WeChat Advertising Strategy For Business In 2019 Includes Many Exciting Features
WeChat Advertising has increased the ROI for 92% of luxury brands all over the world some of which include international brands like Givenchy, Montblanc, Pepsi, Dior etc. The Chinese social media platform has a history of resilience towards the entry of new advertisers, but it slowly opened up to foreign advertisers and has taken new routes ever since.
What Can We Expect From WeChat Advertising In 2019?
1. WeChat’s Time Capsule
WeChat announced their newest system upgrade after their last one in 2014. They introduced the “Time Capsule,” which is an equivalent to Instagram stories, one of the hottest marketing mediums in the western world. The feature just like Instagram stories, lets users post videos of up to 15-seconds to an individual users’ feed instead of WeChat moments, the app’s version of Facebook News feed. The video will automatically disappear 24 hours after its publication. After uploading either from existing newly recorded videos, users will be able to add descriptions, emojis, music, and locations. It will recommend background music based on the video content.
2. WeChat Marketing Automation
Brands can utilise this feature holistically to retain the existing ones and reach out to new followers. This is similar to email marketing automation in the west. Marketers have successfully utilised tools like the ‘Auto Reply’ & ‘Auto Message’ responses based on keywords where an advertiser can setup predefined auto-replies for various keywords the user messages your account with. Other features like Chat bots, Automatic tagging and grouping, tag and segment push message etc. are gaining momentum by the minute because of how convenient it gets to segregate the target audience
3. WeChat Mini Programs > WeChat Articles
While last year’s strategy was to create better and more engaging content for WeChat articles, this year, brands should leverage the new content formats that WeChat has to offer — An increasing number of frequent publishers on WeChat are turning to mini-programs to keep their readers engaged and to offer richer forms of content. Mini-programs are also a great vehicle for real-time engagement and events such as live streaming.
4. WeChat Brand Zone
During the rollout of version 6.6.1 last December, however, WeChat quietly launched a new feature named brand zone, which allows brands to display their official WeChat accounts, boutique stores, and other customized content to users who don’t subscribe to their content. Instead, users can search directly for the brands they want to visit. The new feature signals Tencent’s ambition to make WeChat an all-encompassing digital platform, connecting social media marketing, e-commerce and payments
5. Moments Ads
In point number 1. We mentioned that Time Capsule has replaced WeChat moments but didn’t mean Moments is completely out of the picture. WeChat moments ads are placed in-feed for users and involves a higher budget approach in terms of minimum ad spend but offers the highest exposure levels. As per our previous article, we mentioned how marketers can utilise this form of advertising to the fullest as the ads are available in video formats that are gaining more popularity as compared to the static display ads.
