The Best Wechat Solutions for Growth in China

Wechat is the number one social Media for Brands and in B2B for Business.

Most of companies are still exploring the best way to optimize their presence on Wechat.

Wechat : the Super App

Wechat is arguably the most popular and useful mobile app in China, with most Chinese citizens using it for both their personal and professional life. But it’s not just the people who rely so heavily on the increasingly popular app. Wechat has very cleverly developed an abundance of ways in which companies and brands can use Wechat to help their businesses thrive.

When conversing with a new client in order to gage and understanding of their requirements, they all very early on, insist upon having a Wechat account created for them. When further asked why it is they require this, the response is generally along the lines of “I don’t know, but the Chinese use Wechat so my company must do the same’’.

Time and time again I have experienced conversations that follow this pattern. So without further ado, here are the top ways in which Wechat can help lead your company to success.

1.      Wechat for Lead Generation

For B2B, tourism, or services industries, you can use Wechat to communicate with your target audience and generate leads. It is not the most efficient way of doing this (Wechat is a closed platform, so can therefore be difficult for your target audience to find you), but it can work well.

Wechat can also act as a newsletter for your audience. Many Chinese do not regularly check their email accounts, however, they frequently read their Wechat messages. In fact, 70% of the Chinese rely on using Wechat in work over email to communicate with clients, suppliers and colleagues, organize work and read professional information about their work on Wechat when they have time.

So how do companies maximize their leads on Wechat ?

Good question.

Step 1 : Introduction

It is crucial to have a clear Wechat introduction for your company. The Chinese like fancy presentations , H5 pages , videos and minisites, so it is important to consider these when building your Wechat account. When your audience see your Wechat account they will decide their first impressions of your company based on your account page, so it is hugely important to get this rightl

Step 2: Content.

Content is the most important part of Wechat Marketing. It can be difficult to get visitors on Wechat, so producing good quality content regularly can help increase your visibility. Content including useful tips, market information, special offers etc can really help encourage your audience to follow you on Wechat.

Before starting a Wechat project, we usually carry out a content strategy, where we evaluate what the target audience of our client may be interested in and from there, we create articles around that. 

Another aim of producing good content is that it becomes sharable content. Whether your audience share it in targeted groups, by direct message or in their own moments, this all leads to great visibility for your company. To have the best chance of producing sharable content, it generally needs to include:

1. l An eye catching title (so users will have to click to read the article)
2. l An attractive presentation (Gifs, photos, embedded videos, etc).
3. l Good personalized content
4. l And above all, it needs to be original content

It is difficult for companies in B2B to produce shareable content, and most of them have the temptation of producing corporate only content. For our agency, if we were to only send information about gentlemen, we would probably not have many followers. Therefore, we choose to produce added value articles for our broad target audience, including market information, tips to achieve success in China and how to maximize results.

Step 3 : Community Management

As previously mentioned, Wechat is a closed platform and in the early days, you will really need to heavily promote your account and your content. It may sound simple, but 95% of companies in lead generation fail to promote and share their content in groups, forums websites and other media platforms. Some companies also forget to share their QR code for their Wechat account on their website and with emails to clients. By not doing this, your company is potentially missing out on a lot of followers. Big companies will benefit from having a community manager; somebody that will integrate themselves into targeted groups, will interact with your target audience regularly share your content in groups and on their moments.

Community Management takes time, because you firstly need to identify where your audience exchange information. You also need to spend time finding influencers who appeal to your audience who can also help share and promote your content.

Spending time integrating, communicating with the right message and replying to questions, and creating groups of members of your audience can be very time consuming initially, but can really pay off in the long run .

Step 4 : Customer service

Having an active customer service base on Wechat can be hugely beneficial in terms of instant interaction with customers who have queries. This is a great way to provide instant and direct information and quotations if necessary.

Robot chats are quite popular in China, as it helps your team avoid having to answer the same question time and time again.

After gaining an understanding of these four steps, many clients will ask ‘’Should I run my wechat by myself’’? Generally the setup requires a combination of design, technology, and a thorough understanding of your target market.

Content : If you have the resources to produce quality content, then yes, write it yourself. It can be difficult for an agency to understand specific B2B markets or what the exact needs of the customers are. Agencies can help you to simplify content or make it more appealing.

Community management : Usually Chinese marketers can advise how to identify groups, how to share content, etc, but this can be a simple task for your company to carry out in house once an understanding of Wechat is gained.

Customer service: It is better if one of your employees can reply to questions and make quotations as they should have a very thorough understanding of your products and services.

2.      Wechat Branding

Wechat is the most popular communication channel for brands in China. High end brands like the idea of privileged access , and members deals, whilst mass market brands have to produce viral content in order to recieve maximum exposure.

Step 1 : Set up of the wechat

For brands, we recommend to have really high quality design pages, H5 pages, and eye catching videos to give an attractive introduction of your brand to your consumers. Wechat is a great tool and you can personalize a lot of aspects of your Wechat account to give a personalized image of your brand.

EXAMPLE TWIST AND DRINK

Brand Content

Publish less, but publish better. A service account has a better opening rate than a subscription account by around 7%.

