Weibo Marketing Revisited: Why Printing & Packaging Pros Can Thrive on Social

Weibo Marketing Revisited

Printing and packaging people can be Weibo regulars, too

Mention Weibo and plenty of people feel it arrived only yesterday, yet its actual reach has already run far beyond early expectations and even outshone the traditional blog. As a young medium, Weibo captured the hearts of millions of internet users with seemingly no effort at all, and posting in the small hours has long since stopped being unusual. Wherever attention gathers, fresh opportunities for online marketing are never far behind.

Weibo marketing is an online marketing approach that has only just emerged. Not long ago, Sina joined forces with a real estate company on a campaign: netizens simply registered a Sina Weibo account, reposted the designated post as the organizer required and followed the organizer, and stood a chance to win an apartment offered by the developer for free. Tens of thousands of users responded the moment it went live. The apartment was a gimmick, of course; what the developer really walked away with was hundreds of thousands — even a million — followers, which within a short span put the company's name in front of netizens nationwide and turned them into loyal fans. Weighed against the advertising money that goes into radio, TV and newspapers, one apartment was a small price to pay — why not? We grow tired of the usual promotional routines, yet this fledgling approach clearly strikes a chord, and that is exactly why it delivered so fast.

Take another case. Lakala president Sun Taoran announced on Weibo that anyone who reposted or commented on his post between that morning and that evening could apply for one Lakala device by putting down a deposit in RMB. With Lakala's Taobao price tag sitting well above that deposit, the pull was obvious. Within hours of the post going up, the number of users applying to pay the deposit and claim a device climbed past a striking figure. Faced with those results, Sun Taoran openly cheered for the might of Sina Weibo. Applications for a trial do not equal completed sales, yet the marketing effect was still startling — Lakala's official flagship store on Taobao Mall has its own sales numbers on record. Beyond management lessons, life reflections or startup stories, the greatest asset of a boss's Weibo account is speed: company news goes out instantly and netizens learn about it first-hand, which feeds straight into marketing. Sun Taoran's Weibo marketing carried Lakala's sales volume past its Taobao sales record — a notable result in itself — but the story does not end there. A look at Tencent Weibo shows his follower base running into the tens of thousands, meaning any Lakala update he posts reaches tens of thousands of netizens. On cost and on reach alike, Weibo clearly holds the advantage.

So, can the same playbook work in the printing industry? Let us take a brief look.

Houses, cars and other products that invite interaction naturally spark conversation; by contrast, Weibo marketing is genuinely harder in the printing industry — though not impossible. After registering a Tencent Weibo account, the author found plenty of users named after the trade and a good number of posts carrying related keywords. Look closer, though, and most of them simply treat Weibo as an ad board: a one-liner about printing, graphic design, technical drawing, color printing or advertising production, and that's it. Even so, how many people actually see such a message? For printing businesses to make Weibo marketing work, the first problem to solve is where the audience comes from — with no followers, even the most tempting offer goes unnoticed. So how do you build that following? The author sums it up in a few points:

1. Build your own circle of friends first.

The bosses who work Weibo well are hardly strangers to us. Posting from phones and computers, they share daily life and the latest company developments, and in doing so build real traction for their businesses. Printing-industry bosses can do the same: creating a Weibo circle of their own is the first step toward success.

1. Plan promotional campaigns.

Once a follower base exists, the next step is organizing interaction. Two examples:

Example 1: If you manufacture printing machinery, run a Weibo lucky draw and let selected followers win free use of a printer.

Example 2: If you supply consumables, launch a consumables trial program.

When Weibo first appeared, it was probably little more than a platform for online chatting and public entertainment. Today we have come to see that it can serve our daily work as well — fun and business can go hand in hand!

— Reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn); original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-370011.html