5 Genius Chinese New Year Ideas to Amp Up Your Marketing

Chinese New Year is just around the corner. This festive season offers companies a unique opportunity to showcase their offerings while highlighting their culture and business values.

One-sixth of the global population celebrates Chinese New Year, making it one of the biggest annual celebrations in the world. And this year, we'll celebrate it on the 12th of February.

This is the perfect time to boost engagement with your existing and new customers. Businesses are now starting to hand out promos and put up decorations to attract customers. You should too.

Make the most of your marketing this Chinese New Year. Here are creative ideas to help you make your campaign a success.

5 Attention-Grabbing Marketing Ideas for Chinese New Year

Feature all other lucky symbols

2021 is the Year of the Ox. The Ox denotes hard work, positivity, and honesty. Other popular Chinese symbols like the dragon, Neko cat, good luck gong, and lanterns will be great additions to your marketing campaign.

Taobao, a Chinese online shopping platform reached a whopping RMB350 billion as of September 30, 2020 — all thanks to Taobao Live. The company also updated its user interface to recreate a famous painting that is easily relatable to its target audience. 

This smart customisation instantly connected with the customers and attracted several buyers, increasing the number of transactions to give incredible results.

Engage customers through contests

While it's good to invest in brand ambassadors and influencers, customer engagement is still the most powerful marketing technique.

And one of the best ways to keep your customers engaged is through contests.

Contests expand your audience. It can help you reach global customers, build your community, and get more subscribers.

Contests can also drive customer engagement. The more people like, comment, and share your posts, the more attention you'll receive.

In 2013, Coca-Cola provided a digital platform for its customers to nominate those who made them happy. Launched during Chinese New Year, the campaign garnered 650,000 uploads making it a major hit.

Connect and engage with your customers by launching enticing social media contests and campaigns.

Create heartwarming marketing campaigns

The Chinese New Year is full of positive emotions of hope, love, prosperity, and happiness. Brands that can tap into the emotions of their customers get higher success rates.

Customers are more likely to recollect your brand if it made a strong connection. Remember, a great story is 22 times more memorable than facts. 

Apple created an ad called Three Minutes that centred on customers who aren't able to take time away from work to be with their loved ones during the holiday season. The video promoted the iPhone X's video capturing feature while creating a strong connection with the audience.

Showcase your company's culture

While businesses promote content and videos that talk about the customer, rarely do businesses talk about their own people. Although this is still largely unexplored, the good news is that the customer appreciates content that helps them connect with the brand better and understand what happens behind the scenes. 

For Chinese New Year, We Are Social showcased its team celebrations on its social media which received a great response from its customers. The employees showcased their work culture and values and tapped into the audience’s emotions.

Surprise your employees and coworkers this Chinese New Year with gifts and celebrations in your workplace and capture these moments to be shared with the world.

Decorate your office with everything red

Red is associated with wealth in Chinese culture, and you will find every enterprise, store, and home using it to the fullest to attract prosperity.

Make sure to decorate your workplace with red lanterns and lucky symbols to set the festive mood.

Product companies can incorporate red themes in their user interface — and even include some themes for the festive season.

Alipay, the leading online payment app in China, created a futuristic Augmented Reality (AR) campaign which gave out the red packets to its customers as a gift. Hong Bao, or the red envelope, is widely used for gifting money or gift cards during the Chinese New Year.

Similar to the location-based game Pokemon Go, Alipay had users search and collect virtual Hong Bao and scan objects to play with friends.

Make a solid online connection

Connecting with customers is critical to any marketing campaign, Chinese New Year or not. Well-thought-out campaigns that evoke the right emotions tend to help businesses in the long run.

This year, create an online avenue for your customers. Invest in a feature-packed web hosting plan that gets your online presence up and running in no time.

Hope the year of the Ox brings peace and happiness! Take a cue from these ideas and create successful marketing campaigns for your business.