Customer Education in China, creating your first customer education campaign
Customer education is about providing information about usage of your product or service before or after purchase. It is important for brands to let their interested audience know the technical aspects of the products, and how to get the best out of the purchase, especially if it relates to gadgets, innovation, or software.
What is Customer education and how is it different in China?
Customer education is about providing information about usage of your product or service before or after the purchase. It is important for brands to let their interested audience know the technical aspects of the products, and how to get the best out of the purchase, especially then if comes to gadgets, innovation, or software.
When it comes to China, your white-collar Chinese consumer who lives in a large city is very curious about all things new, from innovative skin care products to automobiles. Some companies in China build customer education programs to promote and teach people how to use them. Remember it was only 15 years ago in China that avocados could only be found in luxury imported food stores.
Forms of customer education in China
In China’s mobile-first and highly competitive market, the customer education concept takes mostly mobile-friendly and O2O forms. Your approach should be an innovative, mind opening experience. By using mini-programs, gamification, interactive courses, tutoring videos, in-store sessions and pop-up events, customer education works best when it “doesn’t feel like school”. For example, Apple holds in-store and online events when releasing new software features. Deciding on best fit of format and sticking to it will make life a lot easier in the long-term, especially when scaling up.
Developing a program, and moving on with your first customer education campaign
What should a customer education program in China include?
When creating an outline for your customer education program for China, consider thoroughly researching your customers’ lifestyle and highlight the moments in their day/week when they would need your product or service most. Keep in mind that the daily and working habits of your Chinese clients can be very different from the ones in other countries. When deciding on what to start with, find a fun way to showcase your product in an interesting way, letting people know what pain-points are you trying to solve. Do not overload your program with unnecessary details, as the attention span of people in general is short. When listing the functional categories of your product or service, include the purpose, key features, benefits, use cases and answers to FAQs. As a step three, include information that your customer might need down the road, any optional features or an upgrade. Since China has strict marketing information controls, it is important to check which words can’t be used when building your scripts. For example, exclude phrases like ‘100%’, ‘the best’, ‘the most’, ‘top’, and any statements that can’t be backed up by official documentation.
Splitting the program into a series of campaigns or blocks
Everyone learns differently. People of different ages, genders and education backgrounds prefer to have different formats of information when learning. Having a clear idea about who your target audience is can be a crucial difference when building your program. Try to learn about how much time these people would have to learn about product or service, what tone of voice they prefer, look out for the latest trends in educational marketing in China or study the competitors’ materials to have a better idea. Think about how to make the program not only interesting but also easy to comprehend. Splitting big blocks of information will create a more dynamic and simple viewing experience. A good example of customer education in China is delivered by Xiaohongshu university: a series of short (2-3 min) mobile-first videos where Xiaohongshu anchors introduce basic and advanced features of content creation and platform use for their users.
- Building a customer education program
Consider the budget and resources you have on hand. See what can be done in-house and what must be outsourced. Work with professional service providers that have previous experience and qualifications. You would will most certainly need to deliver your program in Chinese language. See how your localization partners can make your life easier with additional services, such as delivering translated versions in your original graphic format or direct web/software update in the target language.
Getting people to see your customer education program in China
Just like any other product, your customer education program must be promoted for people to know it exists. Of cause well developed brands have a great advantage in promoting their content. But here are some of the most popular channels for foreign and Chinese brands doing customer education programs promotion in the Chinese market.
Most popular platforms for B2C brand:
- WeChat Brand Offical Account inclusion, and WeChat KOL promotion
- Xiaohongshu/RED short video tutorials
- Baidu organic and paid channels
- Niche websites and apps
- Video and livestream channels: Youku, Tencent video, Douyin, BiliBili etc.
Most popular platforms for B2B brands:
- WeChat Brand Offical Account inclusion, and WeChat KOL promotion
- Baidu organic and paid channels
- Niche websites and apps
- Knowledge based social media: Zhihu, Baidu Zhidao.
- Special categories within the video channels: Youku, Tencent video, Iqiyi etc.
HI-COM is a localization and multilingual communication agency dedicated to providing China-specific strategy, social media communication and e-commerce marketing services to businesses around the world. Working with more than 100 brands, HI-COM is the go-to partner of companies that want to enter China market! Contact us for your free consultation today!
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