How to start your B2B marketing via Zhihu platform?

How to start your B2B marketing via Zhihu platform?

“Share your knowledge, experience and insights with the world”

If you want to expand your B2B business in China, this article will introduce a useful tool for you. Zhihu, the king of Question and Answer. Like Quora’s Chinese version, it can be a knowledge platform for B2B in China.

This blog post will mainly focus on 3 parts:

  • Zhihu’s introduction
  • How does Zhihu work for B2B?
  • Zhihu’s B2B marketing solution

Zhihu’s introduction

Zhihu, “the king of Question and Answer”

Zhihu, the largest knowledge-sharing platform on the Chinese Internet launched in 2011, with the vision of connecting everything with knowledge. it allows people to easily share knowledge, experience, and insights with the world. As of 2019, Zhihu’s official data shows that the number of users has exceeded 220 million (Data source: public information online).

Zhihu is a comprehensive Q&A platform. As a precise question search engine, which allows marketers to interact more with users on the platform and answer inquiries from different accounts. Correspondingly, the official B2B account can also publish news about itself to attract other users to visit.

Most of Zhihu users are highly educated

Zhihu brings together the most creative people in different fields on the Chinese Internet. Users build trust and connection through knowledge, find interesting high-quality content, and discover and obtain new opportunities. Zhihu has a ground audience group, and most of them are highly educated. According to iResearch data, Zhihu users have a better educational background.

(sources from: 2018 China Knowledge Marketing White Paper-Zhihu case, iResearch)

Among them, 80.1% of them have a bachelor’s degree or above. In the same period, only 20.4% of all Chinese netizens have a bachelor’s degree or above.

A group of youthful users from developed cities

According to the iResearch’s data source in 2017, 98% of Zhihu users are adults, 19-24-year-old group accounts for the largest proportion. Users from the first-tier cities and the new first-tier cities account for nearly 50% of all users.

3 main types of Zhuhu users

We can divide Zhihu’s user groups into three categories: quality life group, knowledge group, trend-following group. Quality life group users are mostly from middle class, pursue fashion, focus on brand, and good style, they are the pursuit of quality life. Knowledge group users focus more on self-improvement and high quality knowledge. They always maintain good reading habits. And the trend-following group users are mainly young people, they have diverse interests and likes New things. They love to play, love to share with others.

Zhihu is a friendly, rational, high-quality, multi-modal knowledge sharing community

Here is the conclusion of Zhihu’s advantages:

  • Zhihu has a wealth of operational experience in a knowledge-sharing community, and since the establishment in 2011, Zhihu has always maintained a strong competitiveness.
  • Zhihu has high-quality user groups, high-quality Q&A knowledge contents, and strong algorithms.
  • Zhihu’s early users were mostly elites in the Internet and finance fields. As an elite Q&A community, it occupied the minds of users and formed a better community atmosphere.
  • It can be seen from Zhihu’s several rounds of financing that the investment field has always maintained recognition of Zhihu’s commercial value, and sufficient financial support is also an effective guarantee for Zhihu’s rapid development.

How does Zhihu work for B2B?

What is Zhihu institutional account (“机构号” in Chinese)?

The official definition of “Zhihu Institutional Account” indicates that “institutional account” is a dedicated free account for institutional users, which is independent of the original personal accounts in the community. Its users are organizations with formal qualifications, including but not limited to scientific research institutes, non-profit organizations, and government institutions, media, enterprises, etc. Hereinafter referred to as institutional account. It is similar to managing official brand accounts on LinkedIn. The higher quality of the questions and answers, the higher the brand awareness. Here is an example of an Institutional account of Siemens China. We can see it seems like a professional website page on the Zhihu platform which involves many useful functions.

Zhihu’s B2B marketing solution

Make your account become a key opinion leader

The institutional account on Zhihu can do many things for your brand and business. In conclusion, there are three main significance of owning an institutional account.

  • Zhihu is a high quality new channel that currently has 13 million daily active users, 5 billion monthly page views, and 33 minutes per capita visit time. (source from: Zhihu column)
  • Zhihu is a efficient tool for PR and crisis public relations. Zhihu netizens are often keen to conduct “logically rigorous”/”convincing” analysis of new events, so this has also become an important battlefield for determining the direction of public opinion.
  • Zhihu can help you acquire high-value fans. In addition to PR and negative control, with the birth of the agency account, another function may soon be on the stage-a good brand agency account will help to obtain more followers who have high NPS values (net promoter socre).

Moreover, an institutional account has some practical functions, including answer, post articles, questions, comment management, and participation in community interaction. Here, you can do most thing that you want for your business. Do not hesitate and start your knowledge marketing right now!

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