Get Sales Traction with WeChat for Canadian Businesses

Two years ago, PM Justin Trudeau used WeChat and Weibo to woo Chinese Canadians and it worked for his final success in the election. Since then on, more and more Canadian companies and organizations have been keeping close eyes on these Chinese social media.

• In early 2017, Buick Canada lauched its official account on WeChat to enhance the brand affinity with the growing ChineseCanadians.
• On May 16, 2017, Tourism Toronto announced to introduce WeChat Pay into local tourism businesses to boost travel and shopping consumption by Chinese travellers.

Big or small, you can have your customized solution to get sales traction by reaching out to ~2 million Chinese in Canada.

Combining Chinese residents, international students and travellers, there were around 2 million Chinese ethinc population in Canada and their yearly spending was up to $60 billion at a 5% Y/Y growth, based upon the calculation with the data from Statistics Canada. And they are still one of the fastest growing group in Canada. No wonder why more and more businesses in Canada, no matter the business scale, invest more on marketing to reach out to them.

Recently, we helped a shoe distributor launch a WeChat campaign to promote its warehouse sale event. The request arrived on my mailbox only three weeks before the event. Reading the brand list and understanding the target customers, we came up a special promotion plan and media suggestion for the client. The performance of the campaign was out of the expectation, though both the budget and preparation period were tight. Below we outlined what we did and what we achieved.

It’s not a simple translation. The contents are adapted into eyeballs catching and resonating words.

What we did?

• To motivate more customers to visit and buy while protecting the profit of our client, a special incentive plan was desigend for WeChat users.
• Not simply translating the information into Chinese and doing a banner, we adapted contents into an advertorial in the eyeballs catching and resonating words to Chinese customers.
• Picked up a list of the influencing WeChat accounts, whose subscribers are mainly from the GTA and matched to the target customers profile best.
• Optimizing the budget with average click-throughs, we selected a post position for the advertorial in an influencing account which has more than 100,000+ subscribers in the GTA.
• A detail instruction was provided to the client to assure the happy checking out experiences for both casheirs and customers.

The CPC （cost per click) could be as low as $0.20 or less with the ROI above 1,000%.

What we achieved?

• The clicks on the advertorial are 60% higher than the average clicks on the posts of the same position.
• The CPC is as low as $0.60. (Comparing it to Facebook or Google advertising to the Chinese in the GTA, you will be surprised. And, if the client had $500 more on budget, it could be reduced to $0.20 or less. )
• The estimated ROI is above 600% upon an estimation on the visitors to the event.

Upon reviewing on the performance, we suggested our client,

• sign up a WeChat account to build up followers,
• increase a small budget for an optimized reach in future,
• prepare the campaign at least 2 months ahead so that we can design a more efficient plan to optimize the traction and track the effectiveness.

Feel free to get connected and learn more about how you can market your business or causes to Chinese in Canada.