Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance have launched omni-channel marketing. Who can better capture the hearts of merchants?

Is omni-channel marketing what businesses really need? The author analyzes why "omni-channel" is now the trend, what are the differences between the "omni-channel" of big companies, and what kind of "omni-channel" businesses need.

Is omni-channel marketing just a platform concept hype or a real need of businesses?

In the past two years, the hottest word in the entire marketing industry is "omni-domain". Almost all major companies have emphasized their omni-domain capabilities when recruiting investors. From Alibaba, JD.com, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Tencent, "omni-domain" must be mentioned at the beginning of a press conference, including omni-domain marketing, omni-domain marketing efficiency improvement platform, omni-domain interest e-commerce, and corporate omni-domain business partners...

After listening to them one by one, merchants will find themselves confused because each company’s “global area” is different.

In addition to being the usual competition for definition rights among large companies, this is also because the concept of the entire domain itself is too extensible . It can be public domain + private domain, marketing + operation, or content + shelves.

If we want to be more blunt and add omni-channel, with the existence of the "walled garden", basically no company is qualified to talk about "global".

In the final analysis, "the whole domain" is a basket. What the big companies actually want to output is the upgrade of their own marketing capabilities , which can help merchants capture fragmented consumers scattered in various scenarios, influence their already limited remaining minds, and then sell goods to them, although this fragmentation was caused by the big companies themselves.

So, why is "global" the trend? What are the differences between the "global" of big companies? From the perspective of merchants, what kind of "global" is needed?

1. Why is “global” the trend?

There are two major historical backgrounds for the dominance of "global": one is that the traffic princes are divided and each is a king, and the other is that e-commerce becomes the end of the Internet platform.

In essence, "global" is a marketing trend that was forced into being.

The reason why everyone is chasing the entire domain is because the entire domain itself does not exist. In the fragmented era, all consumers exist online in a "sliced" form, which is not only in space but also in time.

Even though WeChat covers the vast majority of the country's population, these people do not spend all their time on WeChat. They move around on countless apps, and the data between different platforms are isolated. No platform can track all the behavioral paths of a person on different platforms, so it is impossible to establish a complete data file about him, and it is difficult to have the "right" influence on him at the "right" time.

Image source: WeChat Open Class

The development of marketing today is a process of continuous integration towards unification, the integration of brand advertising and performance advertising, the integration of mental planting and transaction weeding, and the integration of early purchases and repeat purchase loyalty.

In this process, two ultimate goals are achieved: one is "big" horizontally, covering every potential consumer as much as possible, and then using funnels and labels to stratify the customer base; the other is "deep" vertically, deeply tracking and influencing the customer base, and finding ways to unleash all their consumption power.

In an era where everything is marketing, marketing has possessed all media and penetrated into the marrow of the era. The relationship between people and goods is the most core relationship in the consumer era.

Internet platforms are all engaged in "intermediary" business, and their commercial value lies in whether they can provide higher efficiency in matching people and goods.

The emergence and popularity of “global” is the product of efficiency.

As early as 2016, Alimama first proposed the concept of unimarketing, a digital marketing methodology centered on consumer data. Simply put, it is to connect the user accounts of different applications under Alibaba, connecting Taobao for e-commerce, Alipay for finance, Ele.me for life services, Youku for video content, and so on.

Alimama Global Marketing (2016 Edition)

Prior to this, Alibaba's business units had always been independent of each other, and brands had to repeatedly place ads on different platforms, and there was no strong correlation between the effects of the ads. In essence, it was pure traffic trading, and there was no real marketing channel centered around consumers. Therefore, after Alibaba proposed omni-channel marketing, it emphasized four key points around consumer operations: full insight, omni-media, omni-channel, and full-link.

By connecting data, Alibaba can sort out user behavior paths, build a more complete user model, and help brands do more precise marketing based on more three-dimensional and clear insights.

At that time, Taobao e-commerce was still the end point of traffic, and Alibaba was confident that its ecosystem could cover everything. Lu Tao, former general manager of Alibaba Group's Global Strategy Center, once said: "Together, it can cover more than 95% of netizens." And just the year before, Alibaba also laid a solid foundation for data integration in its organizational structure, and "small front desk, large middle desk" came on the stage.

In 2021, Alibaba's omni-channel marketing was upgraded to version 2.0, which is still centered on consumers and upgraded around the four "alls". It can be seen that the basic judgment and system framework of that year are still applicable.

