23 Expert Tips that will take your WeChat Marketing to the next level!

Optimise your content

WeChat just like all other social media platforms, is heavily based off content. In order to access and maintain a higher quality audience, content optimisation is a necessity. A business WeChat should give the audience a reason to follow them over any other competitor and as such, optimising content successfully will be a key part in keeping followers subscribed and wanting more.

1. Be Creative and Innovative

• Being creative on WeChat is a must. With more than 700 million WeChat users all around the world, gaining followers is not an easy task and is very competitive. If you decided to go for service account, for example, you can create mini-games, or an even online challenge to engage your followers.

2. Shareable Content

• Shareable content is an alternative to word of mouth which in essence makes the content become more trustworthy and visible on the internet. A company should adjust the content they share based on the culture and  followers’ interests. We live in an era where visual and video content is much more effective than lengthy text.
• On McDonald’s WeChat account, you see that they share interesting content with customized menus alongside Happy Meal and Special Toy promotions. This kind of content includes many different elements that could successfully get the attention of its followers and encourage them share it in their social circle. Involving children in this way is a powerful marketing tool, especially now the one child policy has been lifted in China.

3. Have Quality Content

• In order to build a strong long-term relationship, the content you share with your followers must be relevant and of good quality. It should not only show your products or services, but also provide some kind of value to your followers. Avoiding typos, grammatical errors, and fake statements as well as not responding to your followers’ queries is a must.

4. Title is Key

• Having amazing quality material is a must, however it is important for a business to take title into consideration. After all, the most important is the title that will appear on your moment (WeChat’s version of a Facebook Post)
• It gives your audience reason to click on the article, and can give even the most poor and badly written content a chance to be looked at.
• On the other hand, paying no attention to your title and how it may be perceived by your target audience can be extremely detrimental, and can turn readers away from even clicking on your content no matter how good it may have been.

5. Use Every Type of Content

• In order to publish great content and to not bore your followers, you should make the best out of every kind of content you can post on WeChat. Instead of writing text only with one image, you should maybe consider adding a video broadcasting your promotion campaign, provide links towards your official websites, and so on.

6. Have a Specific Strategy

• Make sure you have a specific strategy in mind, one that is clearly defined and manageable. While having an open mindset is good to take in multiple strategies into consideration, it is important to have at least one strategy that your brand’s main focus is dedicated to.
• Having too many ideas to implement can be detrimental as the brand then has too many strategies to put into effect, weakening the overall execution. Being able to focus on a single strategy however gives the target market something clear to understand, while also providing room for the brand to implement several secondary ideas based either upon strengthening that single strategy OR expanding the business steadily into other areas.

7. E-Commerce Integration

• If your company is involved in any type of sales directly, why not consider integrating your payment method with WeChat pay. It will enhance the users’ experience greatly with the payment simple and at their finger tips, they stay within the app for the whole process.
• This feature is used by a massive amount of WeChat users in China in their daily lives. From the farmer market to the department store, WeChat pay has totally changed payment behavior in China.

Build a Long Term Relationship with Followers

Keeping followers is important to the long-term success of a brand, and as such simply getting the follower should not be the entire process. Instead, it is important for a business to know how to keep followers interested and interacting in the long run.

8. Loyalty Programs

• One of the useful WeChat features for marketing is that one can employ a membership/ loyalty program with their WeChat official account. It allows business or brands to covert their followers into members.
• Offer Membership/ VIP cards via WeChat to increase account followers
• Send out exclusive promotions/ marketing news for branding
• Rewards (E-coupons) encourage more purchases
• Partner with other companies to provide all-inclusive offers

9. Know your Target Communities

• Knowing the demographics and identifying your followers will help companies to better communicate with followers. Brands can start up a certain interesting conversation group via their official account where they can do specific promotion in an exclusive group chat.
• This tactic will increase the effectiveness of any brand’s marketing campaign since they understand the interests of their target audience. Combining the techniques of targeting groups and  approaching individuals is effective, WeChat allows brands to be creative when interacting with followers.
• A campaign named “New Coffee definition” launched by Starbucks is an engaging activity where it starts up conversations with their account followers. Users will receive a message with a short music video based on what emoticon the user sends to Starbucks official account.

10. Interact with your Followers

• In the same line to building a long-term relationship you have to regularly interact with your followers. You can do so via the allowed amount messages you can send to them, replying quickly with relevant information to their queries, through online WeChat events (games, etc.) and your own WeChat application.

11. Give Incentive For Followers

• In this day and age, simply being present is no longer enough. It is necessary for any business that wants to grow to be able to give their followers a reason to follow them instead of the dozens, maybe even hundreds other competing businesses on WeChat.
• Through WeChat, you can communicate and advertise directly on smartphones apps. Businesses attract consumers with prizes, promotions or pictures and they will follow. Learn more about WeChat marketing.
• Targeting specific communities also a good strategy. Here’s are the top 5 WeChat channels for Wine lovers. Give your new followers a gift that meets their specific likes and needs.

12. Be Cautious with Redirecting

13. Special Events

• Events can be very broad, including trade shows, conferences, new product releases, it is a very good opportunity to broadcast your brands combined WeChat activites. A simple series of topics with QR codes can explain more detail about your brand than you would imagine. It is also a cheapest way to promote your official accounts while holding events to attract media attention.
• Another way could be using WeChat features to promote your special events. Like the campaign held by Burberry whom invites users to shake their smartphones on WeChat in order to attend a special event.

