s considered to be very bad. That means the digital marketing of the Yili dairy is losing a good number of insights.

Also, the traffic per month is around 3000 only which is known as poor. Hence, Yili dairy needs a strategic enhancement in its SEO strategies while working hard enough to keep the brand soaring in the Google organic SERP results.

Influencer Marketing

Yili partnered with 10 celebrities and influencers, including Yangming and Shentao, and planted content on social media under the banner “Drink milk scientifically”.

Ecommerce Strategies

Since 2018, dairy mammoth Yili has utilized social e-commerce such as Wechat. On August 5th, 2021, Yili officially signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Suning Commerce Group Co. Ltd (suning) in Nanjing City. 

Mobile App

The company doesn’t have any mobile operations. So the company needs to ameliorate some apps from their side to increase sales and become more engaging with people.

Content Marketing Strategies

Yili dairy is always active in advertising its products because the growth of the company in china is fully dependent on the advertising sector. A multichannel strategy is an important magic weapon for Yili’s rapid growth. At the same time, Yili Dairy actively expands the University market, develops the campus agent, and penetrates the university market through the mode of purchasing on behalf of others and returning profits. According to the orientation of the market, when choosing the channel mode, Yili mainly considers the requirement of channel construction and radiation power for the growth of scale.

This ends our elaborative marketing strategy of Yili. Let us conclude our learning below from the marketing strategy of Yili.