Weibo is often dubbed China’s Twitter. The micro-blogging platform, however, provides businesses with the opportunity to connect with potential and existing customers in an engaging and personalized manner. Weibo marketing (adstochina.westwin.com/Weibo-Marketing) needs a bit of expert help, and here is how you can employ the different features on Weibo to make a lasting impression on the audience that matters to your business.

Picking the right format

There are multiple ways to reach out to your audience on Sina Weibo. These include fan headlines, search engine promotions, and display adverts. Fan headlines showcase your post on the top of your followers’ feeds or their connections and can be promoted for a period of maximum seven days, after which Weibo considers the post to be not news-worthy. You can use the format to promote your posts or that of a key opinion leader. These posts are also shown only once to the users, but you have the option to generate multiple posts at the same time for better reach and engagement.

Weibo also has inbuilt search functions, thus listing down results for fan pages, accounts, and posts. The option lets you improve the visibility of your brand page to people who search for keywords related to your business. Display ads on Weibo work much like those on search engine pages. The ads are showcased on web and mobile versions, and the links on them a direct audience to the advertising homepage.

Weibo marketing also has in-built prize campaigns that allow you to give away prizes to more followers. These could be virtual prizes that cost less or bigger prizes that are related to the product or service offered by your brand. Prize campaigns are a great way to attract followers and include multiple formats like lucky roulettes, flash sales, repost campaigns, content collection campaign, and free trial campaigns.

Putting demographic targeting to good use

One of the major benefits of Weibo marketing is that you get to decide the audience who should see your post. Fine-tuning the audience demographics improves your chances of gathering followers who take an interest in your product or service and makes conversions and sales more likely. Weibo provides multiple targeting options, including age, gender and geographic region, interest and hobbies, device, competitor list, follower relationship, and target accounts. There is also the option to choose the time to run these ads – the platform typically sees rush hours, and you can choose to run your ads during the period for a wider reach quickly.

Choosing the payment model appropriately

To run ads, Sina Weibo allows you to pay as CPM or cost per thousand impressions, which applies only to blog promotions. It also offers CPE or cost per engagement, which includes forwards/retweets, clicks, and comments. The best way to choose the right payment method is by conducting an alpha-beta test for the ads you run. It is important to monitor the statistics and fine-tunes your Weibo marketing efforts from time to time for the best results. In order to prevent overspending on your ads, you can choose to set a daily budget, after which the ads automatically stops for the current day.

Analyzing competitor ads

You may be doing things right, but it never hurts to see how others are performing. The key to successful Weibo marketing is to design ads that users connect instantly with. When you plan the ads on Weibo, the system suggests similar accounts, which can be used to analyze the competition in your space, including the follower gender, age, geography, device, interaction patterns, time, and so on. With so much data in hand, it is possible to draw an idea about what keywords the competitors would have bid on and when they are likely to post their ads. By watching them carefully, you can replicate successful strategies, or work on new ones to attract more customers.

All aspects about Sina Weibo marketing and promotions listed above matter to the success of your campaign, but what is equally important is that you invest time and money into building good quality content – text and images – that resonate with your brand image and which speak convincingly to the persona of your audience.