WeChat Marketing: Effective Strategies for your Brand in China

While the rest of the world is socializing via media such as Twitter, Facebook, or Twitter and chat services like WhatsApp, 1.4 billion people in china are not. Instead a majority of Chinese citizens are using WeChat for all their social media services, from chat to sharing interesting information with friends, reading news, playing games, tracking their fitness activities, making voice and video calls, shopping online and even paying for goods and services. With so much going through this one app in China, it is key to know how to effectively strategize your WeChat marketing to grow your brand in the Chinese marketplace.

WeChat Business Accounts

The foremost step in establishing your WeChat marketing plan is to apply for one of the three types of business accounts for WeChat.   Official accounts are available to celebrities, media, government organizations, and businesses, and are in the style of subscription accounts, service accounts, and enterprise accounts.   Subscription accounts will allow your brand to broadcast one message per day to subscribers, which appear in their subscription accounts folder.   Service accounts allow up to four broadcasts per month instead, and appear in the friend session list, but with a verified account it gives access to nine robust API’s and can apply to use WeChat pay. Lastly enterprise accounts have access to messaging and business tools, but they are only available in Mainland China

Location-based Marketing

With the use of an official account, you can take advantage of location detection services to localize your WeChat marketing strategies. When a user is using the WeChat app they can see lists of local businesses around them that are taking advantage of the WeChat official accounts.   By using this feature, brands can share their service information or product list to people in the area around their brick and mortar location. Examples of a good use of location-based marketing is when a restaurant shares their menu through WeChat, and allows users to place orders and even pay for their meal.

Personalized Content Marketing

While official accounts only allow you to broadcast messages a certain number of times in a certain time period, you can use the chat services in WeChat for effective WeChat marketing. With the use of chatbots, users can message your brand with “keywords”, which then trigger the bot to reply with relevant information. It’s a great way to share videos, guides, articles or just basic business info.

Community Engagement

Engaging with your brand’s customer base is a great way to expand your brand’s influence throughout user networks, and WeChat gives you a great way to do that. An effective use of WeChat marketing is to send out messages that get followers to share their thoughts and ideas on a topic that is related to your brand. This not only gets the community engaged directly with your brand, but if you make the message fun there is a better chance of it being shared across other platforms.

QR Code Creativity

WeChat takes advantage of QR Codes, so your brand should too. By placing QR Codes on print materials like newsletters, business flyers, website ads, or posters on the street, WeChat users can scan the codes with their mobile devices and immediately link to product pages where they can order the product your advertising in just a couple clicks with WeChat Wallet.

Take advantage of WeChat today with effective China WeChat marketing strategies with the help of Westwin.