Line Marketing
How to best utilize LINE to market your business
LINE App is the most popular messaging platform in Thailand and parts of Asia, surpassing even Facebook messenger and WhatsApp. In a growing and fast-paced world it is important to be in the right place at the right time to be seen by your customers, and for large parts of Asia, LINE App is the place to be.
Differing from other social apps in many ways, LINE offers you several approaches in order to market your brand, both in awareness and sales. From the wildly popular LINE stickers to Exclusive Offers to LINE Point ads, you can find the best marketing strategy for you to get the most out of LINE, and reach a large new group of people.
What is Line App?
Originally from Japan, LINE was generally released by 2012 as a messenger app but soon grew to be so much more. It is now a huge social platform and has millions and millions of users, allowing phone and video chatting but also games, tools, music, video streaming and payment services, among others.
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- One particularly popular feature which has lasted through from the beginning is the LINE Stickers, of which billions are sent a year, making this a great way to connect with customers as you will see below. In the last couple of years in particular, LINE has branched out more and more into key areas like payment and shopping, creating a great platform to market your brand.
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- Large numbers of people in Asia spend huge amounts of time on the LINE app, using it to stay in contact but also for delivery and many other daily uses. It is an excellent way to increase your brand awareness, increase sales and generally connect with a huge customer base.
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Line Stickers
LINE Stickers are arguably one of the most popular features of the app and a great way to market your brand. People have found an extensive sticker collection to be something of a status symbol within the app, with customers using them to show emotions. There are two ways for businesses to utilize these stickers; you can sell them or create a ‘Mission Sticker’ instead.
By creating a ‘Mission Sticker’, a sticker you can only get once you have completed a specific mission, you can gain brand awareness and sales, requiring that people add your official account as a friend (permitting you to message them in the future easily) or even purchase a specific product. This is a great way to utilize LINE’s own popular feature with stickers that are unique to this platform and reaching customers you might not otherwise see, gaining a large base quickly.
Exclusive Offers
Similarly to LINE stickers, which can take time to create, the Exclusive Offers service also creates a mission of sorts, requiring the user to add you as a friend to gain access to a particular deal or discount. Much like trying to gain more email addresses through such offers, the key to this strategy is gaining another user as a friend. You can use either or both of the above strategies to build up a large following and again allow you to increase brand awareness and reach more people.
Line Point Ads
Line Point Ads are another way to interact with the users of this popular app. The general idea is that people have to complete whichever activity it is, be it adding you as a friend, watching a video or download an app, in order to achieve a certain number of LINE points. These points can then be used as currency to purchase stickers or other items that are central to LINE. Again this is a great way to interact with people and have them add themselves to your database or watch your ad while feeling there is something in it for them, ensuring they will pay more attention.
By creating a ‘Mission Sticker’, a sticker you can only get once you have completed a specific mission, you can gain brand awareness and sales, requiring that people add your official account as a friend (permitting you to message them in the future easily) or even purchase a specific product. This is a great way to utilize LINE’s own popular feature with stickers that are unique to this platform and reaching customers you might not otherwise see, gaining a large base quickly.
Once you’re friends…
To join LINE as a business you need to create a LINE Official Account, under your own name, in order to communicate with your followers. Once you have been added by the user as a friend it is easy to send them messages with information or promotions about your brand. As they receive a notification on arrival many messages do get opened and raise your brand awareness, while there has been success with messages that include offers. You can also post on their timeline and hope to engage people more with likes and comments.
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- One way to gain the most out of these messages is to make them ‘rich’. A ‘rich message’ includes much more information than normal, including lots of images, text and other links. You can reply to users based on certain keywords automatically, and even use the survey feature available to gain research on your followers, like purchasing habits, to better help you adapt your marketing strategy. Keyword-specific messages are a great way to ensure that you are sending the information you wish to extend to the correct target market, and the more you have in common, the more likely it is that they will engage with your brand and convert to sales.
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