This post is the final in a four-part series about using Tencent advertising to reach Chinese international students, based on a recent webinar with Silvia Zeng, Tencent’s Senior Business Development Manager for New Markets.

In our previous post, we delved into how to use Tencent’s advertising features to target users at the Awareness and Engagement stages of their journey. In this post, we’ll look at how to use Tencent’s advertising features to target users at the Conversion and Advocacy stages of their journey.

Conversion

WeChat Official account in-text ads

Tencent has recently released a new ad format, the WeChat Official Account in-text ad. This is similar to the WeChat Official Account banner ads, but rather than appearing at the bottom of articles, they appear in the middle, where users tend to be more engaged. According to Zeng, this ad format is performing well and they have observed a very positive benchmark CTR, which is why she thinks they could be particularly suited to targeting students at the conversion stage.

Tencent news video ads

Parents play a significant role in the decision to study overseas – research for our whitepaper The Learning Dragon shows they are involved in the decision in 68% of cases. This is not surprising when you consider that parents often pay partially or wholly for the extensive costs related to international study. That’s why it’s especially crucial to ensure parents are on board at the conversion stage.

Tencent News video ads are a key way of targeting parents of prospective students, as the Tencent News userbase tends to be older and highly educated – around 72% of users have higher education qualifications.

Optimisation tips

Based on the performance of an ad campaign by the University of New South Wales, Zeng shared some tips for optimising campaigns at this stage:

1

Focus on the students rather than the destination

Ads featuring students and showing campus life performed better than those featuring scenery, buildings, landscapes or icons like the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

2

Focus on your USP

Taglines that reflect what sets you apart, and focus on cold hard facts do much better with students. One tagline that worked particularly well for UNSW touted the fact that UNSW is one of the top 8 universities in Australia.

3

Take advantage of Tencent's machine learning technology

Once you’ve come to the limit of A/B testing, and the cost per lead has stabilised, machine learning can be enabled. With Tencent’s optimised cost per action (OPAC), you can set a controlled cost per lead, and the machine sets up a placement model to find more of your target audience automatically.

4

Streamline your landing page

Long landing pages with lots of questions that require users to click through several pages will result in a lot of churn. Ensure your landing page is ideally on a single page, or at the most two pages, with no more than 5 fields that users have to fill in. You should also ensure the benefit to students is clearly displayed at the top.

Advocacy

This stage is about building deeper relationships with your Chinese international students and alumni, while also making the most of all the data you have collected so far to take your marketing to the next level.

Analyse your Official Account followers, users who have interacted with your ads in the past year, and data collected from landing pages and roadshows to create detailed personas to help you further refine your messaging.

You could also use Tencent’s lookalike and relationship expansion features to target similar users as well as your current followers’ friends, families and colleagues to identify more leads.