WeChat Marketing: How To Market on WeChat as a Foreign Company

In today’s digital landscape, reaching Chinese consumers is inseparable from WeChat marketing. As China’s most widely used platform with over 1.3 billion active users, WeChat presents opportunities for businesses seeking to establish their presence in the Chinese market. AppInChina’s comprehensive WeChat promotion service empowers international brands to navigate this complex ecosystem successfully. This article will explain all aspects of WeChat promotion, including best practice, research tools, content formats and what first steps your business can take to succeed in China with WeChat marketing. 

Why Should You Promote Through WeChat?

WeChat promotion service encompasses a full spectrum of marketing activities designed to increase brand visibility, engagement, and conversions within the WeChat ecosystem. Unlike traditional social media platforms, WeChat functions as an all-in-one super app that integrates messaging, payments, e-commerce, and business services into a single platform.

As a result, this integrate ecosystem allows for a range of promotional servies. WeChat promotion services often include account setup and optimization, content creation and management, advertising campaigns, KOL collaborations, and mini-program development. 

How Does WeChat Marketing Promotion Work?

WeChat Official Account Management

The foundation of any successful WeChat promotion strategy begins with establishing and optimizing your WeChat Official Account. These accounts serve as your brand’s hub within the WeChat ecosystem, similar to Facebook Pages but with significantly more functionality and integration capabilities.

Your business will need to  choose between Subscription Accounts (订阅号) and Service Accounts (服务号) based on your objectives. In short, Subscription Accounts are ideal for content-focused brands and KOLs who prioritize regular communication with followers. Service Accounts offer advanced features including custom menus, payment integration, and API access for businesses requiring more sophisticated functionality. For more detail regarding the difference between a WeChat Subscription Account and a WeChat Service Account, refer to our complete guide

Content Strategy and Creative Development

Successful WeChat promotion requires culturally relevant content that resonates with Chinese audiences. This will mean that the majority of the content you have already produced will need to be localised and adapted for a Chinese audience. Promotion service providers will often create content plans and provide in-house localisation services. 

How Can I Drive Engagement With My WeChat Account Content?

Professional articles addressing user pain points, interactive polls and quizzes, trending topic discussions, visual content including infographics and videos, and location-based service information. Content must be updated regularly and tailored to different user segments.

What are Some Optimisation Techniques for My WeChat Account Content?

WeChat Account content is really the same as other content, the same rules apply. Firstly, you want to make sure that the content is of high-quality. If it is an article that is answering a question, for example, it should answer that question in the most effective way possible. Ideally within the first few lines of the page too. Use compelling headlines with question formats, implement strategic keyword placement, create visually appealing layouts with proper formatting, include related article links to increase session duration, and develop themed content series to build anticipation.

WeChat Advertising Solutions

WeChat’s advertising platform offers multiple touchpoints for reaching target audiences, including Moments (朋友圈) and WeChat Channel (视频号) advertisements, Official Account promotions, and Mini Program advertising. Most WeChat promotion services will include comprehensive advertising management across all available formats.

Moments advertising allows brands to appear directly in users’ social feeds, creating native advertising experiences that feel organic and engaging. Official Account ads promote subscription growth and content engagement, while Mini Program ads drive specific actions like app downloads or e-commerce purchases.

What is Best Practice for WeChat Marketing?

WeChat Index 

Any successful marketing campaign (be it WeChat or not) starts with a sufficient amount of research to provide the campaign with direction, keywords, and some form of strategy. Luckily, as the WeChat ecosystem has grown over the past decade, so have the research tools. The most widely used tool to research keywords and queries in WeChat is the WeChat Index (微信指数). The WeChat Index is a keyword and query tool that tracks search volume over a certain time period.

How Do I Use WeChat Index?

Let’s take Nike and do some market research about them through WeChat Index. This will inform us of how people are discovering and interacting with large clothing/shoe brands in China through WeChat. Firstly, you need to navigate to WeChat’s integrated search bar. Once you have typed in whatever keyword or phrase you would like to research, you scroll through the menu bar just below the search bar and you will find an option: “WeChat Index”. 

Once you enter WeChat Index, you will see search volume for the keyword you have searched. In this case, the results for Nike will show. 

This shows that in the past 30 days, Nike has been searched for over 17,000,000 times through WeChat. In the menu, you can also toggle the period of time that you would like to see results for. 

