WeChat, the most used social platform in China, is an app that even small and medium-sized businesses can use to their advantage to reach Chinese consumers. But how can these companies sell more on this platform? In this article, we will suggest 5 useful tips and strategies optimize your Wechat eCommerce Strategy.
Wechat is essential to enter the Chinese market
Wechat has now become indispensable not only for individuals but also for small, medium, and big companies that intend to create effective marketing strategies aimed at the Chinese market. In fact, WeChat is still the only tool to have a direct connection with Chinese customers. Through the use of WeChat, companies have the opportunity to reach a huge number of Chinese users. To understand the extent of WeChat’s success, it is enough to know that the application has reached 1.2 billion monthly active users.
Why is Wechat important for users and for small and medium brands in China?
Born as a messaging platform, over the years Wechat has introduced several innovative and advanced features that have made it more than a simple online chat. WeChat marketing has become a must for brands, especially if the ones that are going to use its eCommerce tools.
Today Wechat allows users to:
- Create a circle of contacts and chats with them
- Post content or better “moments” on the bulletin board
- Stay informed about news in any area
- Make reservations (taxis, restaurants, flights, and much more)
- Use WeChat Wallet to shop online, see their balance, transfer money to other contacts, pay via mobile
- Use QR codes which provide a very low-cost way to connect the digital world inside our phones to things, people, and places in the real world around us.
Wechat also allows companies a complete CRM through:
- The ability to create Wechat official accounts (Subscription, Service)
- Interact with followers and keep them updated on brand news
- Mini-programs, small apps inside the WeChat system that cover various functions, such as e-commerce, games, and much more.
- Wechat pay is used by 900 million monthly active users with 1 billion transactions per day, from O2O connections, mini-programs, or Tencent platforms.
- Wechat advertising (Wechat moment ads, wechat account promotion, wechat mini program ads, wechat article banner ads).
Small & Medium Companies First step: Open an Official Wechat Account
The first step to starting your own Wechat business is creating an account. In addition to being able to create a personal profile, WeChat also offers the option of opening an official account through which the company can increase its brand awareness and engagement with customers.
Through an official account, you not only have greater contact with customers but it is also possible to create real advertising campaigns. Therefore, there are many foreign brands that use Wechat as the main portal for their advertising.
There are 2 types of official accounts the service account and the subscription account:
- Service accounts appear in the “chat” section like any contact. As a result, they offer greater visibility than subscription accounts, however, only four posts per month can be published.
- The subscription accounts are grouped in a sort of folder called, precisely, “subscription” visible in the “chat” section of WeChat. Through this type of account, you can send your followers more than one push notification per day.
Create a Wechat store to simplify the shop on the platform
The WeChat store is an e-commerce platform that exists within the Wechat app. Thanks to mobile payment with WeChat Pay, the Wechat store offers “one-click payment”, which enables an extremely smooth user experience and a significant increase in sales conversion rate.
5 tips to sell more on Wechat for small & medium company
1-Use content like images and videos to create engagement
Creating qualitative content on Wechat is very important to successfully maintaining an official Wechat account. The content should be interesting, informative, educational, emotional, attractive, interactive to keep the attention of your followers and to attract new ones.
Businesses should create “how-to” content that answers frequently asked questions and solves consumer problems.
Short videos and live streams are exploding on social media and also on Wechat as they attract a lot of attention. These are compelling images that can support your storytelling.
In the following image, you can see how Guerlain creates videos for his Wechat account.
2-Small & Medium Companies can Build loyalty with Wechat mini-programs
WeChat mini-programs are basically apps within WeChat. The aim of the mini-program is to create a friendly, efficient, and consistent user experience within the WeChat ecosystem. Every effort has been made to cater to a range of needs. There’s no need to download or install a mini-program in order to use it. It can be used anywhere, at any time, without any special requirements.
- Brands can use mini-programs to offer special promotions, share games, sell products, and so on.
- Brands can use the Wechat mini-program to reach their customers with a cost-effective way for users to easily access content, services, and products.
- Wechat mini-programs can be very interesting to engage your community, build brand loyalty, and even enable your customer base to reach a new high.
3-Small & Medium Companies have to use Wechat E-brochure
What is the WeChat E-brochure? Let’s see WeChat as an ecosystem, WeChat E-brochure (also called H5 WeChat) is a part of this ecosystem. To successfully carry out your project and promote it on a large scale, in the most efficient way possible, WeChat E-brochure is a perfect choice.
