Cutting through the jungle of B2B marketing on WeChat

Marketing with WeChat is a lot like making a trek through the jungle, as I’ve found several times over in my experience. It’s really packed, there’s a lot of noise, you can’t really see where you’re going, and you’d better know what you’re doing if you want survive..

Before joining Wiredcraft, I operated a few official WeChat accounts for different B2C companies in design, IT, events, and food and beverage. After taking charge of Wiredcraft’s WeChat account (our ID is wiredcraft, btw!), I started to explore a more customized WeChat strategy for a particular user, the B2B company.

Hack through the dense foliage of B2B WeChat marketing

Some people believe that WeChat doesn’t work for B2B marketing or that a B2B account has to be boring. Well, I hate to debunk such a popular myth, but this one has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. WeChat can be the cornerstone of branding activities and be quite potent for lead generation.

Let’s explore this new train of thought. B2B users have a more targeted customer base, a higher average price point, and - most crucially - a customer decision funnel that is heavily influenced by reputation. With a good level of influence and engaged customers, social media tools like WeChat can be more transformative for a B2B company than a B2C company.

“Turning your customers into advocates and marketers on behalf of your brand pays off a lot more when you’re selling $10,000 pieces of manufacturing equipment, than it does when you’re selling $3 cans of Pringles.” -Jay Baer, Presid Convince & Convert

How to build an awe-inspiring WeChat account

I believe the differences between B2B and B2C social media campaigns are more tactical, than strategic. If you look into it, B2B customers have the exact same appetite for useful, entertaining and credible marketing as B2C customers.; radically, both kinds of businesses are really H2H (Human-to-Human). In other words, your company WeChat must try to behave like a human, preferably a really cool one. And the key traits of an effective WeChat account are just the same as those of a charismatic person representing a company: interactive, knowledgeable, helpful, humorous, the list goes on. Wouldn’t you rather interact with somebody like that than with someone who’s a tremendous bore?

Have a gander at Wiredcraft’s WeChat

In order to maintain a consistent image on all social media, the Wiredcraft team aims to be geeky, productive, and helpful with a somewhat whimsical sense of humor on WeChat. A solid welcome post is a great place to start:

A simple and functional layout

• A WeChat calendar As a service account, we fortunately won’t be folded into the subscription channel and get swallowed up with everybody else down there. However, we can only post 4 times a month, which means a well-organized and prioritized WeChat calendar is absolutely necessary.

This is a hypothetical WeChat post agenda for next month. Since we have four regular meetups each month (Hacker News, Javascript, UI/UX Design and DevOps), and they take place in different weeks, I normally schedule a WeChat post the day after each event. Even if you have a subscription account with unlimited posts, it doesn’t hurt to have a WeChat calendar so you can systematically track your content.

• Be helpful, be useful

This is a typical post on the Wiredcraft WeChat. In essence, content is supposed to provide value to the reader – DO NOT talk too much about your company (unless you offer discounts like Uber); nobody wants to read your company brochure on WeChat. They want to know what’s in it for them. After providing value, potential customers will see you more as a thought leader than just another company and will more likely put you at the top of their list when they make a purchasing decision.

On the other side, a timely event recap increases the possibility of reposting, people like to see their faces on the media and want their friends to see them as well (so choose the photos carefully). By the way, don’t forget to share the post to the related WeChat groups.

Lower the barriers to entry as much as possible

Most people prefer pressing a QR code over clicking a hyperlink (most of them aren’t clickable), so I always use a QR code formation tool (e.g. 草料) to make it easier to subscribe. Instead of expecting the audience to check out our past articles, I’d rather sum up some useful keyword entries like “event,” “news,” or ‘job’ and set up automatic replies. I also opened the comment section, so people can give their feedback immediately and directly below the article, which increases customer interaction.

How to measure your success

So after all of these, how do you measure the effectiveness of all your WeChat activities? At Wiredcraft, we measure the effectiveness of our WeChat marketing by the following indexes:

• frequency of interaction
• popularity of functions
• number of followers
• an evaluation of followers
• conversion rate of business.

In general, a B2B WeChat account don’t gain as many followers as a B2C one, even if they’ve already done an awesome job on content, because most of their followers are not their final buyers. Ergo, we should also evaluate the offline activity and customer lifetime value.

On those occasions, for those B2B companies, WeChat can be seen as a networking platform for online communities. It helps you to gather the popularity and resources in a fast, convenient and low-cost way. It’s a reflection of the “crowdsourcing” concept, in its traditional pre-internet sense.

Good luck with your WeChat jungle safari. It’s very hard to master, much less get right, but having this tool in your pocket can be a big boon for your B2B company’s marketing.

If you don’t want to be on the waitlist for our coming events, follow us on WeChat (ID: wiredcraft) We’re not pushy, we don’t spam, and we only post once a week anyway. ;) If you have any feedback on this article, hit me up on WeChat (ID: ssuperqing). As always, feel free to tweet us with your thoughts or funny cat pictures!