How to Promote a Tourist Attraction on WeChat

Are you considering promoting a tourist attraction to an audience based in China? If yes, you’ve come to the right place! We know that dipping one’s toes into a new market can be perplexing, especially if it’s a country as large and unique as China. Don’t worry! That is precisely why we decided to write up this helpful guide to help you understand the basics concerning advertising tourism in the Middle Kingdom!

Table of Contents

• Why Chinese Tourists Are Important
• What Types of Trips Are Chinese Citizens Interested In?
• WeChat: What It Is
• WeChat: How to Use It
• WeChat Official Accounts
• WeChat Mini Programs
• Channels
• Services
• What Are Some Key Advantages to Being a Western Brand
• How to Write Travel-related Articles For a Chinese Audience
• Designing a Travel Article
• Comparing Chinese & English Article Design
• Creating Article Titles For a Chinese Audience
• How to Get Creative With Official Account Titles
• Writing Content For a Chinese Audience
• How to Make Tourism-related Videos for WeChat

Why Chinese Tourists Are Important

If you are a company or individual in the tourism industry, have you ever wondered about how to attract Chinese visitors to a particular destination? If you haven’t, it may be time to begin thinking about why it would be a good idea. According to Time, for example, “Chinese travelers made 155 million trips overseas, spending $277 billion—a fifth of the global total outlay by international tourists” in 2019. While the world didn’t see the return of Chinese tourists in 2023 as promised, analysts still believe that everything will return to normal this year.

This absence of Chinese tourists is no small detail. In fact, since 2013, Chinese tourists have been the largest spenders worldwide. According to Statista, “outbound tourism spending by Chinese travelers increased more than tenfold between 2006 and 2019”.

The travel destinations of these Chinese tourists are quite diverse as well. In 2021, for example, Japan, the United States, and France were the top three countries visited.

With this knowledge in hand, you can be sure that there are many different reasons to be interested in marketing to Chinese citizens as well as a ton of angles you can go about doing so!

However, the question still remains: How does a foreign company advertise a destination to someone in China? What are the best avenues for doing so? What types of destinations would they be interested in? What styles of trips are most popular? Do they differ by age? By region?

We will go over these questions and more in this article!

What Types of Trips Are Chinese Citizens Interested In?

A recent Reuters article addressed the current problem of fewer Chinese going abroad by highlighting how the main audience for international travel right now is wealthier Chinese. The good news here is that some companies mentioned that their tours for the Lunar New Year in Europe were fully booked up. This shows that perhaps the pandemic era’s hesitancy to fly abroad is slowly changing.

Another thing that has been changing recently is the type of trips the Chinese prefer to take. Traditionally, many Chinese, especially older generations or people less acquainted with foreign cultures, opted for group tours. More people these days are beginning to prefer more independence on their trips. Some of this is because younger Chinese in cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen are better acquainted with foreign media or studied abroad.

Here are some charts from skift.com.

WeChat: What It Is

WeChat is the most popular social messaging and social media app in China. As you can see from the below charts, it not only dwarfs other apps in terms or popularity but also in terms of the amount of time Chinese citizens spend on it. In fact, 78% of 16 to 64-year-olds in the country use WeChat. 20% of those older than 55 use it.

One thing to always remember about China is that the country is divided by a “tier system” that distinguishes cities based on income level. Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and a few other better-known cities are called tier-one cities. Understanding these differences may help you better plan for how you advertise in China. Wechat’s own statistics can help us grasp the population of China and how it relates to this tier system. Most of Wechat’s users do not even reside in tier 1 cities. In fact, 40% live in tier 2 cities. You may know some of these cities. Zhengzhou, a city where a lot of China’s factories recently moved to, is a tier 2 city. Xi’an, where the famous terracotta warriors reside, is a tier 2 city. Both of these cities are historically significant to China given that several dynasties held their capitals within them or very close by. History is often related to tourism. You can bet a lot of people living in these cities would love to explore other countries’ historical landmarks!