14. Collect Feedback

• Being on WeChat not only enables you to contact future/current customers but also to collect feedback for a low cost about your products or services.
• Collecting and archiving your followers’ feedback can help you to build a CRM system and provides you with a pack of data to use for your market research analysis, thus enhancing your strategic decisions.
• Collecting feedback also draws your followers’ attention and let’s them know that you care about them and their opinions, which is essential to maintaining a strong long term relationship.

15. Use Influencers and Opinion Leaders

• Of course there are some short cuts to boost your WeChat followers. Business effectively can do it through partnership with other WeChat account owners who have a significant number of followers like celebrities (might be quite expensive) or internet celebrities (could be cheaper). Through these KOL’s (Key Opinion Leaders), your business account can be exposed greatly to the public which will boost your followers quickly. Check the following promotions which WeChat did with celebrities to boost its own user base.
• You may not already know it, but Chinese people strongly believe in their social network contact opinion and advice. That is why it’s important not only to collect feedback about what your followers, customers think about your brand but also to collaborate with key opinion leaders.
• A key opinion leader are people on social media or internet who have a strong fan base with numerous followers who enjoy, and believe in their publications.

Make the most of all WeChat Features

WeChat has a huge range of features that a brand can take advantage of. In order to keep your WeChat fresh and up to date, understanding all the various tools and options at your disposal is essential to providing your audience with interesting and a diverse range of content that will capture and provide worth to them. After all, if you don’t make the most out of these tools, other brands undoubtedly will.

16. Post WeChat Moment Ads

• There are multiple ways to promote your products or services on WeChat. One of them is to share moments ads.
• What is a moment? It shows on the screen of the user and is very similar to Facebook posts.
• You can use this powerful tool the same way you would to advertise on western-style social media platforms. You can insert: a picture, a description text (40 characters max), images (max 6 images) and finally a internal WeChat link to your official page or WeChat mini website.

17. Micro Sites

• With the WeChat platform open to developers, brands are able to build dedicated micro-sites for their campaign content as a social hub for interactivity and engagement.
• A great example of this was created by Chanel, who built a fashion micro-site to house details of its global campaign with interactive features including the latest brand news, a history of the brand, new products, make-up tips and more.

18. Use QR Codes

• QR codes are a very effective invention which bring businesses and customers closer than ever before, using a feature similar to a bar code that is then scanned by the phone for a variety of uses including: creative ads, gifts, customisable messages and more.
• Consumers in China are trained to scan the QR code when they see it with a hope of getting something in return.
• This creates a great chance for marketers to create some incentives to keep users engaged. The idea is simple, create engaging content that will produce offline results. Marketing campaigns could be discounts, coupons, time sensitive sales, location based sales, etc. in order to attract customers into stores or to attend events.

19. WeChat Games

• With the flexibility to build small apps on top of the existing WeChat platform, brands have also been able to create engaging games and competition entry forms.
• U.S. fashion company Kate Spade launched a sky lantern game where users could select a lantern colour and write their own message on it before releasing it into the sky. Participants were also entered into a competition to win Kate Spade products.
• German luxury brand Mont Blanc, actually invited its WeChat members to join a “black and white” event in Shanghai. Then, they made sure to engage their followers by setting up interesting games. This helped them to gain more than 1000 followers.

20. Create a Service Account

• If you were strongly hesitating between a subscription and a service account, the second choice may be the best for you.
• In fact, the service account provides additional features and options for a company. You can create your own menu, application, receive queries and promote your products or services. You can also send to your followers 4 messages per month. This time, they will be able to receive a push notification, which is great to instantly connect with your followers.

21. Use Customisable Sub-Menus

• Many markets that are still in the very first stage of using the WeChat platform are missing the most efficient way of keeping clients engaged. Customised menus.
• Customised sub-menus are like buttons that can include links or newsletters to showcase your products and it’s the key to the entire ecosystem.
• Neglecting this WeChat feature can severely hamper a follower’s experience

22. Use Automatic Replies

• WeChat recently created a new pretty useful feature: automatic replies. This can be used only by official accounts. Thanks to this new functionality you can send “welcome messages” (like Burberry did) to your new followers and even better reply to their queries automatically based on keyword recognition. It will strongly help you in being more responsive.

23. Become a WeChat Partner

• If you have the chance to have an interesting budget to allocate to your WeChat strategy, collaborating directly with WeChat for a specific advertising campaign and for a certain amount of time is the best way to rapidly and efficiently skyrocket your WeChat account visibility.
• In 2015, Western Union partnered with WeChat by creating a specific platform on WeChat. It provides an online payment service, which allows WeChat users to send money to any location among a list of 200 countries.

If you’re looking to learn more about WeChat and how your brand can use it for success within the Chinese market, here are 2 links to get you started!

WeChat! The Next Wave To Social And Financial Success?

WeChat Marketing Agency – Trusted By Top Australian Brands – WeChat Setup and Maintenance 

If you enjoyed reading this and would like to read more social media related content, feel free to take a look at our Social Media Case Study Library!