How to choose an effective advertising method on Wechat

Wechat has over 600 million users based on huge cardinality of Chinese population. So Wechat is not just a social network platform, it's also a powerful platform to advertise for companies.

There are three kind of advertising methods of Wechat: Wechat moments advertising, Wechat banner advertising and Wechat Key Opinion Leader advertising. And we are going to talk about which one is most effective way for most western companies.

The differences of three methods

l  Wechat moments serve as a social network function, which is launched on 19 April 2012, and the moments post first moments advertising on 2015. Wechat advertising is the equivalent of Facebook ads appearing on the timeline. The format of ads is exactly same as the moments’ format shared by personal account. And there are four components of ads: the brand name and profile image, the description, the link to the brand relative website and up to six picture or a short videos. Company could choose different targets based on several factors, such as gender, age, mobile operating system, education level, marital status, locations and Wechat behavior. According to research, Wechat users open moments 10 times per day, and the reading amount is equivalent with reading a book per month.

l  Wechat banner advertising is much like the ads banners you would see on a website. They always shows at the bottom of a message written by a Wechat official account. This kind of ads method launched on August 2014, and has very low performance. Companies could choose the target people as same as moments, but they cannot choose their ideal official account. There are two components of banners: ad banners and action call (the action call asks users to another webpage).

l  Key opinion leader are another way to market brand on Wechat. And it means pay a Wechat blogger in exchange of putting a promotional post on their account. Companies could negotiate with bloggers about how to advertise for them. Blogger could push several messages per day, and they could write an article only about a company or just put a banner on their article. And Wechat blogger served as same as influencer.

For most of big western companies, Wechat moments is the most ideal choice since the low performance of Wechat banner and often extremely high cost of blogger advertising. Banners could take good care of some star up companies because of low cost, but all the foreign company need to pass several regulations during Wechat review, and Wechat has strict rule about minimal entry price, so the banner is not a cost-effective way for most western companies.