WeChat Advertising 101: All You Need To Know
In this day and age, WeChat has become an app that is too powerful to live without for anyone in China. With Tencent gradually opening up the platform to advertisers WeChat advertising is becoming a powerful tool for businesses hoping to grow their digital presence in China.
This makes WeChat the most effective and influential Chinese social media for businesses to advertise on. Over 20 million wechat advertising official accounts (a must-have credential for any businesses to place advertisements on WeChat) are registered on WeChat already. If you don’t want your business to fall behind the trend, continue to read this article to find out how to maximize your business’s impact by advertising on WeChat!
4 Reasons Why WeChat Is So Special for Marketers
Launched in 2011 by Tencent, WeChat started off as a basic messaging app. Until now, The app has already amassed over 1 billion MAU and over 45 billion messages are sent through the platform every day. As of the latest report in Q2 2019, WeChat had 1.132 billion monthly active users!
Though it originally started as just a messaging app, the success of WeChat stems from its continuous evolution into what many now call a “Super-App”. As the all-in-one platform that it is right now, the variety of WeChat’s functions branch out to every aspect of a user’s daily life.
Imagine getting all these things done with just a single app: making payments to businesses from street vendors to international luxury brands, settling your credit card bills and utility charges, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, calling a cab… The list goes on.
WeChat even enables its users to access functions from other apps so you can do nearly anything without leaving the app with the addition of WeChat Mini-Programs. And with that, WeChat successfully yields an incredible user stickiness, with each WeChat user on average spending 85.8 minutes and 34% of their mobile data on the app per day.
Each WeChat user browses their WeChat Moments 10 times a day on average and the articles they read each month from WeChat official accounts add up to the length of a full book. All this makes WeChat marketing an incredibly powerful tool for businesses in China. Let’s check out 4 of the main reasons why WeChat is so special below.
#1: The Mind-blowing Purchasing Power of WeChat Users
Apart from the fact that WeChat has a gigantic user base, one will be astonished by the purchasing power all these users carry.
WeChat has achieved a 93% user penetration rate in first tier cities in China. This figure could be very powerful as the majority of WeChat users are between 15 to 40 years old, the group most well-known for having the strongest purchasing power in the country.
But even with the richest population and biggest spenders all captured at the same time, how many of them are actually spending money through the app? In fact, 300 million users have bound their credit/bank cards to WeChat pay and 500 million transactions occur daily on the platform.
So how much is that translated into dollar terms? WeChat alone has driven a total amount of 209.7 billion RMB of information consumption, which accounts for 4.7% of China’s total information consumption. Meanwhile, it also stimulated traditional consumption by 333.9 billion RMB– Just imagine how much your business will miss out on without utilizing the power of this platform!
Key Figures showing the purchasing power behind WeChat
#2: The Capacity to Engage the Right People
Making sure that advertisements posted on social media reach exactly who you want to target are surely among a marketers’ top concerns. That is one of the major advantages you can get from advertising on WeChat.
With the massive amount of data captured and stored by Tencent, WeChat divides its users into granular categories not just by demographic information but by interests and behaviors as well. This enables businesses to filter out the most valuable individuals they want to reach from the over 1 billion users and create WeChat advertisements specifically targeted to this unique group.
Let’s start from one of its most powerful pieces of data, geographic information.
Utilizing LBS technology, Tencent records users’ usual places of residence and current locations precisely to a specific commercial area. Currently, the platform has identified over 4400 commercial areas and over 58 million POI(Points of Interest) in their system for marketers to target. Equipped with this capacity, businesses can target users based on the shopping mall they frequently visited in the last month, or even find out those who are now physically near their store (area with 500 to 5000-meter radius) in order to push advertisements or store coupons just to them.
Store owners can send marketing messages only to those physically near them with WeChat
Recently, WeChat also has started to identify users traveling overseas based on their login location, allowing businesses to target that specific group through advertising. Given how accurate this information is LBS based WeChat advertisements have become some of the most popular forms of advertising on the platform.
