The term “Unimarketing” has become very popular across various social media and e-commerce platforms in China. From Alibaba and JD to Douyin（TikTok In China）, Kuaishou, and Tencent, these platforms are all striving to achieve the widest possible reach.
What is Unimarketing in China?
Unimarketing is a marketing model that integrates multiple channels and resources to provide comprehensive coverage throughout the entire customer lifecycle. It emphasizes not only attracting and acquiring potential customers but also retaining existing ones.
Platforms aim to broaden their reach as much as possible, covering every potential consumer and effectively segmenting customer groups. At the same time, they strive to go “deep” by thoroughly tracking and influencing these groups to maximize their spending potential.
Features of Unimarketing in China
1. Multi-channel Integration: Integrating various online and offline marketing channels, including social media, email, physical stores, brand websites, etc.
2. Data-driven: Using data analysis techniques to accurately understand customer behaviors and needs, enabling personalized marketing.
3. Full Lifecycle Coverage: Covering the entire customer journey from first contact with the brand to becoming a loyal customer.
Why Are Chinese Social Media Platforms Pursuing Unimarketing?
Platforms
Social media platforms pursue Unimarketing to improve traffic quality and the efficiency of matching people with products. By integrating multi-channel consumer data, platforms can deliver more precise advertising, enhancing effectiveness and revenue. Unimarketing boosts platform competitiveness, attracting more merchants.
Merchants
Unimarketing provides merchants with comprehensive consumer data and precise market insights, helping them achieve targeted outreach and efficient conversion. Through data sharing and intelligent operations across multiple platforms, merchants can streamline marketing processes, reduce costs, and identify the most effective strategies to enhance brand value.
An Expansion Project in China? We Can Help You!
Alibaba’s Unimarketing
In 2016, Alibaba introduced the concept of Unimarketing, aiming to integrate its various applications and platforms for data-centric intelligent marketing. Unimarketing connects user accounts across Taobao, Tmall (e-commerce), Alipay (finance), Ele.me (lifestyle services), and Youku (video), forming an integrated marketing ecosystem.
Unimarketing 1.0
1.0 focuses on four key areas: uni-insights, uni-media, uni-channels, and uni-links. Before Unimarketing, Alibaba’s business units operated independently, requiring brands to advertise separately on different platforms, resulting in scattered effects. With Unimarketing, Alibaba can streamline user behavior paths and build complete user models, offering brands more precise marketing.
Unimarketing 2.0
2.0 introduces the consumer operation theory: AIPL
- A (Awareness): People aware of the brand, reached by ads or searching category keywords.
- I (Interest): People interested in the brand, including those who click ads, browse brand/store pages, interact with the brand, view product pages, or search brand keywords.
- P (Purchase): People who have purchased the brand’s products.
- L (Loyalty): Loyal customers who repurchase, review, or share the brand.
In 2021, Alibaba upgraded to Unimarketing 2.0, continuing to focus on consumers and optimizing the four key areas of 1.0. The AIPL theory significantly impacted Chinese marketing, leading to many derivative methodologies.
Douyin’s Unimarketing
Live-streaming e-commerce integrates content promotion with sales conversion, enhancing traffic matching efficiency and ushering in the 2.0 era of e-commerce.
In May 2022, TikTok Built a “Comprehensive Interest E-commerce” and launched the “Mall” channel on its homepage, marking its entry into comprehensive e-commerce. TikTok’s Unimarketing revolves around user scenarios, connecting behavior data from promotion to consumption to help brands achieve more comprehensive and precise marketing performance.
Tencent’s Unimarketing
As a major Chinese social media player in Unimarketing, Tencent leverages WeChat’s massive user base and traffic, providing unparalleled advantages. Tencent’s vast ecosystem and diverse product tools offer tailored business pathways, emphasizing private domain value to help clients achieve sustainable operations.
The WeChat Channels serve as a crucial hub for public and private traffic conversions, significantly impacting Tencent’s comprehensive operations. The combination of Channels, live streaming, influencers, Mini-Program, WeCom, WeChat Pay, and other tools supports transactions and marketing decisions, utilizing AIGC for ad material creation.
Conclusion
Although the “Unimarketing” approaches of various Chinese social media platforms differ due to platform characteristics, they ultimately aim to enhance traffic quality and improve the efficiency of matching information with users. The core of Unimarketing across these platforms is consumer-centric, establishing richer marketing touchpoints through consumer behavior cultivation, and achieving deeper audience insights and more precise ad targeting by integrating consumer data.
If you want to learn more about digital strategies in China, please contact the professional digital marketing agency STAiiRS.
Recent Comments