Golden Week in China begins with National Day on the 1^st October. National Day celebrates the founding of the People’s Republic of China, although the idea of a ‘National Day’ can be traced back as early as the Western Jin Dynasty (265-316AD). Following the day is one of the longest holiday periods that Chinese workers get, so it is often used as an opportunity to travel. With Chinese consumers looking to spend a week enjoying themselves, Golden Week presents the perfect opportunity for Western luxury and travel brands to attract an affluent customer base that is willing to spend large amounts of money on their product and services.

Here are some of the tactics you can use to find and engage Chinese travellers during Golden Week.

Chinese social media marketing on Weibo

As one of the best networks in China for brand interaction, Weibo gives you the chance to amass a base of loyal followers to whom you can market. Theming your marketing around a certain event is always a good way to attract attention, and can work particularly well on social media. A good example of this is the car manufacturer Audi, who last year ran a Weibo campaign entitled ‘Audi’s Destinations’, where they asked their followers to use the hashtag #Audi’s Destinations# to submit travel photos, their intended destinations, and the model of Audi they were driving in order to win an exclusive limited edition Audi tent. The campaign lasted from the beginning of October until the end of Golden Week, ensuring that the brand was strongly tied in with the travel theme during this important national holiday.

WeChat marketing

With WeChat active number of monthly users hitting 438 million, and the app far outperforming other social networks in term of the average amount of time spent on them, WeChat is clearly a powerful tool to find and engage your target market. With the WeChat Payments platform, you can easily create a one-stop shop for your customers. Hotels can allow users to find and book rooms, luxury brands can take orders. You can run exclusive promotions that are targeted to specific user groups (using multiple criteria such as age, location, gender, etc), and use limited availability or time period to generate quick sales or bookings during Golden Week.

KOL promotions

KOL (Key Opinion Leaders) are people or companies that are experts in their field or industry. They are followed because of their knowledge and insights, and have a reputation for being trustworthy and genuine. They attract a large number of shares and generate big impressions thanks to their many followers, and the perceived integrity of the information they share. Finding and engaging KOLs from your industry and securing mentions, shares and endorsements of your advertising, content or product can help you get noticed by a large group of people who will respond to what they see as a genuine recommendation. Engaging KOLs online should be a vital part of your social media strategy. They can be identified by a capital ‘V’ after their username: green for an individual; blue for a corporate account.

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