Email never took hold for personal communication in China. China skipped directly to chat and the mobile phone as a primary mode of communication.

Most Chinese digital platforms use cell phone for a users Primary Identifying Key and validation method. This has resulted in low usage of email and preference for SMS, and now, private chat as the preferred means of communication. Global platforms though are based on Email. As an example, HubSpot recently released a Visitor Identification API to track users across websites, but it only includes email and first name, last name as fields to map. This is not useful in China since websites use Phone numbers or WeChat OpenID for registration.

2.First Name, Last Name vs. Name – The Chinese Language and Culture is Different.

Speaking of name many unique characteristics of the Chinese Language itself provide difficulties for global platforms to be used in china, for instance names. In China first last middle name are three characters and typically all used together so in China there is just one name field vs a combined First Name and Last Name field. The mapping between these often times causes problems especially when personalizing communications. There are many such examples this is just one.

3.What’s App/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Paypal/Slack/LinkedIn vs. WeChat – China’s Digital Ecosystem is Very Different.

In a true case of digital innovation China has developed the SuperAPP, WeChat and it’s business oriented new sibling WeCom (WeChat Work) which encompass Private Chat, Sharing, Group Discussions, Payments, Business chat, Ads, Videos and more is the equivalent of multiple western apps.

It has become the most effective and common means of digital communication in China and has a whole series of features that are constantly being innovated and upgraded.  Global platforms have not been able to keep up with the changes and in fact are falling further behind in their ability to integrate the latest features, for instance WeCom Group Send tasks API, which allows us to automate chat messages between sales and customers and is becoming a must have feature in China.

In addition, new channels are developing, for instance TikTok/Douyin which is becoming an important acquisition channel with it’ s own ecosystem of advertising and business friendly Super APP features.

4.Chinese Internet-related Laws – Global Platforms Often Don’t Function Well in China.

According to Chinese Internet-related laws, many of the Email or SMS services they integrate with either don’t deliver to China or suffer from bad deliverability.

Additionally, they do not integrate well with local tools. Seminars, Webinars and Conferences are operated usually with an event management tool and campaign is run through marketing automation tool. Global event tools are not built for the China ecosystem and domestic event tool workflows do not work as well.

5.Global Experience vs. China Experience – China Marketing Strategies, Tactics are Different.

Marketing Automation is complicated and a key component of the leading platforms is their training, education, and tactic sharing. Some of it is relevant and can be used but enough is different that the local know-how from a local provider will be just as important as the tool. For instance, for B2B Viral Marketing (LieBian) lead generation tactics for building word of mouth campaigns, local Chinese platforms will provide a tool to run these campaigns and respect the legal requirement that you only allow for incentivizing two levels of sharing, whereas global platforms do not even have it.

6.Western Speed vs. China Speed – Everything Changes Faster in China.

According to the IMF China is expected to grow 1.9% in 2020 which is 290% faster than Western Advanced Economies which contracted 5.4%. Incredibly for an economy which is already the second largest in the world this is actually an increase over 2019 where China was growing “only” 259% faster.

This level of growth and change has never been seen before so many assumptions about how things will go are not valid since this is the only time in history that this has occurred. The resulting impact for Marketers and technology platforms is that you can be sure that the level of unique needs, channels, and behaviors will at the very least continue and probably accelerate for the foreseeable future. This, then, is the fundamental gap between a Local and Global Marketing Automation solutions, in order to be ready for “China Speed”, and react to the ever-changing needs and trends, it needs to be built in and for China.

Very Direct Version:

• HubSpot doesn’t support phone number as main unique identifier very well.  It is based off of Email which is not used as the primary key for identification in China.
• HubSpot is missing Chinese language specific features like combined name
• HubSpot does not directly integrate with WeChat official accounts and WeChat Work the two most important communication channels in china. You need to run campaigns where your leads are, we are optimized for WeChat.  HubSpot cannot run campaigns well in WeChat. You will be losing leads
• HubSpot doesn’t have servers in China so performance may be slow
• HubSpot does not have tools and training materials for China marketing tactics like “LieBian” Viral marketing.
• HubSpot is not integrated with the other marketing tools that marketing teams use on the the ground.
• HubSpot will have a very difficult time catching up and keeping up as China’s digital ecosystem is continually changing.

