How to market on WeChat? You probably know what I will suggest after reading WeChat Marketing, the Key to Digital Marketing in China. Of course, my thumb suggestion is to treat the official account as your own website where the customers can interact with your company or products. Considering the user base and the functionalities of WeChat, it is worth dedicating more time and resources here.

1. The Overall Strategy

I won’t go into detail about operation techniques. After all, this article is more about a generic scope of WeChat marketing and also, Tencent changes WeChat policies sometimes. There will be another blog to offer specific tips for digital marketing operations on WeChat.

So back to the strategy. For building a WeChat official account that is another web portal of the company, like a website, you can use all your current digital marketing frameworks to design the structure of this account. Just apply the principles from the basic user flow analysis to dedicated UX design.

Below is a simple example of an E-commerce platform’s WeChat official account. You can see there is a profile page for the generic audience whoever find this account. If a user follows it and clicks the “Enter Offical Account” button, he/she will enter a messaging interface where the marketing materials will be posted. At the bottom of the interface is the menu that provides functionalities of this account. And you can customize the menu based on the company’s needs. For example, in this E-commerce account, customers can buy the products here or download the company’s app.

Pay attention to the keyboard button at the left corner of the menu. By clicking this button, the customer will have an input keyboard for a deeper interaction with the account. The official account can reply default messages or customized responses to specific keywords like a Chabot, and it becomes a powerful tool for CRM. This is how digital marketing can be done, in a WeChat style.

Picture 1 – The Preview of An E-commerce Platform’s WeChat Official Account

2. Account Type and the Marketing Direction

The account type is vital, for it determines your marketing activity directions. When you register the official account for a company, there are 3 options, and 2 of them are for marketing: subscription account and service account. The third one, enterprise account is for the company’s internal use, and it won’t be covered here.

Picture 2 – The Subscription Accounts on WeChat

The subscription account allows companies to post materials on a daily basis, which is a great fit for content providers like news media. However, for a better user-experience, WeChat folds all the subscription accounts a user follows into one thread in the user’s “Chat” section. As shown in Picture 2, the user needs to click into this thread to navigate to a specific account’s content. In addition, this type of account doesn’t support external links (e.g. links to your own website) in the articles.

Picture 3 – Different Account Types on WeChat

The service account enjoys a better position in the app’s interface. As you can see in Picture 3, it has a single thread on the follower’s “Chat” section like any other his/her friends’ chatting threads. Consequently, the user will notice a post immediately upon opening the app. The service account allows external links, and more importantly, WeChat Pay, the inevitable part to directly close a deal with customers. Nonetheless, companies using this type of account can only post 4 times a month (roughly once a week). For that reason, the marketing materials should focus on major product updates/notices or less urgent contents.

If your company operates on a considerable scale and would like to directly sell products on WeChat, I suggest you register a subscription account and a service account respectively. The former is for posting the regular company and product news or sharing the industry insights, while the latter is used to serve customers and to generate profits.

PS: Apparently, the service account seems more serious. Accordingly, running such an account requires the company to have a China-registered entity. If your company doesn’t have a Chinese branch, just go for an agency. They will charge you a reasonable service fee for registering the account and operating it if you require.

3. WeChat Ads

Same as other social media platforms, WeChat runs ads. The company can post ads in places like the bottom of an article or users’ “Moment” news feed, based on targeting methods of demographics, locations, and interests, etc.

What is special about WeChat Ads is that you have to run them via one of the appointed agencies by Tencent. Self-service advertising like Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Ads does not work here. This is majorly for an easier regulation (or “censorship” if you prefer) of the ad content. The fact is, China basically doesn’t allow any kinds of online self-service advertising on any platforms, period. For example, Baidu doesn’t allow the self-service search-ads which Google does either. Therefore, as a digital marketer, you need to outsource the paid campaigns to an agency anyway.

The pro is the small likelihood for capital-controlled “fake news” to disorient users’ opinion (think about Facebook’s scandal in March 2018). The con is, from a commercial perspective, the agency problem. Because these errand boys won’t stand on behalf of you 100%. In other words, their ultimate goal is to let you increase the ad-budget, instead of to bring revenue for you through good ads. This is a regular problem in outsourced marketing campaigns anywhere, so just be vigilant when dealing with agencies.

Picture 4 – A WeChat Ad at the Bottom of An Article

Another type of ad is initiated by some celebrated official accounts. There are many communities on WeChat. Some accounts scream authorities in certain communities, and their articles usually have extremely high impressions and response rate in a specific audience segment. Some of them provide advertising service by introducing products in a post and charge a fee. For instance, Mimeng is a well-known official account of romantic relationships, and a partner with many companies whose targeting customers are young couples. Technically, this is a campaign where you cooperate with another party instead of with Tencent WeChat. Therefore, the conditions and prices may vary a lot. Just be clear about which account you would like to cooperate with and talk to them as a real business deal.

4. Conclusion

WeChat is indeed a powerful and inevitable marketing tool in China. We, as a SaaS company, have generated more than half of our digital leads from our WeChat official account. So, I know this is the way to go, and I have shared my thoughts on it here. If you have any ideas or queries about digital marketing on WeChat or in China, you are welcome to leave a comment. Thanks for reading!