Dubai Free Trade Zone Increases Leads With New China Social Channels

DMCC is a world-leading Dubai free zone facilitating global merchandise trade. DMCC provides customers with everything they need to set up a company and shape their business. It has been named the world's "Free Zone of the Year" by the "Financial Times" fDi magazine for six consecutive years.

DMCC's main goal with Oxygen was to generate China brand awareness to increase company registrations. This case study demonstrates how Oxygen uses various different China marketing tools to bring in record registrations for DMCC from China.

DMCC had a WeChat official "subscription" account that needed migration to a "service" account for better article exposure.

Baidu ads worked well but it could use some enhancement from other supplementary marketing services.

The submission form on the DMCC website didn't convert well as Chinese internet users weren't accustomed to filling in a form.

DMCC had limited marketing staff in China, so they hoped to improve the efficiency of customer acquisition through automated marketing workflows.

DMCC hoped to gain more SEO content exposure on search engines through other authoritative Chinese platforms.

This calls for Oxygen's China marketing expertise.

The Solution

Through the integration of multiple China marketing platforms, Oxygen developed a brand new automated conversion process from marketing to sales for DMCC.

We created a service account for DMCC and migrated the current subscription account to the new service account. With a new WeChat service account, DMCC gained over 500% readership of their published articles. The open rate was as high as 30% (compared to the WeChat industry average of 3%). The user-optimized design enhanced the content viewing experience, which made the DMCC content more readable.

DMCC WeChatofficial

DMCC's WeChat Official Service Account Backend

Oxygen created a Zhihu enterprise account for DMCC to publish articles and Q&As. The Zhihu platform has a high authority on Chinese search engines which makes it possible for content posted on the website to rank well organically.

With 1K+ page views, DMCC's Zhihu enterprise account contributed 50,000+ impressions to the DMCC WeChat service account, along with 8,000+ traffic to the highest performing Q&A page.

In less than 8 months, the DMCC Zhihu enterprise account received almost 40,000 blog reads. Compared to the 61 blog reads from the original WeChat official subscription account, this is almost a 656x increase in Zhihu blog impressions.

DMCC zhihu

DMCC's Zhihu Performance

Chinese users typically aren’t accustomed to submitting contact forms for communication. The common practice in China is for local users to be able to “Add as Friend” on their WeChat accounts for direct engagement with a business’s WeCom.

These communication tools are all within the WeChat ecosystem so messaging is seamlessly integrated between a user's personal WeChat and a business’s WeCom. Customer digital assets and conversation history are all kept within the DMCC WeCom account.

DMCC's WeCom received 450+ new WeChat “friend Requests”.

DMCCwecom

Registering DMCC's WeCom account

Parllay improved customer retention and sales performance through personalized marketing. 48.7% of new WeChat followers were successfully converted into potential customers. 7.67% of new WeChat followers left their contact information after completing the new follower automated nurturing workflow. Up to 22.5% of followers actively engaged with new content.

With marketing automation, we were able to re-engaged 23.8% of potential customers who clicked “to contact” but did not successfully complete the process. Multi-channel attribution of new followers allowed us to see which channel performed best.

DMCC parllay

Using Parllay to create lead source attribution QR codes for each unique channel

Every event held by DMCC was simultaneously promoted on Huodongxing for free exposure and registration. At the Shenzhen roadshow event, DMCC decided to spend 10,000 yuan on Huodongxing for SMS marketing. This enabled DMCC to send event text messages to 10,000 target users.

In the end, 270 applications were received, and the conversion rate was as high as 2.7%. The acquisition cost of a B2B single user is 37 yuan. Among them, there were many well-known enterprises and institutions such as Huawei, OPPO, state agencies, and investment institutions.

DMCC huodongxing

Many events have been posted on Huodongxing to increase event registration

From branching out into additional China social media platforms, Oxygen was able to launch DMCC into the Baidu search spotlight with a #1 ranking for Dubai free trade zone-related content.

DMCC's WeCom received over 450 new "friend requests".

Parllay converted 48.7% of new WeChat followers into potential customers through an automated lead nurturing workflow.

Huodongxing boosted webinar registrations to 270 businesses interested in company formation in Dubai.

This massively helped DMCC achieve the “highest number of monthly company registrations in the past 7 years”.

2020 is also the year with the largest number of Chinese company registrations in the history of DMCC.

+500%

WeChat Article Views

+50K

Zhihu Page Visits

>450

New WeChat Contacts

>48%

WeChat Follower Conversion

>270

Event Registrations

We have been working closely with Oxygen for two years to launch our China Digital Strategy. Oxygen has helped connect to the Chinese markets through digital campaigns, HubSpot integrations with Chinese social media platforms, and strong content development in Mandarin and traditional Chinese. Their efforts helped us quickly reach our lead targets from China and we are continuing to see improvements with digital. They have also helped us launch our thought leadership program which we are very pleased with. We consider Oxygen as a strategic marketing partner in our work and they have a wonderful team in Hong Kong. I value our relationship.

Charles Tomas Thoren

Head of Marketing - Analytics & Operations, DMCC

As a continuation of our success with the DMCC China campaign, our team is working on further marketing activation campaigns with the DMCC team. This includes updates to the DMCC China website for ongoing offers as well as managing advertising campaigns across Baidu and WeChat to reach audiences in China. Other than DMCC's China website and paid advertisements, our team also actively manages DMCC's Zhihu, Weibo, and Parllay accounts to track performance for campaign reporting.

Our partnership flourishes as we strive to innovate on ways to increase company registrations for DMCC in China.

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