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Wechat, as one of the core marketing platforms in China, generates an immense amount of data every day. Understanding how to mine that data for useful information is the secret for making your Wechat strategy really fly. As we all know, in the era of big data, whoever gets the users gets the world. To achieve personalization of your marketing at scale, it’s first necessary to collect a large amount of user data and build a complete set of user personas with tag libraries, structured data, and attribute visualization. But what exactly is the value of knowing your Wechat followers? And how do you go about collecting this information?

Personas are virtual models of real users

In the big data era, web browsing, clicks, commenting, ratings are all pieces of the bigger behavioral puzzle. These fragments, when systematically collected, stored, and organized as a data set, tell us a lot – both directly and indirectly – about a user’s personality, habits, attitude, and buying readiness. This data set forms the basis of your marketing plans and can be referenced to reconstruct your consumers’ real needs. These comprehensive, 3-dimensional sets of user data form what we call “personas”.

Personas are virtual models of real users and are based on the observed behavior of target customers. Enterprises will identify a group of target customers to uncover demographic attributes, behavioral attributes, social networks, psychographics, habits, and preferences for individual consumers. After continual refinement and updating, the data is abstracted to form a comprehensive virtual picture of a typical customer. This virtual picture is what we call the persona.

Tagging users is central to the persona process. Tags are invested with specific meanings that describe the attributes and characteristics of real users. Tags make it convenient for companies to do statistical analysis. For different target audiences in different scenarios, the tags given to users often have different meanings. At the same time, a user’s behavior is highly context-dependent. When the context changes, the probability of the particular behavior changes as well. Therefore user personas should be dynamic. We generally divide up tags into two major types: dynamic and static. Static tags generally don’t change. They may include things like demographics, location, gender, educational level, etc. Dynamic tags, on the other hand, are more likely to change such as web browsing, search, registration, reviewing, rating, shopping cart activity, commenting, etc. In general, we say that personas using only static tags are 2-dimensional, whereas those using static tags and dynamic tags are 3-dimensional.

Why do you need to set up WeChat user personas?

1. More accurate ad targeting, improved user experience

Wechat is China’s biggest social platform with more than 1.1 billion monthly active users and personas based on Wechat are highly representative of the true target market for your products. So do Wechat account operators really understand their own followers? What kind of people are they? What do they really want from you? Personas can help you understand your fans individually. They can also help you personalize your content and your product offerings so that you get the maximum ROI. WeChat account operators can send content to users based on gender, age, location, hobbies, and other tags mapped out in the persona to achieve precision marketing. Only by knowing who your real followers are can you be sure that you are rolling out the right marketing plan. The goal of creating your user personas is quite simple: know them better so you can serve them better.

2.Guide product development

Identify your core users for typical scenario analysis based on user personas. Use this analysis to find pain points and use these pain points to guide product development and product positioning. After that, you can roll out detailed process and planning. Only if you know who the product is for, and the functional demand behind it, can you successfully put your users in the driver’s seat. Carrying out user-oriented product research as part of the development process using a data-driven approach results in products with much-improved user experience.

The native WeChat backend provides marketers with an important window for understanding users, such as seeing user growth and user attribute changing over time. These have important reference value, but in general, these data need much deeper data mining and analysis.

Compared with the native WeChat platform, JINGdigital functions such as tagging, custom QR codes, tracking, and data analysis provide a rich toolkit for brands to establish and optimize user personas: track user behavior and transmit data in real-time to a backend database or mobile dashboards. After collecting a wealth of data, brands can gain a deeper understanding of their fans by creating segments and lead scoring.

