You are a small brand and you want to operate in China? You have to know Wechat and its functionalities to make good use of the number one social platform in China, WeChat is the Chinese for micro-messaging originally, created in 2011 by Tencent and was already different from the competition by spreading the voice message feature. But years over years functionalities were added to the platform until forming a specific ecosystem for all WeChat users. If the app is very familiar to smartphone users in Chinese cities, it is an essential tool for Chinese netizens.
Wechat Features for Companies
You will need to register your brand as an official account. You basically have 2 options: you can either sign up for a subscription account or a service account. They both have their advantages and disadvantages regarding what your objectives are (be careful, you will need a business license « 营业执照 » as well as a WeChat Pay account). If you want we can help you.
Subscription Account: With a subscription account, your company is more focused on its content. Your content is accessible in the SERP of the search engine embedded in the WeChat ecosystem. You have the possibility to send one push notification to engage your audience per day. However this notification is hidden in the folder where all the subscription account notification goes.
Service Account: The focus of the company is around the user. Your maximum amount of push notifications is 4 per month but the notification is more visible than the subscription account’s because they appear as a personal conversation in the message feed of the user. With this account, you can create a closer relationship with the user through chats, loyalty programs, etc.
Marketing strategy: rise brand awareness！
Publish content regularly! One of the best ways to improve your visibility is to write meaningful and useful content. Write articles about your business to show your expertise. You can also display your products and service and talk about them: take the angle that suits the most your business, if your business is in technologies, you can talk about features, functionalities, design, etc…
– If your business is a traditional food, you can talk about history, or give very special food recipes. Finally, if you’re doing fashion or perfumes, you should tell about your storytelling, right? Because WeChat is a pretty close ecosystem you may have difficulties targeting and making people find your account, this is the reason why, if they find you, you have to make the first impression perfect! Be creative, express yourself to text, you can add pictures, videos, and so on.
Launch Marketing Campaigns: Brands can launch marketing campaigns to engage customers. It can be reposting an article that limits been published for gaining a prize or organizing a special contest that involves customers.
KOL Promotion: Key Opinion Leaders are very helpful players for any business. They are influential personalities operating mainly on social networks (they can also be celebrities), and they are one of the most efficient ways to promote your brand. They can be part of your marketing campaigns by creating content around your guidelines, or they can be the marketing campaign by offering possibilities of promoting your services/ products (by reviewing it, by sponsored post, doing giveaways, creating contests engaging their community, etc). They are effective because they have strong relations with the community they built, a community that trusts them and often identifies with them. That’s why they are so influential and must be considered as a must.
However, KOLs campaign on WeChat can be very pricy, so if you go for this type of promotion choose wisely the KOL you want to work with, make sure that he/she is targeting the right consumers for you. Also if you want a less pricy personality, choose the less popular one, they are still ways because their community is smaller they’re considered as more authentic.
In all previous cases, please share the content you created and the QR code to access your account on other social networks (such as Weibo and Toutiao), on websites,
WeChat is the most spread and used social network in China, you should elaborate your strategy for the Chinese market allocating a part of your budget and time to WeChat. As said above, you have many different ways to leverage this platform, for all types of budgets, please contact DDC to integrate your new and cost-effective strategies!