In terms of the other cities, 9% of WeChat users live in tier 1 cities while 23% live in tier 3 cities and 27% in tier 4.

Skift has provided a few more graphs related to WeChat and tourism.

Here we can see that younger people are more and more preferring to use social media, like WeChat, to plan their overseas trips. Social media is already the second most popular method Chinese use to get resources on trips as well. Please note that WeChat has its own functions that incorporate travel websites and blogs. We will get into this later on in this article!

Obviously, WeChat is a big deal in China. It would be wise for any tourism company or site outside of the country interested in attracting Chinese customers to be knowledgeable about this app. This is why we are here!

WeChat: How to Use It

Now that we have a basic understanding of what WeChat is and the data behind it, let’s peek underneath the hood of this app to learn more. In other articles, we have gone into more depth discussing the ins and outs of the app. For now, we will just focus on the basics and how they can be used to advertise a tourist attraction.

When a user first opens the app, they are greeted with the “Chat” screen. Like with most messaging apps, this page displays all the conversations a user has had. However, most Chinese citizens or foreigners living in China, probably see much more than simple one-on-one or group chats on this page. This is key for our discussion today.

You see, WeChat is much more than just a social messaging app. It has come to be called a “super app” due to its many features and interaction with other apps and websites. Hopefully, this article will shine a little more light on this to make it clearer.

Let’s start by connecting WeChat to something you already know. If you have ever used WhatsApp, you may be aware of the “Updates” page that allows a user to follow companies and other types of organizations to get news regarding what they’re up to.

This differs from Facebook in that, when a user follows a Channel on WhatsApp, its shared content does not get added to a main “Home Feed”. Instead, a followed Channel remains on the “Updates” interface and one must tap on each Channel separately to see any updates.

With Facebook and WhatsApp in mind, let’s see how WeChat’s features for businesses are similar and unique. 

If a user wishes to find an account or information related to tourism, they can tap the “Search” button at the top right of the app’s interface. (Note that users aren’t capable of doing this on the desktop version of WeChat. This is not a problem, however, since China is somewhat more of a phone-using rather than computer culture than North America or Western Europe.)

Once they have done this, they will be given a few different options: Moments, Official Accounts, Mini Programs, and Channels. For now, we will ignore the “Moments” feature and focus on the last three.

WeChat Official Accounts

If a user chooses “Official Accounts”, they will be given another search bar. Luckily for us, WeChat has some accounts in English due to the number of foreigners living in China. Since the purpose of this article today is tourism, let’s search for the topic “travel”.

This brings up a list of options just like the “Search” function in WhatsApp or Facebook. Let’s tap an English-language account to learn more about Official Accounts.

Above is a screenshot of this particular account. As we can see, “OKDealTravel” is the channel’s title. The Chinese characters just below the title is the name of the company that runs it. This is followed by a short description of what the channel is about and a large “Follow” button.

After this, a user can select from three different options. “Articles” is straightforward. These particular headlines are all about upcoming trips that foreigners living in China can join to enjoy their days off. Later on in this article, we will discuss how a Western company may go about writing for a Chinese audience using this feature. For now, we will stick to addressing the basic functions of an Official Account.

From the above screenshot, we can see that the “Channels” option is similar to something one would see on TikTok or Instagram. Remember, TikTok came from China. If TikTok is a tour de force in the West, you can bet it’s the same and more so in the largest country in East Asia. Just remember that these videos aren’t for Youtube where people often prefer longer-form content. For Official Accounts like this one, short and sweet is the most important thing to remember.

Last, there is the “Services” option. Companies have a lot of freedom in what sub-options they can put in this tab. As shown in the above screenshot, companies may prefer to use this tab to have buttons that can take users to other websites. As the name suggests, this option is also for advertising what services a company can offer a customer. For this particular company, they have chosen to advertise what places they work with. 

Let’s tap “Silk Road” to see what this is all about.

