Nowadays, online marketing is increasingly recognized by businesses, and WeChat marketing is gaining even more momentum. The "Travel with Love, Pray at Guanyinshan" series of events primarily used WeChat as the main medium of communication. Travel influencers posted photos and text on their personal WeChat Moments under the hashtag #TravelWithLovePrayAtGuanyinshan, inviting people to like and comment. This approach helped raise awareness about Guangdong Guanyinshan National Forest Park, encouraged followers to follow the park’s official WeChat account dg-guanyinshan, and enabled the scenic area to effectively spread its message directly within the travel influencers' own social circles.
With just a smartphone and platforms like WeChat and Weibo, information can be shared across regions, time zones, and spaces anytime, anywhere. The second phase of the December "Travel with Love, Pray at Guanyinshan" event has now successfully concluded. During this campaign, five travel influencers who participated in prayer activities at Guangdong Guanyinshan National Forest Park published a total of 66 WeChat posts, accumulating a total of 5,428 likes on their Moments. Among them, the grand prize winner, travel photographer Li Qiang @SweepingSnow-FilmImage, earned the title of "WeChat Popularity King" by posting 17 WeChat updates and receiving a total of 3,509 likes and comments.
Based on these two sets of data, one can easily conclude that in the process of WeChat marketing for tourist attractions, the absolute factors influencing effective communication—i.e., earning likes and prompting interactive comments—are, first, the number of friends the poster has, and second, the content of the WeChat post. The number of friends determines how many people can interact when you ask for likes, while the content of the post determines whether it is worthy of being liked or commented on.
In this event, the friends who liked the posts of the five travel influencers came from various provinces and regions across the country, with some as close as Dongguan, where the scenic area is located. Through the "Travel with Love, Pray at Guanyinshan" series of activities, Dongguan Guanyinshan Scenic Area leveraged the travel influencers’ WeChat Moments for direct WeChat-based communication, thereby enhancing the visibility and reputation of “Guanyinshan.”
Screenshots of WeChat posts published by the influencers
Both WeChat Moments marketing and official WeChat account marketing fall under the umbrella of “micro-marketing.” Though different, they share similarities. Official WeChat marketing utilizes the platform itself to keep followers informed about the scenic area and enables direct interaction. WeChat Moments marketing, on the other hand, focuses more on promotion. It leverages personal WeChat accounts associated with the scenic area—such as those belonging to participants in the "Travel with Love, Pray at Guanyinshan" campaign, who were mostly photography enthusiasts in the travel industry—and uses their personal networks to achieve targeted communication within their specific circles.
What both WeChat Moments marketing and official WeChat account marketing have in common is that content is king. Content is the key to successful micro-marketing—it’s about marketing through rich, engaging content, not just producing content for the sake of marketing. In the context of tourism micro-marketing, simple scenic introductions are unlikely to capture visitors’ attention. Instead, sharing travel guides, money-saving tips, road trip advice, food recommendations, and similar content tends to attract more interest. Moreover, insights from influential travelers can generate stronger resonance and spark the desire to visit, as in: “I want to go there too.” For instance, during the "Travel with Love, Pray at Guanyinshan" campaign, when travel influencers posted photos and text about Guanyinshan on their WeChat Moments, they weren’t just acting as travel influencers—they became content creators and promoters of the Guanyinshan Scenic Area.
From newspapers and radio to television, and then to new media. The arrival of the new media era has fostered the flourishing of user-generated content and expanded the possibilities for tourism micro-marketing. Compared to traditional marketing methods in the tourism industry, tourism micro-marketing represents an emerging, low-cost, and high-efficiency promotional model. Tourism self-media marketing brings the “real world” vividly into the “virtual” online space for sharing and interaction, achieving a marketing effect where small efforts yield big returns. Through exploring the "Travel with Love, Pray at Guanyinshan" series of events at Guanyinshan Scenic Area, we find that the key to innovative and practical WeChat-based online marketing lies in the communicators—or participants.