With a staggering 1.3 billion users, WeChat stands tall as China’s go-to app for messaging, socializing, payments, and beyond. From dawn till dusk, it intertwines with the daily lives of countless Chinese citizens. No wonder brands are drawn to it as a key channel to connect with potential and devoted customers.
In this post, we’ll cover some of the most important things brands and agencies need to know about opening a WeChat Official Account (OA) and getting it verified:
Double 11 (aka Single’s Day) is no longer dominated by Alibaba — instead, the world’s largest online shopping festival is now an intrinsic part of the entire China digital ecosystem. It’s a period many brands look to each year to win big. But competition is fierce! The actual task of driving traffic to your platform during major sales events like Double 11 requires a strategic and multi-faceted approach.
Different platforms play unique roles in contributing to the frenzy, leveraging their strengths to attract users and boost sales. Understanding which platforms will be best for your brand and industry is crucial to success.
In this post we’ll break down how different platforms drive traffic and give you a set of guidelines for crafting an effective Double 11 strategy as well as highlight some specific examples of brands who did Double 11 right in the past few years. Buckle up! It’s a long post, but you’ll want to save this one 👇🏼
Top-of-funnel performance is usually hard to track and measure. That’s why we need to take advantage of unique QR codes to better categorize sources where followers come from to find the most loyal audience.
A QR code is essentially a unique URL link stored in a graphic, which can be scanned and read by smartphones. It’s a convenient and secure way to access information and services online, often used in payment, account following, targeted communications, etc.
*Most QR code actions happen in WeChat. Therefore we use WeChat as an example.
How to Find and Measure the Right Source？
Let’s say a beauty brand kicked off two campaigns: One is about free giveaways of sample products, and the other one is about a partnership with a KOL sharing beauty tips. After respective audiences scan the unique QR code of each campaign to gain access to the giveaway, marketers can monitor their unfollowing decisions: Do they just accept the value and leave or do they stay, and for how long? When the account pushes new content, are they still willing to be there and listen? It’ll help you gain insights into your followers’ behaviors.
With the once tightly-closed China social ecosystem continuing to open, it’s possible to direct traffic between different social channels. However, PIPL is strict and the stakes for violating personal information are high. In addition to social channels’ universal mentality of keeping traffic within the platform’s own territory, tracking and measuring are not easy, but not impossible. Generally, you have two weapons at your disposal: Link shorteners and link tagging.
URL links can be long and complex. Link shorteners can help create a unique and shorter link that redirects to the original link. It’s more presentable and easier to share.
During an online campaign, you could have 5 different social networks directing traffic to your website, or one of your social networks is receiving traffic from other networks and websites. In the most complicated scenario, traffic even comes from multiple places in one social channel …
Each traffic channel has its unique URL. Link Tagging can help differentiate them by adding tracking parameters to each link, which can be set manually by your team. You can gain insights into traffic and conversion and understand user behavior on each channel better.
It’s important to prioritize. Setting and tracking too many KPIs will overwhelm you with data and cause confusion.
It’s difficult to set an fixed number of how many KPIs a business, a team or one employee should have in any given industry. Company structure is unique, but according to general practice and professional advice, having between two to four KPIs per goal is recommended [S] .
How to Set up Your Social Media KPIs Correctly?
1. Make sure KPIs are connected to your goals
A sports brand that entered China three years ago wished to improve brand awareness, and it set “reads” on social as its core KPI at first.
“The potential problem is that we were trying to find local fans for our brand, not just reads per content. It’d be easy to hit the KPI, had we just chosen all topics to be what audiences are interested in but not tightly connected to our brand, while the latter is an equally important metric. As we were trying to find a balance, the KPI at the time lost its purpose.” —— manager of the brand’s social media team
