B2B and industrial marketing in China: a B2B marketing agency's guide

In China, a B2B supplier’s home base is WeChat (微信), and its sales team talks to buyers in WeCom (企业微信). Social media won’t replace the request for quote. It helps decide whose name is on the list when the request goes out.

Many industrial brands arrive in China with a LinkedIn plan and a trade show budget. The first no longer works there. The booth works fine, right up until it comes down. A B2B marketing agency in China works on what happens in between: helping technical buyers find you, then moving the conversation to a sales rep who can answer them.

Here’s the job each channel does.

Channel	Job for a B2B brand	What you publish	What you track
WeChat (微信) service account	The home base buyers check	Case stories, product pages, event news	Follows from search, inquiries
WeCom (企业微信)	The sales conversation	Rep chats, customer groups	Contacts added, quotes sent
Zhihu (知乎)	Expert answers	Technical answers, long articles	Reads, profile visits
Bilibili (哔哩哔哩)	Long technical video	Explainers, factory tours	Watch time, questions asked
Douyin (抖音), Xiaohongshu (小红书)	Reach end users and engineers	Short demos, how-to notes	Searches for your name
Trade shows	Meeting buyers in person	Live demos, booth content	WeCom contacts added

If you haven’t launched, start with the first two rows. If your accounts are live and inquiries are flat, skip to the WeCom section. Every source on this page was checked twice in October 2026.

How B2B buying works in China

Start with the order itself. Most industrial buying in China still runs on quotes, not online checkout.

China’s market for maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) supplies reached 3.7 trillion yuan in 2024. Digital purchasing was under a tenth of it, and the main model is still request-for-quote, with buyers sourcing, comparing prices and verifying suppliers themselves. Source: KPMG China (毕马威), China industrial e-commerce white paper, November 2025. https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmgsites/cn/pdf/zh/2025/11/china-s-industrial-e-commerce-high-quality-development-white-paper-2025.pdf

That last clause is the marketing brief. Buyers find and vet suppliers on their own. A foreign supplier has to be findable in Chinese, and look serious about China when someone checks.

The Western tool for that job is gone.

LinkedIn had closed its social networking features in China two years earlier. In May 2023, it said its China job app (领英职场) would stop service on August 9, 2023. Source: China National Radio (央广网), May 2023. https://tech.cnr.cn/ycbd/20230509/t20230509_526245629.shtml

Where do Chinese buyers research suppliers now? We looked for a dated survey of the social channels they use and found none. What we can say is where the tools sit: WeChat (微信) for the company profile, WeCom (企业微信) for the sales chat.

Two kinds of B2B brand come to China. One sells to a procurement team, such as parts for a factory line. The other sells through the trade to an end user who makes the choice, like a homeowner picking a boiler. That second kind also needs Douyin (抖音) and Xiaohongshu (小红书), where households do their homework. Our B2B teardown of Viessmann and iGuzzini covers it in depth.

WeChat as the pipeline, not the magazine

Nearly everyone a B2B seller wants to reach in China already uses WeChat (微信).

WeChat and its international version reached 1.439 billion combined monthly active accounts in the second quarter of 2026, up 2% year on year. Source: Tencent Holdings Q2 2026 results, reported by Jiemian (界面新闻) via 21st Century Business Herald (21财经), August 2026. https://m.21jingji.com/article/20260812/herald/0c6b89715bfa13d4ecf96e41a685bdcd.html

A foreign company gets one kind of account.

An overseas company can register one Official Account, and overseas regions support the service account type only. The account works only after verification. Source: Tencent customer service (腾讯客服), confirmed October 2026. https://kf.qq.com/faq/180312zQjeYV180312FNNbmA.html

A service account can push articles to followers four times per calendar month. Unused pushes do not carry over. Source: Tencent customer service (腾讯客服), confirmed October 2026. https://kf.qq.com/faq/120911VrYVrA131025QniAfu.html

Four pushes a month is not a magazine schedule. Many B2B accounts run it like one anyway, posting company news nobody asked for. If that’s your account, your agency may have done exactly what the brief said, so fix the brief first. Run the account as a pipeline instead. The menu leads to product pages, case stories and a button that opens a chat with an engineer. Each article answers a question buyers type into search.

