Most foreign brands understand the importance of using WeChat as part of their marketing but very few know how to plan and structure a property WeChat campaign.
Here we’ll go over a case study on how I was about to sell $30,000 Worth of Water Bottle Using WeChat Article Pushes in just 24 hours with $0 ad spend.
From mid-April to mid-May, 2018, I created a WeChat content campaign in order to sell more water bottles. My goal was to promote the body’s metabolism and enhance intestinal digestion and absorption, and of course, sell more bodies.
The content consists of 4 copies each written to drive through what I like to call the buying cycle. Which usually is to engage, amply pain, present solution, connect and promote.
As a result, the campaign was about to sell 200,000 RMB (29,000 USD) worth of water bottle using the company’s own WeChat service account with literally 0 dollars on an advertisement.
And… here is how I did it
Campaign Breakdown
According to my own experience, a successful WeChat campaign comes down to the following:
The Right Account
To begin, you want to think about whether you want to run the campaign to own your own brand owned accounts or a third-party account.
This is the equivalent of guess posting or creating your own blog or media channel. You can also think of about it as the difference between working with an influencer (KOL) or your own account.
There are of course advantages and disadvantages to both. When you work KOL or third party Wechat official accounts, it will usually be very expensive upfront and it is usually a onetime promotion.
With a brand owned strategy, it is a much longer process as you’ll need to build up your audience, but it has a small upfront cost, and it more consistent and sustainable.
The Right Time
In general, based on my experience the best time to push promotional articles on WeChat is usually noon and the afternoon. However, you will want to check with your audience reading habits, and if you’re working with a third-party account you will also want to ask them when the best time it is for you to promote to their audience.
The Right Title
There is no question getting the title of your promotional article right on WeChat is extremely important as with any copywriting. Because the title and the featured image is what’s going to grab their attention. And without the attention, they won’t read the rest of your copy.
Of course, there are dozens and dozens of books just on the topic of writing the right title for your copy. For me it comes down these 4 tips:
Be Relevant: Make your title relevant to your audience current pain to a problem that they’re experiencing right now.
Trigger Curiosity: Use curiosity to get your audience to engage and click on your article to read the rest.
Herd Mentality, Celebrity Effect: Try to incorporate your title with a recent hot event, or celebrity news.
Emotional Catharsis: Write your title to relieve an emotional that the reader may be experienced for example, “The Single Best Way to Fix your Broken Marriage Today.”
The Right Content
Choose the right topic or content will directly determine the size of your traffic for your articles. Having a good topic or good content will help you to achieve much better results with a lot less work.
For example, if you can work your copy around a recent hot event that most of your audience know about, it will help you to break through the clutter much easier.
For this campaign, I choose to use four different articles to promote the water bottle. 2 of these articles were wasted due to poorly chosen topic otherwise this campaign would have easily achieved $30,000 plus in revenue
The Right Copy
When looking at the data, I found that out of the 4 articles one article performance the best generated 475 shares and 80,000 RMB. The other two articles brought in a respectively 36,000 RMB and 55,000 RMB respectively.
As you can see the copy of the content makes a huge difference in results. And in my experience, here are the 3 keys to writing great copies which is Attention, Persuasion, Action.
Attention: With any copy, you want to grab the user attention very quickly within the first paragraph. You can accomplish this by asking questions related to the reader, painting the scenes that the reader would like to experience in life, and hitting on the pain points and amplifying them is also extremely useful.
Persuasion: Once you grab their attention then you would want to persuade them to your viewpoint. Talk about principles, find comparisons, use market data, showcase studies and user reviews, and create a sense of urgency.
Action: Ultimately, you’re writing your content or copy to derive a specific action that the user will take. This could be to purchase a water bottle or make a phone call. This is why you should always write your copy with the end goal in mind. Everything else is just to get you there.
To Summarizing:
If you want to improve sales conversion with your WeChat copy then follow these guidelines:
- Positioning the pain points your audience, answer the question: Your “product” can help “who” to solve the “what problem”
- Write your title to meet the Four Attention Grabbing Elements.
- Use recent hot topics or events to help get more attention and traffic.
- Grab the user’s attention, enhancing the persuasiveness of the article, and improving the action of placing orders.
The Campaign Result Review
Our data shows that the 4 articles pushed during this event that one of the articles generated 11,000 views, another two generated more than 15,000 views and the best article generated 26,421 views.
Overall the 4 articles generated just a little bit over 300,000 RMB in sales just in the first 24 hours with the highest performing article doing 80,810 RMB or $12,000 USD. The number of people who clicked through to the landing or sales page was stable at around 1,000 per article with 1,4000 being the highest.
This is only the beginning of this campaign, I project that this campaign will go well over 350,000 RMB in sales.