Once a user has done this, they are taken to another interface. It is here where they are shown a list of tour options to choose from. A user can tap on each of these to learn more about each tour’s contents and pricing. Note that while the appearance in English here may seem a little cramped, the case would not be the same in Chinese since it is a language that requires less space.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about Official Accounts is that once a user follows one, they will receive messages in their main Chat interface from these Official Accounts. This is perhaps the best way for companies to keep their followers aware of their services and why it is crucial for them to create new articles on a regular basis.

One last thing that you may find interesting: Some companies like to hold livestreams on their Official Accounts. These livestreams allow customers a chance to enter lotteries or get discounts for holidays. Live-streaming is popular in the West, but it often takes on an entirely different level in China. The same goes for lotteries. After all, Chinese mobile games were partially responsible for popularizing similar lottery mechanics in English-speaking countries.

WeChat Mini Programs

Let’s move to the next method companies may be interested in utilizing to advertise a tourist spot: Mini Programs. Although Mini Programs appear next to Official Accounts as a search result, they are actually far more complicated. This does not make them less useful, however. In fact, quite the opposite.

In its simplest form, a Mini Program is an app within an app. In the English-speaking world, a person usually needs to go to the Google Store to download a new app. Need to find a doctor? Go to the Google Store and download an app. Your apartment complex recently got rid of using quarters to pay for laundry cleaning? Go to the Google Store or a specific website to download an app. This isn’t even mentioning the differences between apps made for Android and Apple.

WeChat’s Mini Programs erase the hassle of having to download apps for every aspect of life and cluttering a phone’s screen with them. In China, most people are used to using WeChat as a one-stop location for their needs. This isn’t to say there aren’t other options in China, but think of WeChat’s Mini Programs as a quicker way to understand China than a difference and a hindrance to business.

If one understands WeChat, a lot of the business aspect of China is done!

With this said, let’s use the “Search” function on WeChat to search for some Mini Programs as examples.  As we did with Official Accounts, we can search “Travel”.

A familiar face has popped up! All of these search results may be in Chinese, but TripAdvisor is certainly a logo well-known in the English-speaking world. It appears the same is true in China. If this Western company can succeed in the Middle Kingdom, maybe you can too if you stick to the right steps!

Let’s tap TripAdvisor to see if its Mini Program is much different from what we have in the English-speaking world.

When we open TripAdvisor’s Mini Program, we are greeted by a user agreement and privacy policy page. While the English app in the West is not exactly this, it does ask users if they wish to share their location and receive notifications. From here, the Western app and WeChat Mini Program end up being very similar. Below is a screenshot of both.

Although these two interfaces are in different languages, there are a lot of commonalities. For example, the background retains the green color TripAdvisor uses for its branding. While this may not seem like a big difference, it shows once again that entering the China market may not be as difficult as some believe. Of course, colors in marketing can sometimes have different meanings depending on the culture, but when it comes to companies that exist all over the world, consistency is the most crucial thing! Even though the Chinese Mini Program appears a little more simplistic compared to the American app, it has most of the same features inside it. 

As we look over some aspects of Wechat in this article, we will try to highlight some of the differences in UX design one may encounter in China. This may be important to you if your own organization thinks about creating a Mini Program for WeChat. To get started on this, it may be useful to see how other non-English speaking companies have made use of WeChat’s Mini Programs for tourism purposes.

The above interface comes from one of the other top Mini Programs that appears after searching for “Travel”. This Mini Program is called 走走旅游网 or ZouZou Travel. 走 (zou) here refers to walking or to go away. Their website can be found at https://www.zouzoutravel.com.cn. 

If you open up that website link, you can see that the interface there is very similar to the one being used on WeChat. In comparison to the TripAdvisor app, both have more busy screens. There are more buttons. To an English speaker, this may appear strange. Chinese companies coming to the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom sometimes struggle to realize that their own app designs may appear messy to a Westerner. While this may be true for most English speakers, the same isn’t the case in the Chinese-speaking world. With this in mind, your company may want to consult UI writers and designers in China to help localize your Mini Program. We can help you with that!

