WeChat for Business: What Marketers Need to Know
Why Marketers Should Consider WeChat
Is your business looking to raise brand awareness or drive direct customer engagement with Chinese-speaking audiences? Whether you want to enter the China market or reach out to Chinese tourists (who are considered the biggest spenders in the world), the most effective tactic is to adopt the region’s most popular multi-purpose app: WeChat.
Audiences in China have no access to social media apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but they’ve completely embraced WeChat. Launched in 2011, the app is loved by Chinese expats, travelers, and students across the globe.
While other social media platforms might be part of your digital marketing strategy, WeChat is an application to consider as well, especially if you want to increase brand awareness and engage with your Chinese-speaking customers.
Here are three reasons why you should consider using WeChat for your business.
Massive Reach
With 1.09 billion monthly active users (70 million of whom are from outside of China), you can’t ignore the massive reach of this platform. In addition to being enormously popular in China, WeChat has also penetrated the U.S. and U.K. markets and is growing at a rapid rate. The app currently supports over 20 languages and that number is expected to increase over time.
One-of-a-Kind Lifestyle Platform
Calling WeChat China’s WhatsApp or Facebook would be inaccurate—it’s a lot more than that. It’s a one-of-a-kind lifestyle platform that has several apps rolled into one. With the ability to connect to 85,000 other apps, WeChat has formed a strong ecosystem of its own.
What started off as a messaging app has now taken over every aspect of life in China. From shopping online and paying bills to playing games and making video calls, WeChat happens to be the go-to app for almost everything. This allows marketers to gain insights from valuable consumer data, understand which life stage consumers are at, and target them with personalized communication.
Interactive Features
WeChat is constantly innovating and presenting exciting new features to connect brands and customers. One such feature is the Shake function, which lets offline businesses interact with mobile users who are nearby.
When users see the screen above, they have to physically shake their phone. By doing so, the app connects them with someone else who shook their phone at the same moment. Marketers can also make use of such a feature on WeChat.
To illustrate this, for Chinese New Year (a festive period in Asia—similar to Christmas in the West), global luxury brand Burberry sent followers a photo of a cylinder-shaped gift and encouraged them to “Shake, tap and swipe to try and open the gift.”
Upon doing so, they received a letter and were offered the option to send a personalized greeting to a friend. All participants also had the chance to win limited-edition Burberry Lunar New Year envelopes.
In addition to the shake function, WeChat offers other interactive features such as the use of QR codes and mini-programs.
