How important is WeChat for business?

How important is WeChat for business?

If you haven’t heard of this tool yet you are really disconnected from the Chinese digital world. WeChat is the most used app in China as it manages most aspects of people’s lives in their phone. It’s convenient, it saves time, and time is money.

The most popular apps in the world like Facebook, WhatsApp, Pinterest, and Google pay are blocked in China, but WeChat is not.  WeChat is more than Facebook for Chinese people, it’s their ID, their wallet, their services provider. Once your business is on WeChat, you are inside a community of a billion people in the country, and 200 million overseas.

To understand how the app fits into their routine just imagine your daily routine. You check your messages on WeChat, you order the nearest taxi on WeChat, you pay with your WeChat or transfer money with WeChat. You send documents to co-workers; teachers even send homework through WeChat. Find a restaurant, order your meal before you get there, and pay for it, all on your phone with one app. That basically sums up how WeChat has been integrated into their lives.

In this country of more than 1.3 billion people, 750 million pay with WeChat every day, which means that at least half of the country uses the app for sales purposes. They are not going out of their way to find your business if they can quickly discover something that fits their needs in the app. When you create a WeChat account for your business you are talking their language, you are adapting to their lifestyle, you become convenient, you become part of their world. By being on WeChat, customers can find out about you, talk to you, purchase your product, and pay for it right away. In a couple of minutes, you’ll have a client for life and money in your account.

However, just being there is not enough. WeChat can be a powerful marketing tool if used correctly when creating engaging content that matches your target market’s lifestyle. You can easily promote events and sales more effectively with pop-up messages that are delivered to a member as if it was a message from one of their friends. Most importantly, you can have a personal relationship with your customer. Personalization is one of the biggest marketing trends for 2019. Being able to give a personal service by creating a community of customers on your WeChat can be the difference between you and your competitors. Reach a higher engagement rate with customers by building a relationship with them, by talking their language, by being one of the few overseas businesses that understand Chinese people out of China, by making them feel welcome.