The next Mini Program we will examine is called 洲游旅行 or Zhouyou Travel. 洲 means “continent” and 游 means “to travel”. If we look at their website (http://zhouyou.net), we can see what was mentioned earlier in this article: websites are not as important in China as they are in English-speaking countries. Notice how this website is just a basic page. There is really no information about the actual company. This shows how important WeChat is to any tourism company wishing to do business in China!

The above interface and the previous app we displayed show another common trait with Chinese apps. Notice how much more color and pictures were used by these local Chinese local apps over TripAdvisor’s. TripAdvisor appears to have tried to keep the general appearance of its international app in China. There isn’t anything wrong with this. However, your own company may want to consider whether you want to create a Mini Program that is in line with your global branding or something more localized for the Chinese market. Something in the middle between these two is also an option of course!

Don’t take everything we’ve discussed about design as gospel. As we can see from the above screenshot, local Chinese apps also sometimes prefer to keep their screens minimalistic. This particular Mini Program from TravelID seems to be focusing more on showing Chinese customers a potential travel destination straight away. It gets right to the point by revealing some eye-catching photos of Japan and the details of a few trip packages.

Now that we have gone over a few of the basics of WeChat Mini Programs and shared a few related to tourism, you may be wondering how a user may be able to find your company’s Mini Program again. To do this, a user can go back to WeChat’s Home Screen.

As you can see from the above, a user can tap on the “Discover” button at the bottom of WeChat’s main interface to get a range of options, one of them being “Mini Programs”. If we tap this, the below screen will come up.

The “Mini Programs” interface shows what apps a user has already used as well as suggestions based on what a user has already looked for. In this way, Mini Programs are not exactly like apps in English-speaking countries. However, this does not mean it’s a bad thing. Many apps on phones in North America and Europe go unused for a while, using up space on a person’s phone.

Channels

The last of the “Search” function options that you may wish to utilize is called Channels. In fact, we’ve already gone over this feature. Remember the “Channels” tab of the Official Accounts? This is indeed the same feature. Companies may choose to just make a Channel or connect one to an Official Account. Please see below for a few screenshots of what this looks like on WeChat.

We will go into more detail about how to make tourism videos for a Chinese audience on WeChat later on in this article.

Services

Besides the options presented by the “Search” function, there is one other choice companies may choose to use. To see this, we can go to the “Me” button at the bottom of WeChat’s main interface and then tap “Services”.

Once we do this, we are presented with the following screen. This interface is filled with different icons, each representing services WeChat can be used for to help make modern life more convenient. Today, we will be focusing on the “Hotels” function.

This button takes a user to a new interface run by the company Tongcheng Travel. Note how this interface mimics what was said earlier about super busy interfaces.

Most of the options on this screen refer to searching and booking hotels and trips, but there is also the option 旅游度假, which roughly translates to “Go on a Holiday”. If we tap on this, it will take us to an interface where users can find travel consultants, buy travel packages, book cruises, and get suggestions based on what locations are trending.

You may wish to use this function of Wechat if you’re aiming at older Chinese citizens. This option is a little easier to find than the previous options and requires less searching around. However, keep in mind that this is not necessarily the best way to reach a customer base.

What Are Some Key Advantages to Being a Western Brand?

Now, you may be wondering, there seem to be a lot of tourism companies already making use of WeChat, how can I compete? 

As you saw from the screenshots, most of the companies displayed were Chinese brands. You may be worried that Chinese brands know how to connect with Chinese locals better than a brand from your home country. This is also a concern you shouldn’t worry about. Chinese people, like citizens of many countries, trust first-hand sources on events more than anyone else… especially when it comes to tourism. Remember, tourists often want to travel to another country for an authentic experience. Who is better at offering information and images regarding what life is like in a particular place than someone who is actually a local!?

