How to make a simple B2B marketing strategy for your company WeChat

WeChat is the most popular instant message app in China. Almost everyone in China uses it either in personal daily life or business. You almost can do everything inside WeChat.

For a B2B company, WeChat should be a channel for promoting their business and engaging with their clients or prospects. Before you promote your business using WeChat, you should have a WeChat marketing strategy as a roadmap.

Align with your business strategy

Your WeChat marketing strategy should be based on your business strategy or marketing strategy. Let’s say you have defined your unique value, positioning, target audience, or segment in your marketing strategy. You should develop your WeChat marketing strategy based on these. This will ensure that your WeChat marketing strategy and business strategy will be aligned.

Know your clients

The first step is to define your WeChat audience. It should be based on your defined target audience in your marketing strategy. The best way to do that is to talk with your current clients who fit your client profile. Below are some things you might want to ask:

  1. When do they read the articles on WeChat?
  2. What type of articles do they want to read from your company?
  3. What do they want to learn from your WeChat public account?
  4. What are the current challenges they have for their business?

Your goal

Never launch your marketing campaigns without defining your goals first. Ask yourself what results you want to achieve in your WeChat account. Generally speaking, there are 5 types of goals:

  1. Increase followers.
  2. Increase Page View.
  3. Educate and nurture your followers.
  4. Increase the conversion rate to sales leads.
  5. Drive traffic to your website.

Long game

The core of a WeChat Public account is the content. When it comes to content, you have to think a long game. It will take some time to see the results but the impact will last for a long time. There are three factors you should consider in your execution:

  1. Good content. Good content is the core of the WeChat account. In B2B WeChat marketing, people follow your account because you can provide good information they need for their business.
  2. Consistency. Your WeChat account should publish articles consistently. That is the way for your followers to keep coming back.
  3. Promotion. You should define how to promote your content and WeChat account in your strategy and make sure to spend at least 50% of your time on it.

Your content marketing strategy

Content is the core in a WeChat account. You should have a simple content marketing strategy. Again, the best way to define your content strategy is:

  1. Talk to your client.
  2. Track the results from your blog or previous WeChat articles.

You should define at least two things:

  1. The WeChat article topics
  2. Editorial calendar

You should keep tracking the analytics data after publishing and keep fine-tuning your topics.

How to promote your WeChat

There are two ways to promote your WeChat account.

Offline

  • Tradeshow. The tradeshow is still a critical role in B2B marketing. It is also the best offline channel to promote your WeChat account.
  • Print marketing. Put the WeChat information on your print marketing, like leaflets or biz cards. You will be surprised how many people follow you through them.

Online

  • Online campaign. You should have an online campaign to promote your WeChat account. There are a lot of tools in the WeChat campaign. The most important thing is what you can offer to motivate people to participate in your campaign. It should be something which can help them solve problems or improve their business, definitely not iPad or cash.
  • Website. Your website is also the channel which can drive the traffic to your WeChat public account. Always put your WeChat QR code on the header, footer, or sidebar on each webpage. The website visitors can easily notice your WeChat account info.
  • Lead magnet. You always need a lead magnet to motivate visitors to follow your WeChat account. Think about what valuable info you can provide. It can be cheatsheet, eBook, or whitepaper. You need to give visitors an excuse to convince themselves to follow your WeChat account.

Drive traffic

When you develop your marketing strategy, you need to think about if you need to drive your traffic from WeChat account to other websites or the other way around. It will affect how you set up your WeChat menu and how you promote your WeChat account.

What information they need from your WeChat public account

For b2b business, you always need to provide lots of info regarding your service or product. You always can set up a knowledge base center to help your WeChat followers. You can link the menu with another website. This way, you can provide valuable info to your followers and retain your followers.

Position your WeChat account as a client portal

Since WeChat is a mobile IM app in the core product, it is easy for people to use it every day. You can position your WeChat account as a client portal, meaning clients can find the information or where to go from WeChat account.

Structure your WeChat account

The structure of your WeChat account is very important. It should be customized according to your WeChat marketing strategy.

If you don’t want to direct your followers to other websites, you should think about how to provide value inside your WeChat account. On the other hand, if you want to direct your followers to another website, you should set up one of your menus to link with your website. Also, you should make sure your website is WeChat friendly.

Optimize your WeChat account

When you launch your WeChat public account, it is just the beginning. You also need to keep optimizing your WeChat account. There are two ways to optimize through qualitative and quantitative data:

  1. Get feedback from your followers. The best way to collect qualitative data is to talk to your followers. You will be surprised how much info you can get from talking to them.
  2. Track the results You get analytic data from WeChat backend or third-party analytics service. You can see what types of articles your followers like through click rate and share rate.

Convert your followers to sales leads

The goal of B2B digital marketing is to get sales leads. Through the right WeChat CRM, you can identify your followers as sales prospects. Once your WeChat account starts running, this should be your next step.

Conclusion

WeChat is the most popular mobile app among Chinese people. People use it every day in all kinds of situations. B2B companies should take advantage of WeChat in their marketing.

More importantly, don’t think of WeChat solely as a channel to publish information. Think about it as a client portal when you add value to your WeChat account. Once your followers see the value in your WeChat account, they stay with the account. This way you can nurture the relationship and convert your followers to sales leads.

 

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