With an E-brochure, brands can host unique experiences from their official Wechat accounts.
There are many ways to communicate using WeChat E-brochure:
- Brands could create a survey or quiz to customer leads,
- an interactive experience that unlocks promo codes of special information,
- propose mini-games or animations on their page
- use more conventional ways such as websites alike pages, gifs, or images.
Wechat ebrochures are a great way to share content
In addition, you can redirect the user directly right onto the page you want with external links such as your commercial website or even the download page of your smartphone application. They have the possibility to post their content which can create more traffic to your campaign.
One of the other advantages of Wechat E-brochure is that it allows you to collect and analyze data on the profile of users who visit your page. This way you will know in detail if the target you are trying to reach is being impacted by your campaign. Thanks to this precious information you will be able to adapt your campaign to obtain better results.
An interesting example of an original E-brochure is the work of Starbucks, which has set up loyalty cards that can be customized by the user. This has the effect of being engaging and at the same time fun which can make you want to share your creation with your friends.
4-Use Wechat ads to boost followers
WeChat advertising is an effective way to boost followers, however, this form of advertising is only available to companies with a Wechat official account.
Wechat provides 3 types of advertising:
- Moments Ads,
- Account Ads,
- KOL Ads.
Wechat Moments Ads
Although we would not recommend them to small and medium companies when getting started in China, moment ads can give you a boost once your brand has already started getting recognition. As you can see in the following picture, these advertisements are shown in the users’ Wechat Moments. The price of ads varies by city and by the target group. These ads can only be purchased on a CPM (cost per thousand / cost per 1000 impressions).
Momentum announcements can be text, images, or videos, sometimes in conjunction with promotional campaigns. If readers are interested, they can click the “Read More” button for more information. These advertisements can be linked to an H5 campaign page, the brand’s official account, or mini-programs.
Wechat Account Ads
As you can see in the following picture, Wechat Account ads appear as a banner at the bottom of a WeChat article. These types of ads offer both CPC and CPM, pricing models. This type of WeChat ad is a lot more accessible to small and medium-sized companies and can offer a nice boost for a special event.
Wechat KOL & Micro Kols might be Key for small and medium companies
Partnering with KOLs is an efficient way to promote your brand/products and increase sales on WeChat. KOLs have the trust of local audiences and already have a large number of subscribers.
The cooperation model usually requires you to prepare or confirm the content with KOLs who then publish it on their Wechat official accounts to promote your brand. The KOLs can either compose an article mentioning your brand or simply put a banner connecting to your Wechat account.
Beyond WeChat Moment, Account, and KOL Ads, you can also use QR codes to advertise your Wechat account.
WeChat automatically creates a QR code for each official Wechat account and the app itself has a built-in QR code scanner. These codes can be published in all your marketing channels, e.g. on other social media, product packaging, brochures, shops.
With a simple scan, you can increase both sales and followers on your official Wechat account.
5-Wechat groups marketing is a must for your small or medium-sized company
WeChat groups are the fastest and easiest way to distribute content to WeChat users interested in your type of product or service. Then, if your brand is recommended by one of the users, people will have more faith in the brand and will arouse the interest of other users. Therefore, Wechat groups can reach a larger community and have better visibility.
Businesses should consider Wechat groups as a forum where to provide useful information and develop a relationship with their audience. Businesses should then post regularly at peak times.
You are a small/medium brand? GMA can help you to sell more on Wechat
Gentlemen Marketing Agency is a Digital Marketing Agency that is an expert in helping foreign companies to establish or strengthen their position in China.
Our services for Wechat include:
- Branding
WeChat is an incredible place for you to share interesting content about your brand and your products. You can share videos, audio, photos, and messages. We can help you to share the right content at the right time. Content is crucial.
- Visibility
our Agency specializes in the promotion of the Wechat Channel on Social media, forums, Wechat Groups, or among users. We also communicate among other Wechat Channels to help your Wechat posts to get exposure.
- E-commerce with Wechat Store
We can set up a WeChat Store and help you to promote your products among Chinese consumers on WeChat. Wechat will become a major e-Commerce platform in the future and already have developed Wechat payment.
- Loyalty
Wechat is the tool to make your customer loyal, by providing them useful information and helping them to meet others, consumers, with the same profiles.
- Customer service & Wechat CRM
We set up communication campaigns on Wechat: Advertising campaign on “moment” or on popular posts.
- Analysis
Every month we provide a report with an overview of the monthly campaign.