Nevertheless, let’s discuss how one may want to go about connecting with a Chinese audience through the use of content.

How to Write Travel-related Articles For a Chinese Audience

Another question you may ask if you do set up an Official Account is what type of articles would a Chinese audience find appealing. To answer this question, let’s take a look at some articles from a few companies.

The below screenshots, for example, are from the company Feekr旅行. This is a popular travel company based in Hangzhou that has combined traditional aspects of travel websites with social media. This way, people who are super passionate about traveling and blogging can share and interact with others who have the same hobby. The company also runs an Official Account that releases articles. Let’s compare and contrast some of their most recently posted articles.

Designing a Travel Article

Before we get into the actual content of these articles, it’s important that we pay attention to how an article is designed. While this may seem a simple feature, design is often an overlooked aspect of how companies succeed, especially when it comes to cross-cultural marketing. 

With this in mind, let’s break down the articles above.

As we can see from the above, each article begins with a title and then the company’s name. There is then a large black-and-white picture followed by text and another picture. This style of mixing text and large pictures continues throughout most of the articles on Feekr’s page. 

Sometimes, these articles also like to mix in a few very short videos to show off a room of a hotel, a scenic view, or a well-cooked dish. This same style is used by Feekr even for sites outside of China, like for hot springs in Japan. Imagery can help people who aren’t interested in reading too much. In these particular screenshots, you can see that the pictures take up more space than the descriptions. 

You can also see that these pictures are very well taken, perhaps even a little edited for more effect. Chinese consumers are more okay with this sort of thing. Not every location looks exactly like they do in these photos, especially ones taken of streets and shops.

Similar to English articles, Chinese articles like these occasionally highlight something important by making the wording larger and bolder.

At the end of many of these articles, readers will often come across different holiday packages and links to the pages where they can make purchases related to the article’s subject.

Of course, articles do not need to be as long or drawn out as the ones above. Feekr also publishes shorter articles with bigger pictures as a header. For example, the below screenshots highlight a very short article that puts all the photos at the top of the screen and allows a user to swipe left and right to see them.

As we can see from the above discussion, there are a lot of similarities between organizing articles for Chinese and English speakers. Even so, it is good to see firsthand how Chinese speakers consume travel-related content on WeChat. Perhaps this was the first time you came in contact with a Chinese article like this!

If you are interested in seeing firsthand what an article like these looks like, feel free to go here.

Comparing Chinese & English Article Design

In some spheres of the English internet, articles are not always designed in the same way as the articles shared above. Let’s go to a few English websites focused on tourism to contrast them to the Chinese articles we shared above.

Here is an article from MSN detailing a trip to Japan (https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/timeless-japan-naturally-an-adventure/ar-BB1kjEIb).

What is different about it compared to the WeChat articles?

The first noticeable aspect is that there are fewer pictures. Additionally, there is a commercial within the text that has nothing to do with the subject of the WeChat article. Just like design and language, every country has a particular advertising culture. Just because it is the norm for some websites to be loaded with commercials in some countries, doesn’t mean all websites in every country are the same.

To highlight this point even further, the user is shown a political video related to Japan after the ad on this site finishes. Such a video may be distracting to a reader, even take them away from the original article they were reading. WeChat’s formula prevents such a format from being used by companies when they craft articles.

Still, not every English website is going to be this different to ones found on WeChat. If we scan articles on Tripadvisor, we find that a common template is used to the Chinese ones we shared.

In the next section, you may find that there are some more striking differences between Chinese and English content.

Creating Article Titles For a Chinese Audience

Now that we have looked at how travel articles are designed for WeChat, let’s dig deeper into their content. We’ll start from the top by looking at the titles of the three articles that were shared.

Looking at these titles, what is your first impression? Sure, for some reading this, these titles are obviously in a foreign language. Ignore that for now. Think back to English class in school. What were some of the lessons your teachers taught about how to properly write a title? Even if you can’t remember, open a few English articles and compare the appearance.

