WeChat Marketing: Your Fast Guide to Business

Having a WeChat marketing strategy should be on your radar, especially if your business wants to target Mailand Chinese audiences. With over 1 billion monthly active WeChat users, A successful WeChat marketing strategy can have a real impact on your business.

WeChat is a multipurpose platform. It can be used to play games, read the latest news, online shop, track fitness goals, make payments, and much more.

There are also features such as WeChat mini programs, WeChat official accounts, WeChat Store and WeChat advertising (e.g. WeChat Moments Ads). To access Chinese social media and make an impact in the Chinese market, WeChat is the key.

All of these features make WeChat and the WeChat Ecosystem an exceptionally-lucrative platform for businesses. As noted above, you can connect with consumers and leverage brand influence with Mainland China.

In this post, we will cover ways how you or your brand can use WeChat and access a huge number of monthly active users.

What is WeChat?

WeChat basically enables users to send and receive messages, with a few other features thrown in there too. Some of WeChat’s other services include sharing pictures, stickers, videos, and other content like online memes, blogs, and news articles.

There’s also the famous WeChat Moments Ads feature, which makes it easy to share special moments with loved ones.

However, what makes WeChat so lucrative for marketers with a target audience in China are features like WeChat Wallet, WeChat Pay, and WeChat Stores. WeChat Stores, enables users to interact with, shop, and make payments online and in physical stores.

In fact, you can even use WeChat Wallet to keep track of all your daily expenses too! You can also book services like a doctor’s appointment, book a flight, or even a taxi.

What makes WeChat so popular with Chinese consumers, is the fact that it combines all the functions that make life convenient. It’s almost like a compendium of services, similar to Amazon, Skype, Apple Wallet, Facebook, PayPal, Slack, and more.

How to Use WeChat for Business

WeChat provides three different types of business accounts, also known as Official Accounts. There’s the enterprise account, the service account, and a subscription account. You’ll find that these are mostly used by business owners, government agencies and organizations, media companies, and celebrity figures.

While service accounts are known for being highly functional, subscription accounts offer better tools for messaging. Also, marketers don’t generally pay much attention to enterprise accounts, as they’re mostly used by large organizations.

• Subscription Accounts: With a subscription account, you can only broadcast one message to your subscribers all day.
• Service Accounts: Here, you’ll get access to a maximum of 4 broadcast messages on a monthly basis, which will appear on the friend session list. Once your account has been verified, you’ll get access to the WeChap Pay application, and will also get 9 advanced APIs.
• Enterprise Accounts: With an enterprise account, you’ll have access to all the bells and whistles, including specialized business tools and messaging, but the only catch is that it’s exclusive to users in Mainland China.

How to Use WeChat for Marketing

WeChat marketing can be used for several purposes, including customer engagement and interaction.

Here are some tips on how to make the most out of WeChat’s marketing features.

Location-Based Marketing

As you may know, location-based targeting is one of the most important aspects of any marketing strategy. When you use an Official WeChat Service Account, you’ll have access to specialized location detection features.

A good example of a company that has used this WeChat marketing strategy well, is a food delivery service called OrderIn from South Africa.

This company uses WeChat marketing to provide its users with location-based restaurant recommendations. Through this service, customers can use WeChat to look through different menus, make an order, and confirm delivery times.

Basically, OrderIn takes the online food ordering experience to another level, allowing customers to do everything via WeChat – all without the need to even take out their wallet.

Personalized Content Curation

Large multinational publications such as the The Wall Street Journal, Vogue China, The Huffington Post and The New York Times, are all leveraging WeChat marketing to extend their reach. As such, they use their Official Accounts on the platform to promote content on a daily basis.

However, BuzzFeed just took it to a whole other level, with enhanced customization features that enable subscribers to choose the type of content that they want to receive from the publication. Users can then share the content with friends and family via WeChat Moments or daily chats, which gives BuzzFeed an even wider reach.

Customer Engagement

WeChat marketing offers almost unlimited possibility when it comes to customer engagement.

Companies can use it to promote their products through carefully curated campaigns that contain highly shareable keywords.

Not only will these keywords be synonymous with the campaign, but if they’re good, and the content around them is good, then they can seriously drive engagement, conversions and overall reach.

QR Codes

Each Official Account within the WeChat platform comes with an automatically created QR code, as well as a scanner that you can use to customize your QR codes for increased functionality and versatility.

For instance, you can take a page out of Korea’s E-mart chain store, whose marketing team embedded a QR code within a 3D sculpture.

Now, what makes the sculpture even more unique is that the QR code within it only appears at lunchtime; a time period is known for increased traffic when online shopping.

Plus, when customers scan the QR code, they’re then taken to the Official WeChat Account, which leads to a significant increase in both followers and sales for the company.

Final thoughts

Overall, WeChat marketing proves to be a versatile marketing platform. Anyone can use it as part of a larger social media marketing strategy.

To learn more about how to boost your business, discover the 5 Major Benefits of Reputation Management or take your Instagram profile to a whole new level with Influencer Marketing: 7 Tips to Attract Your First 250k Instagram Followers. 

We invite you to look at our WeChat services. If you are looking to improve your sales in Mainland China, then WeChat is for you. Talk to one of our digital strategists to learn more.

What else can you do to improve your marketing efforts in China?

In addition to SEO efforts on Baidu, the dominant search engine in China, it is important for companies to consider KOL marketing. KOLs, or Key Opinion Leaders, are influential individuals in various industries who endorse products and services to their large online following.

Partnering with the right KOL can greatly improve a company’s visibility and credibility in the Chinese market.

It is also important to have an active presence on Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo, as they are highly popular and offer unique advertising opportunities.

Overall, an effective marketing strategy in China includes a mix of SEO tactics, KOL partnerships, and a strong social media presence.