Search is how many of them arrive.

WeChat Search reached 800 million monthly active users in 2022 and brought in 27% of new Official Account followers. Source: WeChat Search team at WeChat Open Class PRO 2023, reported by 199IT on Sina Tech (新浪科技), January 2023. https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/roll/2023-01-10/doc-imxztfeh2280083.shtml

Tencent hasn’t published a newer split. An engineer who searches for a valve standard should find your article, and it should end with a way to ask.

The private layer: WeCom, groups and the sales handoff

WeCom (企业微信) is the business version of WeChat (微信). Your reps chat from work accounts, and the buyer stays in the WeChat they already use.

WeCom connects more than 14 million companies and organizations, and companies serve more than 750 million WeChat users a day through it. Source: Xinhua (新华网), August 2025. http://www.news.cn/tech/20250820/fbe9a69fd7a742629cf8275238bb7b91/c.html

For a B2B seller, the point is ownership. On a rep’s personal WeChat, the contacts leave when the rep does. In WeCom they stay with the company.

A company can list the customers of every employee who has left and reassign them to other staff. Source: WeCom developer center (企业微信开发者中心), December 2023. https://developer.work.weixin.qq.com/document/path/92124

The same goes for a rep who changes territory.

A company can move an active employee’s customers and customer groups to a colleague, and they become contacts automatically after 24 hours. Source: WeCom help center (企业微信帮助中心), September 2026. https://open.work.weixin.qq.com/help2/pc/14704

Plan two limits before the first campaign.

Each company gets 2,000 WeCom external contacts free. An unverified company can add only 100. Source: WeCom help center (企业微信帮助中心), confirmed October 2026. https://open.work.weixin.qq.com/help2/pc/21326

A WeCom account verified as an overseas company does not support some functions, including external payment collection, conversation archiving and the third-party app marketplace. Review usually takes one to three working days. Source: WeCom help center (企业微信帮助中心), June 2026. https://open.work.weixin.qq.com/help2/pc/16535

Conversation archiving matters most to compliance teams. If you need chat records kept, settle how before the first rep goes live.

The lead flow below is the one our Viessmann case study describes, set beside a procurement sale.

Step	Viessmann, as its case study describes it	A procurement sale
1. Content raises a question	Douyin (抖音) videos, Xiaohongshu (小红书) reviews	WeChat articles, Zhihu (知乎) answers, booth demos
2. The buyer asks in WeCom	“What size system do I need?”	Specs, lead times, certificates
3. The sale closes	Tmall (天猫), JD (京东), distributors	Quote, then contract or distributor order
4. The same thread serves	Installation, maintenance	Delivery, spare parts, the next order

“One conversation from first question to long-term client.” Source: TheRedScroll, Viessmann case study, October 2026. https://www.theredscroll.com/work/viessmann/

The step most programs skip sits between 2 and 3: the CRM. Tag every WeCom contact with its source when it’s added, then sync it to your CRM (the one your sales team already uses, not a new one). Our CRM and Private Domain Traffic service page covers how that connector works for Salesforce, HubSpot or Dynamics.

Trade content: white papers, standards and specifications

This next part is for the procurement sellers. Technical buyers read spec sheets, and in China they also read the national standard behind the spec.

China had 48,000 national standards at the end of the 2021 to 2025 plan period, after 13,000 were made or revised in those five years. Source: State Administration for Market Regulation (市场监管总局) press conference, reported by China News Service (中国新闻网), January 2026. https://www.chinanews.com.cn/cj/2026/01-29/10561626.shtml

By law, the texts of mandatory standards are published free to the public. Source: China National Institute of Standardization (中国标准化研究院), Standardization Law (标准化法), Article 17, as revised November 2017. https://www.cnis.ac.cn/bzhzs/flfg/201812/t20181229_31982.html

There’s your content outline, already written. Map each product to the Chinese standard it meets, in Chinese, with the standard number. An engineer who searches the standard should land on your explainer.

Foreign companies can help write those standards, too.

