Complete Marketing Strategy of Yili – A Chinese Dairy Producer

Updated on: Jul 3, 2022
Marketing Strategy of Yili - Featured Image

  Hey there!

My name is Aditya Shastri and I have written this case study with the help of my students from IIDE's online digital marketing courses in India.

Practical assignments, case studies & simulations from Harvard Business Review helped the students from this course present this analysis.

Building on this practical approach, we are now introducing a new dimension for our online digital marketing course learners - the Campus Immersion Experience.

If you find this case study helpful, consider leaving a comment below.

In a previous article, we learned about the detailed SWOT analysis of Yili. In this blog, we are going to elaborate on the marketing strategy of Yili – As the largest dairy producer and the dairy producer with the fullest product lines in China.

The key purpose is to learn and gain insights into Yili dairy and how it became China’s premium brand of dairy products. The company is aiming to become the world’s largest dairy product producer industry across the world.

So, as you know, the whole world is becoming online now, and marketing is the backbone of every industry. If you are excited to learn many more things do check out our free Masterclass on Digital Marketing by the CEO and founder of IIDE, Karan shah.

We will explore the full marketing strategy of Yili by the closing of this blog. Before getting into the deep, let us begin with the company’s story, audience, and digital presence.

Digital Marketing Academic Challenge 2024 - DMAC

About Yili – Company Overview

Marketing Strategy of Yili

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.

Quick Stats on Yili
CEO Pang Gang
CMO Li Dan
Area Served Yili sells not only in China but in several parts of Asia as well as other countries.
Industry Dairy Products
Market Share/ Revenue Asia’s leading dairy company generated total revenue of around 110 billion yuan
Vision Be and be recognized as the most trusted dairy provider around the world.
Tagline “Develop the domestic market with global resources”

 

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

Marketing Strategy of Yili - SEO

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.

Digital Marketing Academic Challenge 2024 - DMAC

Conclusion – What’s Unique in Yili Marketing?

In the marketing strategy of Orient Cement, we saw that Orient Cement is gaining love and support from all the places in China. As the Yili company tackles its issues, the biggest one plaguing them is its lack of missing efforts. Marketing is an important function of any company’s existence and in the current scenario. The field is rapidly digitising.

The company must focus on hiring digital marketers and marketing professionals, in the hopes that they will consider this step to achieve the desired results.

Almost every other firm, like Yili, is striving to boost its digital presence and, as a result, is looking for digital marketers. Check our Online Digital Marketing Course if you want to learn more and improve your skills. Alternatively, you can enrol in one of our free online masterclasses led by IIDE’s CEO, Karan Shah, to gain insight into the field of digital marketing. 

We hope this blog on the marketing strategy of Yili has given you a good insight into the company’s marketing strategies.

If you like such in-depth analysis of companies just like the marketing strategy of Yili check out our IIDE Knowledge portal for more fascinating case studies.

Thank you for taking the time to read the marketing strategy of Yili, and do share your thoughts on this case study marketing strategy of Yili in the comments section below.

Share post via

Aditya Shastri

Lead Trainer & Head of Learning & Development at IIDE

Leads the Learning & Development segment at IIDE. He is a Content Marketing Expert and has trained 6000+ students and working professionals on various topics of Digital Marketing. He has been a guest speaker at prominent colleges in India including IIMs......[Read full bio]

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Related Posts