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First let’s define MQL (marketing qualified leads). MQL is the result of your marketing investment. It is the pool of people who display interest in your brand’s goods and services as well as those who, for whatever reason, are more easily converted into sales leads. MQLs will often engage with your brand by filling out a form, providing contact information, participating in an event, downloading a white paper, adding a product to a shopping cart, or repeatedly visiting your website or Wechat account.

Below we take a deeper dive into the B2B purchasing process in order to gain a better understanding of how B2B companies can optimize MQL marketing strategies.

In recent years it has become incredibly easy for customers to obtain high-quality information about products. At the same time we see substantial delay in the actual face-to-face meeting with sales.

As B2B marketing strategies become more and more sophisticated, customers are finding themselves overwhelmed with more and more high quality content. Furthermore, customers are finding this surfeit of information is not actually helping them make better decisions. Instead they find themselves spending more time prioritizing and digesting conflicting viewpoints.

Because of that, we see that the best sales people don’t focus on displaying their personal expertise when talking to prospects, but rather on helping customers sort through the mess of existing information.

Why exactly is this new role as “information curator” so important? Because it has a direct impact on facilitating the purchasing process. Easing the purchasing process results in higher value contracts and reduces the possibility of “buyer’s remorse.” Research clearly shows that the more information you can provide which facilittates the purchase process, the higher value the resulting transaction. Along those lines, your MQL marketing strategy should incorporate tactics which reduce friction in the buying process.

Figure 1: 6 major tasks which comprise the purchasing process (Gartner)

Understand clearly the B2B purchase process to optimize your marketing and sales cooperation.

It’s important to keep in mind that the purchasing process is not linear. Quite often the stages take place simultaneously. If you were to draw a real picture of the B2B purchase journey, it would look less like a step by step diagram and more like a big bowl of noodles. Every moment is invitation to review, re-assess and reconsider. The customer will bounce back and forth between tasks until these six tasks are locked in at the same time (refer to the diagram above).

We can say then that B2B procurement does not progress like a funnel, but addresses multiple tasks simultaneously.

If the ultimate goal is to help the customer make a successful purchasing decision, then the CMO needs to think about how to substantially simplify the provision of information in the B2B purchase journey.

Figure 2: B2B Purchasing Journey (Gartner)

Below are three points to keep in mind when formulating your MQL marketing strategy:

Sales is an important channel to engage customers, but not the only one.

Research into whether some stages in the purchase process are more inherently suitable for offline or online channels shows that customers do not show a clear channel preference in completing the six tasks.

Helping purchasers make buying decisions is not a sales problem, it’s an information problem. CMOs who want to accelerate customer growth should start with the quality of information they are providing rather than individual capability.

The official Wechat account plays an important role in providing high quality information. And by using marketing automation attached to the Wechat account, enterprises can precisely target the right content to the right person at the right time. The result is an understanding of your customers which can approximate or even exceed that gained from offline touchpoints. The ability to provide the right information at the right time unlocks opportunity at each stage of the buying process.

Your sales pipeline is misleading you.

Many sales departments organize their activities around a linear pipeline, moving leads from one stage to the next in a logical, linear order. But from the customer perspective it is much more reasonable to define the purchase process by task completion rather than by stage in the process.

Basing your view on a linear, supplier-centric sales funnel will give you little visibility into pipeline problems such having as an inordinate amount of leads being stuck in one stage. The mismatch between your pipeline model and the underlying reality of the purchase process can easily result in barriers to identifying sales rep shortcomings and taking corrective measures.

JINGdigital’s WeChat marketing automation platform allows you to move away from the linear sales journey model, empowering you to design a communication strategy around helping customers complete procurement tasks. For example, you might set up a white paper download in order to help the prospect complete exploration, tag them and then move them into the exploration segment. Then you might set up a dynamic menu which links to content tailored to this particular segment such as comparison matrices, business trend reports, and case studies. The overall effect is to reduce the time needed for the proposect to find the content he or she is looking for. Chatbots are also an indispensible tools in customer journeys to guide pospects to find the information they are looking for and discover the real bottlenecks.