At the end of 2024, members from foreign-invested companies sat on 837 national technical committees for standards, 61% of the total. They can take part at every stage, from proposing a standard to drafting and review. Source: State Administration for Market Regulation (市场监管总局) at a State Council briefing, reported by China News Service (中国新闻网), February 2025. https://www.chinanews.com.cn/cj/2025/02-20/10371510.shtml

If your engineers sit on one, say so in Chinese. It’s proof a buyer can check.

White papers work as well. Put the summary in a WeChat (微信) article and send the full file through a rep in WeCom (企业微信), so the download starts a conversation. One legal rule applies.

China’s Advertising Law requires data, statistics and quotations used in advertising to be true and accurate, with the source stated. Source: Advertising Law of the People’s Republic of China (中华人民共和国广告法), Article 11, as amended October 2018. https://www.gov.cn/guoqing/2021-10/29/content_5647620.htm

Mapped to the buyer’s path, it looks like this.

Stage	Content	Platform	What it asks the reader to do
Problem	Explainer on a standard or a failure mode	Zhihu (知乎), WeChat article	Follow, save
Options	Comparison of approaches, a buyer’s checklist	WeChat article, Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) video	Add a rep in WeCom
Proof	Case story, test data, factory video	WeChat, Bilibili, Douyin (抖音)	Ask for a reference
Specification	Chinese spec sheet, standards compliance	WeCom (sent by the rep)	Request a quote
After the sale	Installation and maintenance guides	WeCom groups, Bilibili	Reorder, refer

Where Zhihu and Bilibili fit for technical buyers

Don’t expect leads from either one. What you get is a place in front of people who are learning the subject.

Zhihu (知乎) is China’s large question-and-answer site.

Zhihu held about 993 million pieces of content from 81.5 million content creators, according to its second-quarter 2026 results. Source: Zhihu Q2 2026 results, reported by Sina Tech (新浪科技), August 2026. https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/it/2026-08-26/doc-iniprums2390218.shtml

It also feeds Chinese AI assistants, on a small test.

In a test of 30 questions put to seven Chinese AI assistants, including DeepSeek, Doubao and Yuanbao, Zhihu was the most cited content community, at 29.9%, far ahead of Bilibili at 7.6%. The test logged 630 valid answers. Source: QbitAI think tank (量子位智库), May 2025. https://www.qbitai.com/2025/05/285761.html

Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) is best known for long video, and a lot of it is learning.

230 million users learned professional knowledge on Bilibili in 2025, and about 16 million watch technology videos every day. Source: Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) 2025 ESG report, April 2026. https://ir.bilibili.com/media/vj4brykg/bilibili-2025%E7%92%B0%E5%A2%83-%E7%A4%BE%E6%9C%83%E5%8F%8A%E7%AE%A1%E6%B2%BB%E5%A0%B1%E5%91%8A.pdf

Bilibili averaged 371 million monthly active users in the second quarter of 2026. Source: Bilibili Q2 2026 results, reported by Securities Times (证券时报), August 2026. https://www.stcn.com/article/detail/4143348.html

Neither platform says how many engineers or buyers use it for work, and we found no survey that does. Use each for what it does well: a Zhihu answer on why a seal fails at high temperature, say. Bilibili suits the longer stuff, like a pump teardown or the factory tour you’d give a visiting customer.

Trade shows and the social layer around them

No country has more indoor exhibition space.

China held 4,095 economic and trade exhibitions in 2025, covering 159 million square meters, up 6.53% and 2.5%. Its indoor exhibition space is the largest in the world, at 30.9% of the global total. Source: China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (中国贸促会), China exhibition economy report 2025, reported by Xinhua (新华社), January 2026. https://www.ccpit.org/a/20260124/20260124af3c.html

For a foreign B2B brand, two Shanghai shows are the obvious place to start:

Show	City	2026 dates	Who it suits
China International Import Expo (进博会)	Shanghai	November 5 to 10	Foreign brands selling into China
China International Industry Fair (工博会)	Shanghai	October 12 to 16	Industrial equipment makers

The 2025 Import Expo drew 4,108 exhibitors from 138 countries and regions and more than 460,000 registered visitors. Source: Xinhua (新华网), November 2025. http://www.news.cn/world/20251110/1fd60ca4e4e34f38a244fcbb3a3ed96d/c.html