Let’s look at some of the titles of English websites we’ve already shared.

See anything different between these titles and the Chinese ones besides the language that was used? If you said “the length is different”, you’re right! Remember, the rules around English writing came about over hundreds of years, beginning in England. It would make sense that Chinese titles follow different rules!

Now, this isn’t to say you’ll need to be writing articles from right to left and top to bottom like in pre-modern China, Japan, and South Korea. However, these differences do point to a need to shine a light on how Chinese titles contain more than an average English title.

Let’s look at the titles of the original three articles from Feekr.

This article is entitled “最被老饕忽略的广东风味小城！吃的又甜又咸，真的香麻了” or “Foodies Ignore This Guangdong Town & Its Amazing Food! It’s Both Sweet & Salty! The Smell is Amazing Too and it Has a Numbing Taste to It!” 

What are some differences that jump out to you here? If we just look at the Chinese, we see that there are two sentences and that one of them doesn’t end in a period or exclamation mark. This shows pretty quickly that grammar rules are different between the languages.

If we look at the translation, we can see that the language is very descriptive. There are two subjects in this title instead of one: the town and its food. English titles usually are one sentence with one title.

Let’s see if we see any of this in the second title as well.

Once again we see in this title that there is more than one sentence. This time, however, every sentence ends in an exclamation mark. 

This one is entitled “又挖到家门口的宝藏小城！颜值不输苏杭！坐拥千庙山林竹海秘境!” or “I Explored a Hidden Town Right Outside My Front Door Again! It’s Just as Beautiful as Suzhou or Hangzhou! It’s Like Sitting in a Dreamworld Filled With Temples, Mountains, Forests, and Bamboo!”

Again, here we see how this title is more descriptive than most English titles. This title is also written from the perspective of an individual as if they are writing a blog. Perhaps this was done to immerse readers more in the article. Tourism, after all, is all about people being able to leave their home for somewhere new. The best way sometimes to sell a place is not only to describe what one can do at a location, but also to make them feel what it would actually be like to be there.

The language in this title is also very poetic. Non-Chinese speakers may not be able to tell this by just reading the English titles. However, we can see this specially with the use of phrases like 千庙山竹海. These 5 characters alone make up the “temples, mountains, and bamboo” aspect of the second title described. The character 千 here means 1000. Of course, the location described in the related article doesn’t actually have 1000 temples, but it is used here to create imagery. The use of 海 here, which wasn’t translated in the English title, means “ocean”. It is being used in the Chinese to describe how much bamboo can be found at the tourist site.

If you are interested in using articles to attract Chinese tourists in the future, you may wish to hire a native writer to help construct titles like this. We can help with this too!

Let’s check out the last title.

This last title can be translated as “春天最chill的采茶体验！索道直达的云端酒店！还有比这里更值得去的踏春地吗?” or “Enjoy the Chillest Springtime Tealeaf Picking Experience! A Hotel in the Clouds That is Accessible By Cablecar! Is There Anywhere Better For a Spring Outing?”

Like the previous two titles, this one is much longer than what would be found on an English website. This connects back to how Chinese characters take up less space than English and how Chinese grammar rules evolved differently to our own.

In the future, when you’re crafting your own titles for Chinese articles, don’t be afraid to get outside your comfort zone. All of these titles use exclamation marks to show excitement. They aren’t as formal as something you’d find in a lot of English titles. China is still very much in an experimental stage in terms of marketing and business ideas. This was the country where coffee companies recently partnered with Chinese alcohol brands after all! 

Here, we can see that the style of the last two titles has basically stayed the same.

How to Get Creative With Official Account Titles

If we return to the original picture of the three articles, we can see that the title is followed by a black and white image.

These black-and-white pictures actually are illustrations for specific topics that this company regularly likes to talk about. You may notice that two of the illustrations are the same. They both have the topic “假日精选” or “Holiday Selections”. The other one is “最美中国” or “Perfect China”. Breaking down your tourism information into subcategories is a good way to help customers navigate your site. Illustrations like these also add some life to your articles.