You must reconceive the synergy between marketing and sales.

Most sales and marketing departments are structured in a sequential manner: marketing first cultivates demand and acquires leads usually in online channels, then passes the most qualified leads to the sales department for follow up face to face meetings. First marketing, then sales. First online, then offline.

However customers simply do not buy in a linear manner. They use online and offline channels to complete the six B2B purchasing tasks at almost the same frequency. In today’s world of B2B procurement, there is no clear handover from market to sales (or online to offline for that matter). It is a parallel process, not a serial one. To win in this environment, CMOs and their sales counterparts must build functional collaboration and organizational strategy around real purchasing behavior.

JINGdigital’s lead management tools help sales and marketing departments collaborate more effectively. Enterprises set up scoring mechanisms according to its unique requirements to identify potential customers and give real-time feedback to the sales team. At the same time, after the sales team engages, sales reps can enrich user information and feed it back to the marketing department, forming a virtuous circle which ultimately mirrors and supports the customer’s parallel purchasing journey.

The bottom line is that close integration of information from multiple channels in a single platform is essential to achieving consistent support for prospects who are engaged in making purchasing decisions.

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Official website

Your official website is one of your most valuable promotion channels. We put this metric first because, compared to other channels, the additional value it brings is most easily measured. More importantly, according to our research, 94% of purchasing departments (B2B) and 81% of customers (B2C) will search you online before buying. This implies that even if they have already encountered your brand elsewhere they will still use online channels to learn more about you. Therefore a robust program of offline activities will result in an increase in visitors to your web properties.

The following 4 metrics are the most important for measuring the health of your web properties. They provide important information about your customers, help you understand their interests, and help you plan future website updates. They inform content decisions, design upgrades and mobile strategy:

1. Unique visitors/unique sessions
2. Number of Marketing Qualified Leads coming from the website
3. Website visitor conversion rate
4. Conversion rate by traffic source

When looking at performance by traffic source, we use the following four metrics:

1. Percentage of leads by traffic source
2. Number of converted leads by traffic source
3. Percentage of leads acquired through brand keywords
4. Percentage of leads acquired through other keywords

Using these indicators you can measure the efficacy of your content marketing, for example how effective was the traffic you drove to your dedicated landing page? Furthermore using tried and true methods like A/B testing to optimize landing page experience and deploy content will increase your conversion. By attributing traffic to specific channel sources, you have a better understanding of the efficacy of your online and offline activities. For example by connecting search terms to a specific offline activation you can better assess its success.

Social Media

By connecting the number of leads acquired by channel and the channel investments you can assess the intrinsic value of each channel and therefore make smarter channel investment decisions.

To deeply understand social media channel performance look at metrics such as reach, engagement, click rate, share rate, conversion rate, re-post rate etc. For more discussion of more granular btreakdown of relevant metrics refer to the reports below.

Wechat User Analysis

Content Marketing Analysis

Engagement Analysis

In our experience, the single most important metric for any social channel is how many real customers it brings.

Marketing KPI Number 2: Lead Acquisition Cost

The process of acquiring sales leads is basically one of turning strangers into acquaintances, unknowns into knowns. From these knowns you can continue to collect and filter data to determine whether they really are potential buyers. After engaging them you can asses your marketing performance by asking: how much does it cost to acquire a customer?

Segmenting lead acquisition costs helps you to judge the effectiveness of your marketing channels. For example if your SEO lead acquisition cost is cheaper than PPC, then you’ll want to re-think your investment distribution. Either add more SEO budget or take a deep dive into why your PPC campaigns aren’t working.

Marketing KPI Number 3： Form conversion rate

Forms are the most common tools to get to know your customers, to turn unknowns into knowns. Forms are a critical tool for acquiring contact information. If your forms are not working the way you expect, ask yourself the following three questions:

Are you providing a valuable enough incentive

Is the information you want to get equal to the value you provide?

Are you properly communicating your value proposition?

Use A/B testing to achieve optimal form conversion performance by trying alternate versions of the introductory text or different design strategies.

