My three previous posts have explored some of the more obvious reasons that WeChat is important for B2B companies who want to penetrate China’s markets and grow their China customer base. These reasons include WeChat’s wide array of impressive commercial and communications functions, as well as the fact that many major Western social media platforms–such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram–are blocked by China’s Great Firewall, making them available in the country only via VPNs, and, frankly, often not even then.
However, there are subtler but equally compelling cultural factors that contribute to making WeChat a crucial piece of the China marketing mix. Not the least of these is that China, like most Asian countries, has a collectivist culture rather than an individualistic one like many Western countries. As a result, the impact of social networks, whether traditional (e.g., guanxi) or virtual (e.g. WeChat), can be far more significant in Asia than in the Americas or in Europe, since the weight of peer associations and recommendations is typically greater in Asia than elsewhere.
This group-focus increases the importance of referral marketing and has significant implications for content marketing as well, since, on WeChat, as on most social media, the two work hand-in-hand. This is because the more engaging high-quality content your company posts, the more followers it will attract, the more your marketing messages will appear on their pages or be shared by them, and, by virtue of association, the more credible your messages will seem to members of their networks.
As touched upon above, a significant advantage of WeChat is its breadth of functionality, which ranges from instant messaging, video chat, custom QR codes and virtual business cards through e-commerce, micro-site, and “app-within an app” development capability all within a single environment. This enables companies to develop and deploy many-faceted multi-channel marketing initiatives that nonetheless provide a seamless user experience–in marked contrast to the disjointed user experience that can result from patched-together campaigns that must be run across platforms as disparate as LinkedIn, What’s App, and Amazon Business.
Please look for my next post, in which I’ll describe how WeChat has moved beyond online marketing and e-commerce to become an increasingly cogent element in other commercial settings such as business meeting, technical conferences, trade fairs, and industry exhibitions.
Shirley Zhang, Social Media and Asia-Pacific Marketing Practice Director — Gilbért, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide, Shanghai
Contact GF&Z at solutions@globalmarcomm.com