WeChat for consumer and brand marketing is not new, but now increasingly B2B companies are contacting us to find out how to use make WeChat work for them. The consumerization of B2B marketing and communications is happening everywhere, but pace is faster in China because of the huge scale of the numbers. Even the most obscure product or service can have 10’s or even 100’s of thousands of potential customers on WeChat. Finding them is the opportunity.
Here’s Current Asia’s quick guide to WeChat B2B marketing and tips for success.
WeChat gives you loads of data!
WeChat is a great enabler for offline activities such as product launches, trade shows and seminars. Offline is still important in the B2B customer journey – even with all the tech and analytics, a sale usually comes down to people in a room. QR codes have pretty much completely replaced business cards in China. A well thought through strategy that allows users to scan QR codes on and offline helps segment your users and allow future targeting.
Consumer content can go viral; sharing is less common in B2B for Moments. As a result, advertising is important for lead generation, and of course WeChat’s owner Tencent offers many data-driven ad formats. Content that is precisely targeted to your customers raises that value of the money you spend to promote posts.
WeChat has great look-alike advertising features to help you get your content in front of very specific profiles of users. Some WeChat advertising opportunities include Moments Advertising (the equivalent of Facebook ads appearing on the timeline), banner ads displayed at the bottom of a message, and paying popular WeChat bloggers in exchange for promotional posts on their WeChat account.
For all its potential, marketers need to consider from the user’s perspective how crowded WeChat is with brand messages, and how challenging it can be to get a B2B company to stand out. Also, WeChat owner Tencent is serious about protecting user privacy and the quality of the user experience, so marketers need to understand the rationale behind current policies, and be alert to the possibility of further limitations.
The day is still far away when people will click to buy 200k tons of chemicals or complete other large scale B2B purchases via WeChat. But the B2B customer journey is increasingly consumer-ized, digitalized and personalized, and WeChat can help with all of these things!