13 November 2019 at 9:00 am

Ask New Anything: The campaign in China

China, the biggest outbound international student market in the world, has a unique internet landscape. When it comes to digital marketing, it requires fresh thinking.

zhihu fox
Zhihu's mascot, an arctic fox.

Ask New Anything, ENZ’s latest global, digital campaign, was launched worldwide in early October and a week later in China – after national holiday Golden Week. In China, the campaign leveraged ENZ’s strategic platforms with the help of our digital partner UMS. 

So far, nearly 37 million Chinese have engaged with the campaign and ENZ’s following on WeChat has almost doubled as a result.

To celebrate the success of Ask New Anything in China, we’ve broken down four of our key platforms and explained why they are important when it comes to having a presence in this part of the world.

1. Zhihu

ENZ is the first international education agency in the world to have an official account on Zhihu. This puts ENZ in the company of other well-known international brands such as Audi and Airbnb.

Zhihu is the latest platform to be added to ENZ’s Chinese social portfolio. Like Quora and Reddit, Zhihu is known in China as a space for Q&As, making it a great fit for the Ask New Anything campaign.

Visit our Zhihu account to watch a campaign video developed especially for this platform.

2.WeChat

It was a natural choice to promote Ask New Anything on WeChat.

ENZ is one of the first education agencies in the world to utilise a premium format of WeChat Interactive Ads, and has engaged with 24 million users in our target groups since Ask New Anything began.

WeChat is a mobile app that does almost everything in China. It currently has over one billion active monthly users worldwide and is growing. In China, our audiences use WeChat to connect with brands, with each other, to shop, to order taxis, the list goes on.

ENZ has had an account on WeChat since 2014, and currently has more than 58,500 followers – including prospective Chinese students and their parents. Almost half of these began following the channel in 2019 as a result of a more targeted approach to our campaigns. Through this channel, users can explore what interests them most about studying in New Zealand.

3. WeChat mini-programme: My StudyNZ

ENZ added My StudyNZ to our WeChat portfolio in October 2018. This is a bespoke application developed for the platform.

The mini-programme delivers the same course-matching experience as our global My StudyNZ platform to Chinese audiences, via WeChat.

WeChat mini programme QR code new logo

4. .cn website

Earlier this year, ENZ launched a China version of the student-facing Study in New Zealand website with a China domain (.cn).

This new website overcame issues with accessibility, performance and loading speed in China, and is optimised for Baidu (China’s largest search engine).

cn website

5. Weibo and YouKu

The Ask New Anything campaign also has a presence on Weibo, which remains one of China’s largest social media platforms, and on YouKu, the China equivalent of YouTube.

What's in it for me?