Alibaba Global Marketing 2.0 (2021 Edition)

In fact, the AIPL (Awareness-Interest-Purchase-Loyalty) consumer operation theory proposed by Alibaba along with omni-channel marketing has profoundly influenced the development of the domestic marketing field. Many subsequent operation methodologies are derivatives and variations of this theory.

However, at this time, Taobao e-commerce can no longer monopolize the discourse power of "people, goods and places" and "the entire region". The rise of live streaming e-commerce has made Alibaba get up early but arrive late.

2. Fighting for the definition of “global”

The biggest revolution in live streaming e-commerce is that it has brought the efficiency of traffic matching to a new level. It integrates content seeding and sales conversion, greatly shortens the marketing chain, and brings e-commerce into the 2.0 era with "goods finding people". This new paradigm revolution has also allowed Douyin and Kuaishou to catch the e-commerce train and go directly from selling advertising to selling goods.

E-commerce is still the end point of traffic, but Alibaba is no longer the end point of e-commerce.

In the end, the consensus reached by everyone is that the combination of content e-commerce of "goods finding people" and shelf e-commerce of "people finding goods" is the complete form of e-commerce, and the new "global domain" was thus born.

In May 2022, Douyin upgraded "interest e-commerce" to "global interest e-commerce", launched the "Mall" channel as the first-level entrance of the Douyin homepage, and officially entered the comprehensive e-commerce platform; in February 2023, Kuaishou e-commerce first proposed the concept of "global operation", announcing that the platform will take "short video + live broadcast" as the core content field and "search + mall" as the core of the pan-shelf field as the two major directions for future efforts.

Douyin Global Interest E-commerce

In fact, the entire domain of Douyin and Kuaishou is centered around user scenarios, trying to connect the data of the two scenarios and keep all user behaviors from planting grass to consumption on their own platforms. After forming habits, it paves the way for more comprehensive and precise marketing for subsequent brands.

Moreover, Douyin and Kuaishou have leveraged the strengths of their respective ecological experts, viewing them as important links in product promotion and transaction elimination.

ByteDance launched the "Star Push Search Direct" solution, targeting the A3 group and proposing "planting and harvesting in one". "Star" refers to accumulating certain A3 through the seeding of content by Star Map experts to create high-quality hot articles; "push" refers to heating and amplifying traffic to increase the A3 rate through high-quality hot articles; "search" refers to mounting small blue words to stimulate search and accurately undertake search products; "direct" refers to accurately recalling A3 in the live broadcast room to accelerate transaction conversion.

Kuaishou launched the "Chuanliu Plan" to connect the relatively independent talent distribution and brand self-broadcasting: through talent distribution, it helps merchants locate customer groups and accurately recommend this group to merchants' self-broadcasting, while also rewarding distribution talents with traffic. It also proposed the "5S Management Methodology": three business fields such as distribution (Sufficient distribution), self-broadcasting (Self-operation), and pan-shelf (Store), as well as two business actions: low-priced good things (Supply) and high-quality content (Superior content).

Kuaishou 5S Management Methodology

On this basis, Douyin and Kuaishou also further mentioned the radiation of all channels. Kuaishou reached out to users outside the site through Kuaishou Alliance, and Bytedance developed a global measurement product. Relatively speaking, Douyin is more refined in the off-site expansion of marketing.

Even if the "walled garden" exists, the platform cannot control the behavior of users. From the perspective of the actual marketing chain, it is impossible for a platform to achieve both planting and weeding. For this reason, Douyin has given a measurement of "spillover value" . After a user completes the construction of cognition on Douyin, most of the consumption is completed on the site, but 20%-40% of the consumption still occurs in channels outside of Douyin e-commerce.

This is the significance of the existence of global measurement. Douyin attempts to present its omni-channel marketing value to brands with more comprehensive and accurate data attribution, which is what the official “Douyin Marketing Full Collection” is all about.

At this point, based on the omni-channel marketing proposed by Alibaba that year, Douyin and Kuaishou have further extended the content planting scenarios and off-site channels. Whether from the perspective of policy guidance or business reality, everyone realizes that compared to who attracts more traffic, it is more important to prove to merchants who provides traffic with higher conversion quality.

