30 Useful Tools for Marketing on WeChat
WeChat has become deeply integrated into daily life China. Besides being a social media app, it functions as a wallet and serves as a portal into various different mini-programs within it for everything ranging from booking plane tickets to paying utility bills. With more than 1 billion monthly users, WeChat has 78% penetration in China among those aged 16-64 years old.
Because of its ubiquity, for anyone running a business in China, WeChat is an integral part of any digital marketing campaign strategy. WeChat has an official account feature that serves as the official page for your brand. In it, you are able to create WeChat articles to push your blog posts out to your official account followers.
In addition, WeChat is an ecosystem app. With its mini-program function, which are in essence apps within the WeChat app itself, users can satisfy their different needs be it for e-commerce or ride-hailing within the WeChat app itself.
In this article, we’ll dive into the numerous different third-party tools that take advantage of WeChat’s different features to build up your business’s Chinese digital marketing arsenal.
Tools to Design Beautiful WeChat Articles
Default WeChat article design is limited. To really bring out the personality of your brand, you will need to turn to third-party customization platforms:
1.Xiumi is the most popular platform for WeChat article design. It allows users to edit templates directly. A downside is that Xiumi does not support direct editing in HTML.
2. 135editor supports a wider range of image formats compared with other platforms. One downside is that the editing page contains distracting ads.
3.With Yiban, it is possible to import whole websites into WeChat articles and has better services compared with free accounts. One downside is that it has fewer template options.
H5 Mini Website Tools
To further spice up your WeChat presence, incorporating H5 landing pages, essentially HTML5 pages, on your official account articles allows for illustrations, artwork, and animations perfect for mobile experiences. These platforms help you create an H5 page for your official account:
4.MAKA supports most fonts and has the most template options. However, it doesn’t support the creation of long scroll pages.
5. Renrenxiou supports the most visual effects and has the widest variety of template themes.
Runner ups:
6. Yiqixiu
7. iH5
QR Tools
QR code usage has had a head start in China compared to the rest of the world, thanks to the rise of ecosystem apps like WeChat. Creating custom QR code weblinks for your official WeChat articles allow readers to easily read your articles by scanning the QR code with their WeChat scan function.
8.Cli.im is a simple QR code generator that allows you to customize the look of your QR code with a variety of templates. It also allows you to add your brand logo within the QR code itself.
Tools for WeChat Events
You can also conduct event management within WeChat to drive O2O, or online to offline, interaction for your brand. While WeChat doesn’t have a native solution for event publishing and payment collection, many third-party platforms do:
9.YooPay is the best option if your target demographics include expats and tourists. It supports Paypal and credit card payments and has an English version.
10. Hudong.ba is one of the biggest event platforms and is free for users to post their events. It is most popular platform for technology and social events.
Runners up:
11. Hixiangchang
12. GlueUp
CRM Tools
For most brands, WeChat is the main hub for content relationship management strategies. These third-party CRM platforms help to collect in-depth information of your followers and extend your target demographic analysis well beyond WeChat’s default analytics:
13.Parllay is ready to use and intuitive CRM platform well-integrated for WeChat. It measures engagement and data analytics and also creates personalized responses to your customers.
14. Knight is a specifically China-focused CRM tool that is integrated with Salesforce. It's main advantage is its abundant e-commerce integration features.
Runners up:
15. Drip
16. MikeCRM
Tools for Surveys or Forms
The ability to get direct feedback from your followers is a powerful tool in shaping your brand campaigns, product offerings, and overall marketing strategy. With WeChat, it is possible to integrate surveys into your WeChat articles and check the analytics right in the app.
17.Tencentsurveys, as the name suggests, is a survey platform offered by WeChat’s parent company Tencent. It is a free service natively integrated with WeChat
Runner up:
18. Wenjuan
Tools for Pictures/Graphics/GIFs
Visuals are important in any campaign. Moving graphics are easily integrated on WeChat. WeChat messages support stickers, which are animated GIFS under 5MB in size. To create custom graphics for WeChat viral marketing campaigns, there are many third-party platforms to choose from, many of which those in the West will also be familiar with:
19.Giphy
20. Infogram
21. Freepic
22. Pexels
23. 699pic
Data Analytics Sites
Understanding WeChat data is crucial for crafting an effective digital marketing strategy on WeChat. There are a few major data analytics sites that analyze WeChat trends, offering you insights into how your WeChat digital marketing strategy stacks up against the competition:
24.Newrank is a “barometer” of WeChat accounts, ranking which accounts are successful and growing in their respective categories. It provides KOL recommendation and marketing strategy services.
25. Datastory is a Guangzhou based big data firm that provides marketing solutions based on trend analysis of WeChat data.
Payment
With the integration of its own payment system, WeChat pay, WeChat doubles as many people’s wallets in China. To easily integrate WeChat payment to your products and services outside of the WeChat ecosystem, third-party platforms can help:
26.Pingxx offers integrated mobile payment SDKs for developers of mobile apps and sites or easy access to Chinese payment channels such as WeChat pay.
27. Xiaotech helps integrate WeChat payments for H5 WeChat shops or WeChat mini-programs.
Live Chat Tools
Digital customer service is becoming ever more important for brands. Live chat customer service is becoming an essential part of any brand’s digital storefront. WeChat has support for chatbots for official accounts, but your brand can take it to the next level with third-party apps with features that go beyond WeChat defaults:
28.Grata is an “enterprise contact center solution” for a range of social media platforms including WeChat. It allows for multilingual support and multichannel integration across different social media platforms.
Tools for Livestreaming
In China, livestreaming e-commerce became a huge trend in 2020, especially with the COVID 19 crisis. By integrating live product demonstrations and real-time FAQs with buyers, it helped ecommerce stay engaging for shoppers in China. WeChat supports livestreaming with WeChat live as well as third party livestream platform integrations through the WeChat mini program infrastructure:
29.Gensee hosts livestream servers for enterprises to develop their own live streamed events.
30. Huajiao and Inke are both livestream platform with e-commerce capabilities
About HI-COM
HI-COM is a multilingual localization and communication agency dedicated to providing professional localization solutions, content and social media management to businesses around the world. HI-COM helps companies enter the Chinese digital ecosystem with a simple and hassle-free approach. Contact us for your free consultation today!
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