The 2026 Import Expo is scheduled for November 5 to 10 at the National Exhibition and Convention Center in Shanghai. Trade visitors register on its website, app or Mini Program, and a WeCom (企业微信) help desk answers questions. Source: China International Import Expo (中国国际进口博览会), May 2026. https://www.ciie.org/zbh/bqgffb/20260529/61291.html

The 26th Industry Fair was scheduled for October 12 to 16, 2026, at the National Exhibition and Convention Center in Shanghai. Source: People’s Daily Online (人民网), September 2026. http://sh.people.com.cn/n2/2026/0924/c134768-41707053.html

Look at the Import Expo’s own setup. Registration runs through a Mini Program. The help desk is a WeCom account. The crowds watch on Douyin (抖音), too.

On the first day of the 2025 Import Expo, a Douyin online tour of the expo drew more than 8 million visits and more than 2 million comments. Source: China International Import Expo Bureau (中国国际进口博览局) and People’s Daily Online Opinion Data Center (人民网舆情数据中心), media influence report, December 2025. https://www.ciie.org/resource/static/zbh/default/assets-2025/download/PDF/CIIE2025MediaCoverageAndInfluenceReport_cn.pdf

So treat the booth as a content shoot and a contact desk. Post on WeChat (微信) a week or two ahead with your hall, your booth number and the demo you’ll run. Every visitor who stops at the booth scans a QR code that adds a named rep in WeCom, which beats a fishbowl of business cards nobody types up. Film the demo while you’re there, because it’s next month’s Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) and Douyin content. Then follow up in those chats within the week.

Measuring B2B social when the sales cycle is 12 months

A 12-month sales cycle breaks the usual social media report. Followers and likes move every week. Orders don’t.

Our two published B2B programs both took about two years to show results.

“Within roughly two years, Viessmann’s online revenue in China was growing month over month.” Source: TheRedScroll, Viessmann case study, October 2026. https://www.theredscroll.com/work/viessmann/

“Over 24 months, iGuzzini went from a name known only in trade circles to a brand Chinese luxury consumers actually recognized.” Source: TheRedScroll, iGuzzini case study, October 2026. https://www.theredscroll.com/work/iguzzini/

Measure the steps between the first article and the contract instead, and judge each period on its own step.

Period	What to measure	What it tells you
Months 1 to 3	Verified accounts, search results for your Chinese brand name	Buyers can find and trust you
Months 4 to 6	WeCom (企业微信) contacts added, by source	Content starts conversations
Months 7 to 12	Qualified leads and quotes, by source	Conversations reach sales
Year 2	Orders and repeat orders traced to a source	Revenue you can attribute

Everything depends on the source tag. Set it when the contact is added. Nobody can rebuild it a year later. Platform lead tools work the same way.

Ocean Engine (巨量引擎), Douyin’s (抖音) ad platform, describes its Feiyu tool as a sales-lead tool that assigns and tags leads and connects to other CRM systems. A July 2022 update added one-tap adding of a lead in WeCom. Source: Ocean Engine (巨量引擎), Feiyu CRM App Store listing, confirmed October 2026. https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/id1428346102

If you’re already in market and your agency reports only followers and reads, ask for WeCom contacts by source. That one number shows whether the content is reaching the people who buy.

What a B2B marketing agency in China includes and costs

Our pricing page lists every package, what each one includes and what it costs.

0 out of 37 agencies analyzed offer fixed-price packages. Source: TheRedScroll competitive analysis, April 2026.

Here’s how a B2B program maps onto that page:

• Each package includes a weekly WeChat (微信) article, weekly posts on the other core platforms, a monthly report and strategy calls.
• Zhihu (知乎) and the other add-on platforms are priced per post.
• CRM and private domain work (WeCom (企业微信) setup, WeChat CRM integration and running customer groups) is quoted to scope.
• Ad spend is paid directly to the platform, not through us.
• Every package has a six-month minimum, and the first content goes live within two weeks of signing.

For most B2B brands, the WeChat article and the WeCom setup matter more than post volume.

Book a call

Tell us what you sell, who signs the order and who chooses the product. We’ll tell you which platform to open first and where WeCom (企业微信) fits.