One thing to pay attention to here too is that the black-and-white pictures are moving. See the little boat in the background of the last two screenshots? On WeChat, this is actually going back and forth on the screen. Creative imagery like this allows a tourist location to come alive. It’s crucial to remember that China’s online population leans on the younger side. On top of this, cartoons and anime are not viewed as so much a childish thing in Asia in comparison to the United States and Europe. Just look at WeChat’s icon and how there are two chat bubbles with eyes. It is far more common for Chinese apps to use cartoonish elements in their branding than in the West. Therefore, adding a little playful tone to an article may not be a bad idea either.

Just take a look at this graph from Brew Interactive on WeChat’s average user base.

There are probably many more differences between English titles for tourism articles and Chinese ones. For now, the above four are enough. With these in mind, it may be a good idea to write an article in English first and then hire a professional Chinese translator or writer to compose a Chinese version that is more localized for a Chinese audience.

You may even wish to hire a Chinese artist to bring your article alive like in these three. We can help with this as well!

Writing Content For a Chinese Audience

Now that we have gone over the titles of a few articles, let’s check out how the content within these articles is actually written. In a previous section, we went over the style of an article. This not only showed that articles can include information about pricing and provide top-notch photos for consumers to get a taste for a tourist attraction’s experience, but some of the photos also revealed attention to detail when it comes to the food one may enjoy while on vacation.

This may seem like a given, but food is even more important for Chinese citizens than the average American or European. Most Chinese still prefer to go to dinner together on a Friday night instead of getting together for a drink at a bar. Chinese food is well known in every country, but within China itself, there is a deep culture around the subject. Every province, even every city, is known for a special dish. Therefore, any company wanting to attract Chinese tourists may want to pay special attention to cuisine. 

This doesn’t need to be always about 5-star restaurants, especially when many Michelin restaurants in China are seen as suiting Western tastes over Chinese. Chinese tourists are like other tourists in that they want an authentic experience. If there is a local restaurant well-liked by locals, focus on that. It may also be a good idea to do some research into Chinese apps that are similar to Yelp like 大众点评 (Dianping) to see whether Chinese speakers have already left comments regarding a restaurant. Their choices may be different to those of others, especially if it’s regarding a Chinese restaurant or a Chinese food option at a hotel.

Research like this may help you understand what pictures and content to include in your Wechart articles. We can also help you do research into this!

You may also want to pay attention to any local industries that have to do with food. Is there a candy company associated with a town? Did a famous chef once live in a city? Maybe the locals are farmers or fishermen. Maybe there’s a certain soda or alcohol that can’t be found anywhere except a particular state or country. You can never go wrong with food and tourism.

China, like much of Asia, is well-known for its street food. Even in cities where eating on the street isn’t as popular anymore, there are still certain streets known for being a hub for cuisine. Your articles can pay extra attention to places like this.

Besides food, you may want to pay particular attention to the outdoors. There are many reasons for this. First, most wealthier Chinese live in large metropolitan cities. Shanghai and Beijing have large parks with trees and ponds, but they are still manmade. People live further away from nature than the average American or Canadian. This has been one reason why Chinese citizens in recent years have become more and more interested in hobbies like hiking, rock climbing, and camping.

The outdoors doesn’t need to relate to sports either. Maybe a particular town you want to advertise is located in a beautiful environment or is known for its nature at particular times of the year. One company recently decided to focus on how sakura trees bloom in spring in Japan by providing an in-depth look at where tourists can go to see the best colors.

These two topics are certainly the ones Chinese gravitate towards more. This does not mean historical sites like cathedrals and castles aren’t interesting to Chinese. However, keep in mind that European and North American history is a lot less well-known to the average Chinese person. If Chinese tourists are interested in visiting a particular famous building, their interest will first be peaked by its aesthetic appeal. Begin with that in your article and then maybe provide a few details why a site is important to a country or culture.

