Once your winery has set up its official account on WeChat, it’s time to start thinking about ways to maximize your scope and reach on China’s most popular social media platform. The first foreign wine industry players to adopt WeChat as the social media platform of choice were media publications such as Decanter, which launched its WeChat presence in November 2016. Today, it’s possible to find subscription wine clubs (such as The French Cellar) on WeChat, as well as accounts for individual wineries from around the world looking to raise their profile with Chinese wine drinkers.

Create engaging content

The starting point for growing your followers on WeChat is creating amazing content. That’s the big reason why the first and most successful wine brands on WeChat have been media publications such as Decanter. For wineries, the best mix of content will include wine learning tips, new wine recommendations, and articles written by experts in the wine world.

So, let’s say that you are an Australian winery looking to sell your wines to China. You could provide regular updates on new wines that are available for purchases. You could also write in-depth feature articles about specific Australian wine regions. Or you could ask your winemaker to write an expert article on a particular facet of winemaking.

When it comes to creating content for WeChat, one important point to keep in mind is that you need to think about creating the type of content that will appeal to the mobile-savvy, younger generation. Thus, the type of content that you publish in your WeChat account should be different from the type of content you are already sending out in your email newsletters or publishing on your main website. In other words, your content produced for WeChat should be fun, dynamic and relevant for your target audience.

One way to think about this is “the three E’s” – content should be Emotional, Entertaining or Educational. The Educational type of content is perhaps the easiest for a marketing team at a winery to create – it is the sort of “how-to’s” or “tips” articles that you might already be generating. For that reason, some wineries turn to external marketing agencies with specific knowledge of how to create Emotional or Entertaining content for the Chinese wine market. Of course, you don’t have to be an expert to create this type of content – simply telling the backstory of why you got involved in the winery business in the first place or why you care so passionately about a certain type of wine might be great for attracting new winery followers.

Engage your current customer database

Another way to think about growing your followers on WeChat is in terms of reaching out to your current customer database and asking them to follow you on WeChat. Your winery most likely already has employees, partners, customers or distributors already active in the Chinese market. Now is the time to reach out to them and tell them about your new WeChat account. And don’t forget about other social media platforms where you already have a presence. Many people think of WeChat and Weibo as complementary pieces of their overall social media presence in China, so if you already have a Weibo account set up, you can use that account to tell people about your new WeChat account (and vice versa). In many ways, it is similar to using, say, an existing Facebook account to tell people about your new Twitter or Instagram account.

However, one important thing to keep in mind is that you should always give people a reason to follow your WeChat account. Is to receive special promotions and offers? Is it to become an expert on a particular type of wine or a specific wine region? Or is it to confer a certain amount of social status or exclusivity on anyone following your account?

Create a WeChat QR code

In China, the QR code is a lot more popular than in Western markets. So you definitely need to think of ways that you can leverage QR codes to engage Chinese wine drinkers on social media. As a rule of thumb, any materials that you send out (such as marketing collateral) for either print or digital should include a QR code for your WeChat account. That makes it possible for people to use their smartphones to snap a photo of your QR code and instantly get linked to your WeChat account. This is especially important if the name of your winery is hard to spell or pronounce for a Chinese wine drinker – by giving them a QR code, you reduce the risk that they will not be able to find you on WeChat or, even worse, somehow end up at a competitor’s account.

Use in-store promotions

In addition to including QR codes on digital and print media, you can think about ways to include QR codes as part of an in-store promotion for your wines. If you are creating a store or shelf displays, for example, don’t forget about the QR code.  And you can even include these QR codes on your bottle labels or on your cases – any place a customer might interact with your products in an offline brick-and-mortar retail establishment is a good place for a QR code.

Often, brands will include a loyalty program component to their QR code promotions. For example, you could promote the fact that you are giving away an exclusive discount or coupon to anyone who uses the QR code to follow you on WeChat. In the marketing industry, this is what is known as an O2O, or offline to online, campaign. The idea here is simple: you are using offline marketing assets to help attract people to your online WeChat account.

Engage influencers in China

In China, influencers are known as KOLs (short for Key Opinion Leaders) and they should become a key part of your WeChat marketing push. For wineries, some of the best KOLs to work with are wine bloggers who already have a very large audience of fellow oenophiles. Essentially, these KOLs will do all the heavy lifting of promoting your winery and your wines for you. The trade-off, of course, is that you will need to have some way to compensate them. There are a variety of different ways to compensate social media influencers. You could, for example, simply arrange for a one-off payment: in exchange for creating content for you on WeChat, you pay them a set amount for their time.

Advertise directly on WeChat

If the above options are not gaining quite the traction you originally anticipated, you have one more option to grow your WeChat follower base, and that’s advertising. To leverage WeChat advertising effectively, it’s important to have a broad understanding of the different features available on WeChat, so that you know how your brand’s message will appear within the platform on someone’s mobile phone. One of the essential features of WeChat, for example, is known as “Moments,” and it is the WeChat equivalent of the Facebook news feed – it shows videos, photos and links from people or brands a user is following.

By advertising, you are helping to insert yourself into a person’s newsfeed. And when you do so, you have various options. You can simply create great content that people will click on and then perhaps decide to follow you, or you can go for a more direct approach, in which you simply advertise the details of your WeChat account and directly ask people to follow you. As noted above, that’s why it’s so important to have a good answer to the question, “Why follow this account?” This is your value proposition and your goal should be to provide a good reason for others to follow you.

Understand the best practices of market leaders on WeChat

Often, you can develop some great ideas for growing your WeChat account simply by checking out what others in the WeChat wine “ecosystem” are doing. So take time to follow other accounts and engage with them. Some people will do a follow-for-follow, so it could be the case that simply following others will result in you growing your WeChat account at the same time. Some good WeChat wine accounts to check out for ideas include WikiWine, Wine-World, Vinehoo, Decanter and The French Cellar. There’s even a WeChat Wine account that specializes in connecting Chinese consumers with Australian vineyards (so if you’re an Australian producer, this might be worth checking out) for the direct purchase of wine.

At the present time, WeChat is considered to be the “king of social media” in China, so it is very much worth your time and attention as a winery owner to leverage all the unique features of WeChat to your greatest advantage.  Start by publishing great content that really engages your audience, and then move on to campaigns, influencer marketing with Chinese KOLs and paid advertising. In a much shorter period of time than you ever expected, you will be growing your WeChat account, gaining followers, and most importantly, selling more wine.