App Marketing
After extensive research within the Chinese market it became clear that the best strategy is using an app to reach out to the targeted audience. Over the last decade marketing through mobile methods such as apps became increasingly popular as it made tools and data highly accessible, starting from publishing blogs up to tracking campaign’s outcomes. Also, apps gave marketers the ability to access data at their fingertips quickly and conveniently (Farooq, 2014).
According to (Jao, 2018) mobile Apps marketing is rapidly growing in China. The reason behind that is that there’s 731 million users online everyday within the country, and 97% use their mobile phones as their main platform. In addition, digital marketing on mobile apps grows by 25% every year.
The initiative is to use a messenger app because messaging apps gain more users than any other category even more than social network apps. The most used messaging apps are Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp, and WeChat in China, and they acquire over 3 billion active users a month (Singh, 2018).
WeChat Marketing
WeChat is the largest platform and it’s the most effective way to connect with customers, during 2017 the app had more than 900 million daily logged in users, with 3.5 million monthly active official accounts which are serving 800 million active account users (Li, 2017).
According to YeahMobi, a Chinese mobile marketing agency. WeChat is the most popular app in china and it’s the core of marketing strategy for businesses (Jao, 2018). Brands can use WeChat to get the attention and recognition of the user, and closer the relationship between the gap with the user (Hai-yan, Qi and Xuan, 2016).
Marketing on Wechat breaks the limit of distance and could interact with the public, and Marketers or individuals promote their product and ideas with information for users as a point-point marketing way. In addition, because the payment function is increasingly powerful, marketing on WeChat has greater space to develop (Hai-yan, Qi and Xuan, 2016)
The WeChat platform has evolved to allow businesses to achieve 4 main goals: communication, customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce and online-to-offline (O2O) commerce (Bonhomme, 2017).
Making the most of WeChat
Business should work on strengthening all online channels, including social media platforms, press releases and the official website. Brands can increase conversions by going beyond a simple quick response (QR) code on their website, and including a call to action with real added value. For example, invite users to follow the brand’s WeChat account to track their online purchases.
In order to make the most of WeChat brands need to identify who is the end customer and how to reward members with special offers. Once that has been done they need to know how to implement a targeted content strategy (Bonhomme, 2017).
Brands could effectively enhance customer experience on WeChat by following:
- Account Promotion to Get More Followers
When the account is registered, marketers should ensure that the account is easy to identify, easy to search and easy to spread. Marketers can also use other ways, such as Weibo, space, forums and other social media to promote, through word of mouth to get the attention of consumers.
- Valuable Content Orientation
Content marketing is not advertising, but a method that makes marketers could communicate with their consumers. Content marketing could use some social hot topics or the focus of public to be more attractive and target consumers value oriented to enhance customer stickiness.
- Strong Interaction Implementation
The interaction functions, such as topic planning, prize incentives, involving consumers into the content on WeChat, are very important for WeChat marketing to enhance the connection with consumers. Interactions should be consistent with the behaviour of the target customers. Brands can use voice, video and other content to encourage users to participate in the discussion or sharing and truly establish the closure relationship between them and the user.
Bonhomme (2017) highlights that brands should not blind pursuit of high numbers for big accounts and many followers, so-called ‘Zombie fans’ because users may doubt the quality of the content and even the account itself. For this reason, engagement rather than follower numbers is the important performance indicator on WeChat.
Measurement Framework
Apps are one of the most accurate and measurable channels within the market. It’s super data-driven. With ton of data such as user identifiers and different channels. Therefore, there should be a meaningful framework to measure it. A successful framework could be:
- Define goals and the type of conversation that the brand wants to have with customers.
- Measure uplift in KPI and CRM channels to understand how it contributes to the business.
- Measure engagement on social activities i.e. likes, retweets and shares.
Conclusion
The advantages of WeChat marketing has been noticed by more and more marketers. Both personal and corporate business hopes get more concerns or follows to get more relations with users with this new social media, WeChat. WeChat marketing provides a new way of thinking. As a new information platform, it has the advantage of user management and will be a useful tool to enhance the customer experiences with effective strategies.
References
Bonhomme, A. (2017). How to get the most from WeChat. Digital and Social Media Marketing, 5(2), pp.146-152(7).
Farooq, I. (2019). 15 of the Best Mobile Apps for Marketers | Smart Insights. [online] Smart Insights. Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/app-marketing/best-iphoneipad-apps-for-marketing/ [Accessed 26 Feb. 2019].
Hai-yan, Z., Qi, W. and Xuan, M. (2016). Research on WeChat marketing path of enhancing customer marketing experiences. Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC).
Jao, N. (2018). A peek into China’s fast-changing mobile marketing scene · TechNode. [online] TechNode. Available at: https://technode.com/2018/09/21/chinas-fast-changing-mobile-marketing-switch/ [Accessed 27 Feb. 2019].
Li, R. (2017). Four Digital Marketing Trends in China To Know for 2018 | KoMarketing. [online] KoMarketing: B2B Search, Social, & Content Marketing. Available at: https://komarketing.com/blog/four-china-digital-marketing-trend-2018/ [Accessed 31 Jan. 2019].
Singh, H. (2018). How to use Facebook Messenger as an advertising platform | Smart Insights. [online] Smart Insights. Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/use-facebook-messenger-advertising-platform/ [Accessed 27 Feb. 2019].