There are many other topics you may wish to talk about, but for now these are just the basics. In the future, we’d love to spend more time breaking down the content usually found in Chinese tourism articles! For now, if you stick to food, outdoor activities, daily life, and the aesthetic appeal of a location, your articles will certainly gain attention!

How to Make Tourism-related Videos for WeChat

Earlier on, we showed how companies can utilize Official Accounts on Wechat to publish videos as well. There is a lot in common between how one makes videos for TikTok and Wechat. Longer videos like those found on Youtube are probably not your best plan of attack for this style of marketing.

Instead, you may want to hire an influencer to help advertise your tourism site. This may involve an influencer who is already well known in China, but you may also want to hire someone who speaks Chinese to make a few videos about a site. Having someone who speaks Chinese is a good way to show you care about your audience, and you’d be surprised how few Western companies have yet to incorporate this into their marketing, at least with simple videos. 

We can help you find the right talent for this as well, if you’re interested!

Your videos don’t need to be super high-budget either. There are really loads of different ways you may want to approach this.

Chinese videos incorporate a lot of music and humor. Below we have a short video of a man lip syncing a love song on a boat to a woman as he acts out the lyrics in the song. In the background is a lake and the name of the location is written at the top of the video. The video has 69.6K likes and has been shared over 100K times. You may want to do something like this. It’s funny and may become a meme, which in itself may attract Chinese tourists to want to visit the location so that they can make their own version of the meme. You could get extra creative with this as well by incorporating a song that is related to a location. You could even turn it into an English lesson!

On this topic of education, you may also wish to make videos that teach people about a certain place to peak their interest. The below video is telling its viewers what 12 places they should visit before they turn 70. It begins with the topic of the video, and then lists each place one by one. Notice too that relaxing music is playing in the background. Easy listening music like this is still very popular in China. Another benefit to Chinese taking up less space than English is that you can provide more info in a video in a shorter period of time. These videos with lists are a very common format for videos. They make it easier to understand and remember tourist locations.

Another important aspect to remember when writing scripts for videos is that they often begin with a rhetorical question. Rhetorical questions are often used in articles and videos to get a person’s interest. You can see this in the below video.

The below video comes from a channel where a man illustrates his life in Japan. Again, he chooses to use peaceful music. This type of format takes a viewer away from where they are watching the video to where the video is taking place. Anyone viewing the video will think “Hey, this place seems relaxing! I’d love to rent a room for a week or so and experience a life similar to this for a bit to get away from the hustle and bustle of my own life.”

Last, we have a video where a woman explains about the costs of going on a particular trip. Once again, we can see this video shares some common aspects with the earlier videos. Relaxing music. Check. Chinese words over the video to help the viewer follow along with the audio. Check. A rhetorical question to open the video. Check.

We Hope Your Tourism Business in China is a Grand Success!

So, there you have it! Thanks for taking the time to read this breakdown of how to use WeChat to promote a tourist attraction to Chinese consumers. There was certainly a lot to cover and there is certainly much more ground to go over as well. We hope this article helped you at least gain a basic understanding about how WeChat works and what options your business has if it ever wanted to advertise in China. Remember, many of the same essentials you use in other countries apply in China, but there are differences too. If you keep your branding friendly as well as upbeat and you are consistent in publishing content, you’ll surely be successful. A careful mix of relying on good local professionals to localize your product and your own uniqueness as a foreign brand will also get you far.

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Christian Manley is a British American with a Masters on China from the London School of Economics. He has been helping the English-speaking world and East Asia communicate since 2014. In the past, he has worked with gaming and tech companies to learn how to translate and do UI/UX for foreign markets as well as taught English, done game production, and worked as a narrative designer. You can find more of his writing on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-manley-%E5%8F%B8%E9%A6%AC%E5%A4%A9-686a468a/.