In addition to these marketing platforms that have completed the full-link closed loop with e-commerce, there is another important player that cannot be ignored - Tencent. After all, WeChat is the undisputed destination of traffic. If the whole domain is simply and roughly understood as public domain + private domain, then Tencent is the player with the most say.

At the 2021 Tencent Smart Marketing Summit, Tencent Advertising positioned itself as a "global business partner for enterprises" and proposed its three major differentiated advantages: online and offline integration of transaction scenarios, public and private domain linkage of traffic and users, and global realization of business goals. At the 2024 Tencent Advertising Innovation and Sharing Conference, Tencent Advertising upgraded its four major differentiated advantages for global operations: excellent ecology, deep operations, strong efficiency improvement, and full touchpoints.

2024 Tencent Advertising Innovation and Innovation Conference

Among them, Video Account + Live Broadcast & Experts are responsible for the conversion of public and private domains, Mini Programs, Enterprise WeChat, WeChat Pay, etc. are responsible for providing transaction support, Ruyi is responsible for marketing decisions and scientific measurement, and Miaosi is responsible for generating advertising materials with AIGC. What Tencent wants to express is that with its huge ecosystem and rich product tools, it can provide different merchants with adaptive business paths, and give full play to its own private domain value, so that customers can achieve long-term operation here. As a hub and important transaction scene for public and private domains, Video Account will play a decisive role in Tencent's full-domain operation.

From Douyin and Kuaishou to Tencent, when it comes to global expressions, they are undoubtedly integrating resources and connecting data based on the characteristics of their own platforms. In a sense, they are all speaking their own language.

A relatively obvious difference is that Douyin and Kuaishou pay more attention to the transaction conversion of merchants in marketing, while Tencent emphasizes more on the long-term operating value it provides . This is actually the difference between Douyin and Kuaishou as traffic entrances in the "public domain" and WeChat as user sedimentation in the "private domain". The former requires explosive power, while the latter requires vitality.

3. Whose “global” can impress merchants more?

Is the “global” that big companies excel at what businesses really want?

In the past, when everyone was doing offline activities, the marketing dilemma for merchants was that you didn’t know where to find consumers. Now that everyone’s lives are fully digitalized, the marketing dilemma has become that you know where to find them, but the cost of establishing connections with them is getting higher and higher.

For businesses, the standard for judging whether marketing is good or bad is actually very simple: whether they can get more sales at a lower cost, whether it is current revenue or potential future growth, is commonly referred to as reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

As Internet platforms have risen and fallen over the years, the activity path of merchants has been to constantly migrate from one traffic depression to another, going wherever there is a traffic dividend, until there are no obvious depressions as far as the eye can see.

2023 China Mobile Internet Traffic Annual Report

Since the days of making easy money by taking a small risk to win a big one are gone forever, we can only refine our operations and work harder through richer and more diverse marketing tools and methods. This relies heavily on the mastery and analysis of consumer data, which is also the direction in which large companies are focusing their efforts.

The entire domain of each platform mentioned above is basically centered on consumers, connecting consumer data to achieve deeper insights into the population and more accurate advertising, and cultivating consumer behavior to establish richer marketing touchpoints and smoother marketing channels.

In the final analysis, although everyone’s global domains are different due to the characteristics of the platform, they ultimately pursue the same goal, which is to improve the quality of their own traffic and enhance the efficiency of matching people and goods.

So, for merchants, whoever can provide them with more comprehensive consumer data, whoever can help them achieve more accurate reach, whoever can help them achieve more efficient conversions, and whoever can enable them to achieve the smartest and simplest operations based on these, will be the one who provides the omni-channel marketing they want more.

In practical terms, the platform’s consumer data model and algorithm mechanism are a black box for merchants. Moreover, due to the compatibility issues between product categories and the platform’s population, merchants often need to conduct multi-platform testing to find the channel that suits them best.

From this perspective, a more global perspective, lower trial and error costs, and customized outputs suitable for operational methodologies of different merchants may be more likely to win the hearts of merchants. This also puts higher demands on the interoperability between platforms, as well as the platform's insight into and tracking of brand and product data in addition to collecting consumer data.

There is a line that runs through the consumer behavior path, and a line that runs through the commodity circulation path. How to straighten out these two "lines" and the complex dynamic relationships behind them determines the height that platforms can ultimately reach across the entire domain.

Author: Mu Yu

WeChat public account: Yiyuguancha (ID: lanhaiyingxiao)