Taking it one step further, if you scroll down, you will be able to see the source of all the above traffic. This data will be the most valuable when it comes to market research. This will directly indicate what content is doing well for the searched keyword. In this case, 83.26% of Nike’s traffic over the past 30 days has come from WeChat Channels (微信视频号). From this we can calculate that over 14,000,000 of the 17,000,000 traffic that Nike has gained in the past 30 days has come from WeChat Channels. In this case, if your business was also involved in clothing or shoes, short-form videos that are localised for WeChat Channels would be your first target in terms of content creation. 

Finally, once you have confirmed what type of content will best suite your business, you can then research how your competitors are doing. In this case, Nike’s traditional competitor is Adidas. Through the WeChat Index, you have the option to add more keywords. Here we see that Adidas is lacking in search traffic in WeChat. This may be something that an Adidas marketing employee will look to prioritise in their next campaign. 

When it comes to WeChat content as a whole, Nike is a good example of how short-video content posted through the WeChat Channel has become the new standard of marketing and advertising. Successful WeChat marketing campaigns will not only focus on written articles, but they will also prioritise video content. 

KOL and Influencer Partnerships

Key Opinion Leader (KOL) collaborations represent a crucial component of effective WeChat promotion. Chinese consumers heavily rely on trusted influencers for product recommendations and brand discovery. Our service includes identifying, vetting, and managing relationships with relevant KOLs across various industries and audience segments.

We facilitate partnerships with micro-influencers, macro-influencers, and celebrity endorsers based on campaign objectives and budget considerations. Our KOL network spans lifestyle, technology, fashion, beauty, travel, and business categories, ensuring relevant audience alignment for every client.

Mini Program Development and Promotion

WeChat Mini Programs offer app-like functionality without requiring separate downloads, making them ideal for e-commerce, service delivery, and user engagement. WeChat Mini Programs are also easy to share. They can be shared through QR codes, social sharing, advertising, and cross-platform integration.

We have created custom Mini Programs that integrate seamlessly with existing business systems while providing intuitive user experiences optimized for mobile engagement. 

WeChat Pay Integration

Payment functionality represents a critical success factor for WeChat marketing campaigns. WeChat Pay integration enables instant purchases, reducing friction in the customer journey and maximizing conversion rates. 

Why Choose Professional WeChat Marketing Services?

Deep Market Knowledge

Professional WeChat promotion services bring essential experience in Chinese digital marketing and cultural understanding. Leading agencies, such as AppInChina, combine international perspective with local expertise, ensuring campaigns resonate with Chinese audiences while meeting global standards.

Top providers stay current with WeChat’s evolving features, algorithm changes, and best practices to maintain competitive advantage. They will also provide you with full transparency regarding your search volume and success on the platform. 

Comprehensive Service Portfolio

Quality WeChat promotion services provide end-to-end solutions from strategy development through optimization and analysis. This integrated approach ensures consistent messaging across touchpoints while maximizing synergies between promotional activities. They will also help with content management. This may be limited to localising existing content, or content creation tailored to a Chinese audience. This content should not only be written content, their services should also include video formt content. As showcased in the Nike case study above, video format content is what does best in WeChat. 

How to Start Your WeChat Marketing Campaign?

1. Initial Consultation and Strategy Development

Effective campaigns begin with comprehensive consultation covering business objectives, target audience, competitive landscape, and budget parameters. 

2. Account Setup and Optimization

WeChat promotion requires handling technical and regulatory requirements including account registration, verification, and Chinese compliance. Once the account has been set up, Mini Programs and other WeChat features such as the WeChat Store can also be deployed under the account to maximise user engagement and conversion rates. Professional setup maximizes growth potential through profile completion, menu structure development, and system integration.

3. Campaign Launch and Management

Comprehensive campaigns implement multiple channels and formats including content publishing, advertising management, community engagement, and performance monitoring. Success requires regular reporting and optimization based on performance data.

How Can I Measure My WeChat Marketing Success?

There are third-party tools that can be used to measure WeChat marketing success. However, one of the best measures of marketing success can be tracking your company name, product name, or service name through the WeChat Index. This will give you the most accurate data regarding traffic and interactions with your content. 

The WeChat Index is particualrly useful, as mentioned above, for tracking the source of your traffic. This can inform whether you need to spend more time on written content of short-form video content. 

How Can AppInChina Help?

WeChat promotion service represents an essential investment for businesses serious about succeeding in China’s digital marketplace. At AppInChina we help by managing your entire presence on WeChat, this includes:

• Creating a WeChat Official Account for your company.
• Creating content for your WeChat Official account
• Deploying a custom WeChat advertising campaign.
• Creating a WeChat Mini Program for your company which can be integrated with the official account.
• Opening and managing a WeChat Store, including customer support and logisitics

Contact us to get started with your WeChat marketing journey