Chinese Digital Marketing

Cebu Pacific Has Risen To The First Position On The WeChat Table

Cebu Pacific Is The Number One Brand On The WeChat Ranking Table

Cebu Pacific rose from the 3rd position to the 1st position on the WeChat ranking table, thanks to collaborative efforts from Digital Crew. This is the success story of Cebu Pacific – Philippines’ budget-friendly airlines and its journey towards engaging 2,40,656 WeChat followers and sustaining a foothold over their Chinese travellers. Breaking through WeChat amidst 1 billion monthly active users is quite a challenging task and the burgeoning official accounts make it more difficult for brands to be heard.

If you’re an airline brand, it doesn’t get any easier to crack through the digital landscape in China, because the Chinese travel overseas in droves and airline brands on WeChat make sure they have a decent grip over their audience. Despite the shortcomings, Cebu Pacific made waves on WeChat with their campaign moves and stood out with their content on the platform.

What Was The Challenge?

Cebu Pacific had to increase its brand awareness in mainland China because the majority of its travellers are Chinese. The travellers complained about the slow website that obstructed quick bookings and that there was clearly a huge communication gap between the brand and its audience. Chinese digital marketing channels like WeChat, Weibo, Baidu, Toutiao, Youku and Mafengwo had to bridge this communication gap and connect with their target audience.

The Target Audience

Chinese travellers between 20 – 40 years of age were identified for WeChat and Weibo. The agency captured the attention of these millennials with familiar storytelling, knowledgeable blog articles, videos and of course exciting campaign giveaways (Free air tickets) on WeChat and Weibo.

The first part of the campaign entailed rebranding in terms of brand communication. The agency noticed familiar icons, colours that served as subliminal messaging and the tone of the brand that was repackaged to connect and strike a chord with the audience.

The Campaign

cebu pacific number one wechat brand

 

The campaign stressed on the tagline ‘Fly To More Fun’ with a localised poem engagement activity where the audience used the word fei (the Chinese pronunciation for the first word of Philippines) to create their poems as well as posters with the original Philippines photograph and stood a chance to win free air tickets!

Popular travel KOLs were roped into the campaign and drive their followers to participate in Cebu’s activities resulting in 266,085 PVs (Post Views) on the account.

Some Excellent Poems From Cebu Followers:

cebu pacific number one wechat brand

cebu pacific number one wechat brand

Creative Service

cebu pacific number one wechat brand

The airline company enabled WeChat mini program booking because of the low website speed, as a flight booking alternative and this tripled the speed of bookings for Cebu. Chinese consumers preferred the use of mobile phones to perform almost all their tasks right from messaging to shopping.

The Results

The multi-channel solutions for these campaigns generated 15.47% more new users between August to November 2018 in comparison to the same period in 2017.

The total PVs of WeChat articles – 33,452

Total PVs of Weibo posts – 5.4m

Total KOL WeChat article PVs – 214,565+

Total KOL Weibo PVs – 7.462m

Commendable Comments

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Conclusion

It is imperative that you understand your target audience, their consumption habits, the medium of communication and other relevant demographic information that compliments your campaign on platforms like WeChat and Weibo. The Chinese love creativity and great storytelling. If your campaign resonates with a fond memory, humour or strong emotion, you will have captured 80% of your audience already.

Digital Crew dedicates its resources towards thorough research with its team of multilingual speakers that rope in collaborative efforts to deliver cross-cultural campaigns. The global agency with offices in Australia, China, New York, Japan and Mumbai has upscaled the ROI for 100 brands and helped them grow their market in China.

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