Wechat articles are long, detailed and informative. We encourage our customers to develop a good content strategy, and really focus on what their target customers like. (more information )

Be innovative

Video is a new way of producing high quality brand content. If you have the budget, you can, like Nike, introduce a nice video every week in order to sustain your brands visibility and create awareness. If budget is restricted, develop a video magazine channel, or let users speak about your brands via their own videos.

Video articles are easy to share, and a video engages more users by letting them jump more into the brands universe. (see other case studies)

Animation

It is always better when you start to have followers to animate your community, with games, online contests or appealing infographs during events.

VIP

Wechat is the perfect tool to create a VIP program. Let your users register and receive special privileges for being a follower.

Word of Mouth

Why is Wechat so powerful? Because people trust in other people and when one of your followers shares your content or account to their friends, you are more likely to gain a new follower.

Chinese people do not trust in corporate communication and official media and prefer to listen to their own circle of peers.

KOL on Wechat – Wechat popular accounts

There are many key opinion leaders on Wechat who can help share your content with their fans and ultimately increase your number of followers. It should be noted however, that there are a lot of fake accounts, with fakes followers and fake views.

So how can you identify the right and wrong accounts to use? Good question.

By carrying out a thorough check of the account can help you gain the information that you need. By checking the views of an account, checking the history etc. An account created 3months ago can not get 1million followers for example, it takes time. We read their content and assess the quality. 

Mister Bags is the leading KOL in luxury.

see Wechat marketing Guide 2017 & Wechat ECommerce Guide

Advertising on Wechat

You have many ways to advertise on Wechat

Advertising on moments is one way. However, at 40rmb for 1000 views it can be expensive. You really need to produce high quality, effective ads for this to become a successful way of advertising. We do not recommend this way for small and medium brands.

You can also advertise through the banners at the bottom of popular articles. It is cheaper and you can pay by engagement or actions. It can be a good way to highlight your account at the beginning but please note, just because people click ‘become follower’ does not necessarily mean they will follow your account. They are curious and will usually unfollow the account if it does not match to their interest.

Wechat Trends

On Wechat you can now find out what the trending, and popular topics and keywords are. This can help guide you to write and produce content based on what is currently popular.

Should I internalize my Wechat Marketing Campaign?

Most brands externalize Wechat Marketing .

Copywriting take a lot of time, and you need really good copy writers to do so.

Promotion – community management : Most of the time, Chinese marketers working for brands do not have time to spend on sharing content and interacting with people. And if they have time, they do not know how to do it.

Community management take a lot of time but is necessary to increase the popularity of the account. It can also detect problems, crisis and complaints. It gives a closer feeling to users, to know that a human is working for the brand and it is not being run by an automated computer.

Games – Event – Buzz : Usually Brand externalize this to a special agency because, it requires specific action.

Special development : usually brands give this task to specific companies, not doing marketing but focussing more on development. It is usually 2 different core businesses.

Customer services : The agency can assist and consult on customer service but it is best to do it in house where customer service agents have more of a specialized and in depth knowledge of their products and services.

 

We Commerce (Wechat eCommerce)

It is quite popular now to develop a Wechat store and sell on Wechat to the community. Many luxury brands have launched a Wechat store, where they can expose their new collection and sell to their VIP customers. Wechat is probably the future of the e-Commerce market, because many Taobao shops are disappointed by the commission and the lack of visibility that they have on Taobao/ Tmall. To sell on Wechat, you need a targeted community and a wechat Store (+ Wechat payment) .

The first step is to build a community and get followers on Wechat (tips on how to achieve this given above).

As explained on the branding part, you need a good content strategy and community management.

After receiving a certain level of followers or groups, you can start to build your Wechat store and offer your products to your community.

On Wechat, sales are never high the beginning because you do not get free visibility as you sometimes do on Taobao (search engine of Taobao). On Wechat, you have to engage people into following, then expose them to the benefit of your products. It is not a short term process, like every social networking strategy, but can be rewarding.

One great thing about Wechat stores is that consumers have less choice to compare products to others. (further readings here)

Users can buy straight from the brands official Wechat store to ensure the product is genuine and of high quality.

Trust is difficult to gain on Wechat, because comments and notations are not developed. However, word of mouth works well so a lot of Wechat is heavily reliant upon that.

More and more KOL/influencers open their Wechat store to sell directly to their community and daigous (personal Shoppers) start to develop their business on Wechat, because it is easier to communicate and they can show more loyalty to their clients.

Conclusion :

Wechat is a wonderful tool for companies and especially for building brands. Tencent build an ecosystem around wechat, Tencent video for Wechat, Tencent music , mini apps. Every year, this super App creates new tools and new options for users. 

We are more than a simple Wechat Agency

more information here. Any askings here

I share my knowledges and experiences with you, I will be very Happy to have interesting Comment or likes.

I read all of them and will try to reply as soon as possible.

You can also add my Linkedin Profil, I almost accept everybody (except spammers)

Gentlemen Wechat Account (many usefull articles)

My Wechat Account