Content: Advertisers embracing new tools

WeChat public accounts.

A mini program is an applike functionality that aims at driving sales directly. Moments is e-space for brands to engage with prospective and existing customers through content marketing, story-telling and more interactions with potential consumers.

And through an official account, “companies can broadcast messages and articles to their followers like a blog, but brands and service providers can also use these accounts to serve customers”, Tang said.

Foreign entrants to China’s digital scene are embracing these new tools. Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s chief creative officer, told China Daily in an earlier interview that WeChat opens up “a huge new world of opportunity” in the digital space.

“The exciting thing for us is the deeper and more meaningful way that we are able to tell our stories using this platform,” Bailey said.

Anne-Marie Verdin, brand director at Mulberry, also touted WeChat’s advanced functionality and prominence in the daily lives of consumers, predicting it to be “the central tool to communicate with the Chinese audience”.

But one caveat about WeChat is that brands should build up a follower base in the first place, industry experts noted.

“Marketers really need to set up formal accounts for their model on WeChat and persuade buyers to stick to their web page, often by providing incentives and promotions for brand new followers,” said Tang.

In this context, he referred to Weibo (which is Chinese for microblog) as a square-like online avenue where its users can easily see posts from anyone, since they really don’t need to be connected to them in the first place.

Agreed Domenica di Lieto, chief executive officer of Emerging Communications, a digital marketing agency with offices in London and Shanghai. She recommended companies start by building up an audience on Chinese microblogging site Weibo before pouring money into a WeChat marketing campaign.

“We say that Weibo is an acquisition platform and WeChat is a retention platform,” she said. “There is no one plan that fits several brands.”

While many marketing practitioners regard the WeChat and Weibo duo as the “holy grail”, they cannot be safe bets once and for all.

According to MediaCom’s Chin, a shift in online paradigm has occurred where video has taken the top spot, or 35 percent, of time duration of people’s internet behavior, followed by social media’s 29 percent, among others.

That has given an edge to the likes of Douyin, a highflying short video app that is fast rising as a staple in the digital marketing matrix of most brands.

“The platform allows brands to share short videos, usually in a fun or interesting format with users … They also leverage key opinion leaders to help share the content so it spreads quickly among their followers,” Chin said.

Established less than two years ago, upstart app Douyin has managed to gain 200 million daily active users in China, according to statistics it published earlier this month. Up to 70 percent of its active users are women, and 85 percent are under the age of 25, who are referred to as the millennials.

Douyin is a good place to start social media campaigns, given that major social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo have become saturated and yet continually increase the price of inserting advertisements on them, experts said.

Especially after Douyin teamed up with e-commerce sites such as Taobao and JD, users can now find direct purchase links on their phone or device screens while scrolling up and down funny videos, according to Neo’s Tang.

This trend dovetails with another massive trend in China — social commerce. (Wikipedia defines social commerce as “a subset of electronic commerce that involves social media, online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist online buying and selling of products and services”.)

Avid young buyers tend to indulge in impulsive purchases as they browse the net. That spells great opportunities for companies like Alibaba, which benefits from the company’s 520 million active users to deliver targeted reach to brands using its e-commerce platforms.

By tracking users across those sites with what the company calls a “unified ID”, Alibaba is able to not only tailor product recommendations to individual users but personalize the storefronts they visit. This it accomplishes by analyzing consumers’ browsing and buying habits, according to Chris Tung, the firm’s chief marketing officer.

“By combining Alibaba’s massive data assets, businesses can identify, segment and build tailored content for the best results,” he said.

For example, since last year, Alibaba’s Taobao has created webisodes to promote household products. Video storytelling has greatly boosted sales, with sales of the featured cooking pot sets over a 14-hour period exceeding sales over the previous 30-day period by 50 times, following a webisode called Night Warriors’s Launch, the company said.

“The beauty of digital marketing is that it is trackable,” Chin said. “The level of consumer engagement is often very difficult to assess. Digital marketing allows for tracking and allows brands to know how many people have seen their ad, clicked on their ad, gone to their website from the ad, engaged with the brand and even purchased.”