How To Be Successful With WeChat B2B Marketing

Why WeChat B2B Marketing?

We have constantly been saying that WeChat is a great tool for marketing to consumers.  What about WeChat B2B marketing?

Many B2B companies have found success with Facebook Advertising and believing that WeChat is the Chinese Facebook, choose to start marketing on the platform. In reality, WeChat is so much more and is absolutely essential for B2B marketing in China. Many Chinese now no longer bring business cards with them to meetings, conferences, or networking events. They just simply scan each other’s WeChat QR codes.

Apparently, communications of B2B through WeChat is as important as B2C.

How to show your QR code on WeChat

Businesses can have a one-to-one direct conversation with their clients, or one-to-many messaging options within groups, multimedia communication and mobile data sharing, all of which make WeChat a convenient and effective communication tool for business.

WeChat also allows a huge amount of built-in functions, which enables stock ordering and management, quizzes, tutorials and so on.

Plus, WeChat app makes any work-related content becomes more engaging, interesting, and pleasant.

Therefore, every business should utilize WeChat B2B channels for your marketing strategies.

Which WeChat Account Is Right For B2B marketers?

First of all, you need a WeChat official account. A WeChat official account is a formal channel for businesses to interact with customers and raise brand awareness.

There are 3 types of WeChat official accounts: Subscription, Service, and Corporate.

To have a deeper understanding about these 3 accounts and how to set up your WeChat Official account, please visit here.

Subscription and Service accounts both fit B2B marketing.

Service account is better for service-oriented businesses and after-sales departments since it allows companies to maintain direct relationship with the clients. 

Features like CRM, custom menus, payment integration, and mini websites are only available to service accounts.

What Are The Features Of Your WeChat B2B Marketing Account?

1. Communication Tools

WeChat allows users to send official documents, contacts, excel sheets, videos and plans.

Businesses can quickly be in touch with each other through messages in the B2B segment.

2. WeChat Web Analytics for Business

WeChat web analytic allows businesses to see how users interact with their websites and collect feedback on their performance so as to improve their products or services.

3. WeChat Template Messages

Official accounts can use a template message to automatically send important service notifications to your clients, for instance, a message to notice that a purchase has been successfully completed.

4. WeChat Translation Tool

WeChat offers an in-app translation tool for iOS and Android users, which is good news for businesses.

When doing business in China, you need to go full native. Bad translation will bring back terrible marketing results and damage your brand image.

It also helps businesses have a better understanding about their target audience’s wants and needs.

5. Group Messages

You can send group messages to your target audience, based on gender and location.

This feature helps you reach the right target audience and avoid disturbing the other groups of audience that may not be interested.

6. Automatic Reply

Automatic reply should be employed when the customers first follow your official account, when they send you a message, or when they send certain keywords.

The welcome message usually introduces the account, indicates the keywords, or even promotes your recent campaigns.

It is the first impression your customers have about your WeChat account, so you don’t want to mess it up.

7. Customized Menu

WeChat allows users to add up to 3 menu categories. Under each of the category, you can have up to 5 sub-menus.

The menu can lead to a message, a website or an app page.

Normally, content-oriented WeChat official account will have at least one menu button leading to their previous articles.

Read 5 New WeChat Features That Will Surprise You in 2017

Challenges of B2B WeChat Marketing

Though there are a lot of opportunities when marketing on WeChat, the challenges are significant. We will discuss them below.

1. Huge Market With Many Competitors

There are 10 millions WeChat official accounts, according to chinachannel.co.

Imagining all these 10 millions accounts leverage promotion on WeChat, it is a bloody competition.

2. Lack of Users’ Attention

In fact, users mostly ignore the content posted on WeChat. The reasons are that they are not interested at all or the content is not engaging and the quality is poor.

Another reason your content may not be catchy to the users is that there are already tons amount of content on WeChat. The users just don’t even bother to pay attention if your content does not stand out.

A Guide to WeChat B2B Marketing

Your Official Account Name Matters

The official account name should represent your business. For that reason, you want to be very careful when choosing your account name.

Because the users will put the keywords in the search box, you also want to make sure that your account name is not too broad or too specific for them to be able to search for your official account.

Furthermore, putting the importance of SEO in mind when naming your official account.

In addition, your official profile is also the face of your business. You want to make it professional with updated description. It is as important as the official account name.

Don’t Forget Your QR codes

QR codes are indispensable in China. Businesses should include QR codes in everything you do, especially in promotional materials such as catalogs, websites, business cards, etc. That way, you can have more connection with your Chinese customers.

Creating a Comprehensive Content

Content marketing is very important to social media marketing. For that reason, before launching your official account on WeChat, you have to do thorough research on your target audiences and come up with a valuable content strategy.

A comprehensive content should be relevant to your audience’s interests.

It also has to be appealing, entertaining, and interactive enough for the audience to spend time on it. Nobody wants to stay on a boring content.

Moreover, WeChat supports original content from official account. Content that is copied from others will have less exposure. So, you want to make your content original.

Other than that, your content needs to be shareable. Practically, social media users are more approachable to content that is shared by the people on their friend list. Not a lot of users read the content directly through your official account.

Again, that proves how important it is to create an attractive content so that it will go viral on social media in order to be exposed and gain more followers.

One more thing, you should keep your content updated to the trending topics like hot news or holidays that is relevant to your audiences.

A WeChat Mini Site Is The Plus

A WeChat mini site is used to create interactions with customers, engage them in activities, and generate your promotional campaigns, product voucher, etc.

You can also have a live chat function for your customer service purposes within your WeChat mini sites.

All of them help deliver a smoother customer experience.

Being Active On WeChat

Users will unsubscribe your account if it is not frequently updated, so making sure you have your account consistently posted.

It is also essential to know when to publish your posts. The peak time for reading on WeChat should be right before and after work around 6 to 7 a.m. and 6 to 7 p.m.

However, you should experience some time slots to see which one works for your marketing strategy.

You may also want to avoid those peak time due to high competition. Evening time after 7 p.m. may work as well.

General Recommendations

Businesses have to invest more time and effort in WeChat B2B marketing strategies to create quality content to stand out from the crowd.

Also, doing market research is a need to understand the audience and target the right potential customers.

Honestly, finding and nurturing the right customers takes a lot of time, effort, and a good content marketing.

Related article 13 Most Effective WeChat Promotion Strategies

Conclusion

To sum up, WeChat B2B marketing is a great tool for businesses to leverage your products or services to Chinese clients. Not only do you have to utilize all the features of WeChat B2B, but you also have to understand your opportunities and challenges to generate the best marketing strategy.

Related article 5 Big Mistakes Foreigners Make when Marketing to Chinese Consumers