Strategies for mobile in China are set to change drastically over the next 12 months, a new survey by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has revealed.

The study, conducted in partnership with CollabCentral Consulting, showed that the number of organisations and marketers using China’s popular mobile messaging apps like WeChat has risen 305% since 2014.

Some 85% of the 20 major Chinese marketers surveyed saying they have used mobile messaging as their key marketing communication platform – up from just 21% in 2014.

82% of marketers were currently focused on using mobile as a brand awareness channel, as opposed to for sales or e-commerce.

However, only 26% surveyed felt that mobile would be used solely for marketing over the next year with almost half of those surveyed expecting mobile to evolve into a cross-purpose marketing and sales channel.

Driving consumers to purchase online or offline is a rising priority as e-commerce and m-commerce enjoy a higher growth rate in China than anywhere else globally.

“Clear vision leads to action and this shift in recent months amongst the marketing community of China to leverage mobile as a business driver, beyond marketing and communication is a great signal to start acting upon,” said CollabCentral Consulting founder Nishtha Mehta.

“Marketers need to be bold, the speed of change in China is unprecedented,” added Nishtha. “What’s relevant today, might be replaced or outdated tomorrow itself.”

“Move fast, use test and learn cycles to establish best practice principles, and then aim to scale these across brands.”

The most effective techniques for leveraging online to offline (O2O) sales reported by the respondents were mobile loyalty, gift in-store redemptions and trial coupon redemptions, despite many acknowledging a need to develop their expertise in the field, with 32% describing their expertise at O2O as ‘low’ level.

Lack of integration and unwillingness of retail infrastructure to integrate mobile payments or coupon redemption were cited as key barriers to the progress of O2O, with finding the right partners also acknowledged as a key challenge.

“If stores do not carry the mobile connected technology required to make O2O work, or are not sufficiently integrated with online or offline environments, then even the best O2O techniques will struggle to get off the ground,” said WFA senior global marketing manager Matt Green.

“Closer and faster collaboration between the retailers, marketers and companies such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent is needed.”