Marketing KPI Number 4： MQL volume

After acquiring your leads, your next job is to filter out Marketing Qualified Leads. These are prospects who meet or exceed a baseline of defined metrics. The metrics will be different for every industry but the methodology is the same.

To track the efficiency of converting leads into MQL, use cost effectiveness as a benchmark. And because the acquisition cycle for each industry is different, long-term tracking is essential to get an accurate assessment of your own performance. If the measured result is too strict or too loose, you can adjust your MQL definition.

Marketing KPI Number 5： Number of SQL produced through marketing activities

When an MQL passes the threshold of sales criteria, the prospect becomes an SQL (sales qualified lead). Properly attributing SQL to the channels which produce them helps you troubleshoot any difficulties you may encounter. For example not producing enough SQLs from the MQL pool may indicate that marketing efforts are being mis-directed or, during the discovery phase, too many false positive signals are being uncovered.

Or perhaps the information the marketing team is collecting is not sufficient to make an accurate determination of sales readiness. SQL conversion rate is a standard measurement especially in mid- to low-end channels and is very important to ensure that marketing activities produce a stable stream of genuine sales opportunities.

Marketing KPI Number 6： SQL acquition cost

Determining the cost of SQL acquisition requires an estimate of the overall marketing spend. For mass market expenditures (such as TV commercials) it’s not straightforward to track the lead source and allocate costs. For online activities, tracking lead sources and allocating costs is a lot easier.

You might instinctively think that the best idea is to push all of your budget toward your acquired SQLs. But if you do that you will not have a clear understanding of your channel effectiveness. Understanding the channels through which you allocate costs and the SQL that these channels bring is critical to formulating future marketing plans.

Marketing KPI Number 7： Success rate

Converting MQL into SQL and SQL into customers is the engine which drives a company’s growth. Even if your retention rate is 100%, if you can’t attract new customers your company will not grow.

There are many factors which influence success – lead quality, product fit, competitor price, and brand reputation among others. Starting from these factors, you can make some tests to better understand whether you are moving the needle on your success rate optimization. For example are the new products you are bringing into the market having an impact? Is your marketing team bringing in the right prospect pool?

These factors can improve your ability to turn leads into customers. Even though we typically see this metric as a core sales team KPI, however the marketing department has an important supporting role to play. Therefore it is recommended that Sales success rate also be added to marketing KPIs.

Marketing KPI Number 8： Customer retention

We all know that acquiring new customers takes more money and time than retaining existing customers. A high customer retention rate is a good indication that you are deliver more value to customers than competitors and that customers are satisfied with your product. This KPI is extremely important because it measures the real value that the company is bringing to the market.

Retaining customers is also crucial for maximizing customer lifetime value. When you hit this mark, the value of your customers increases accordingly, giving you more budget to spend on acquiring the most suitable type of customers for your business.

Marketing KPI Number 9： Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Only when customers are your customers are they valuable to your business. What is your customer churn rate? What processes do you have in place to prevent customer churn? You should know what your churn rate is and work actively to reduce it. To reduce it, you must have a comprehensive understanding of your customer, as well as continuous monitoring of customer satisfaction and how customers are actually using your products.

Marketing KPI Number 10： Marketing ROI (MROI)

Reporting and analysis form the basis for calculating this KPI. Having the ability to report and analyze website activity and traffic sources is critical to online success. When you have the tools to analyze the data, you can optimize traffic source to get more leads, and ultimately improve website conversion. Take a look at the following scenario:

The above chart represents traffic sources for a website, including search ads, display ads, social media and backlinks. Does this imply the marketing budget should be spent entirely on search engine advertising? Maybe not. Let’s take a closer look at the expenditure and value of each channel:

Search engine advertising may bring the most traffic, but also has the lowest value per customer – only RMB3000. On the other hand, social channels have the least traffic, but each year bring in 50 million in value, and the investment is low. So should you continue to run search ads? By calculating ROI you can better understand the value of each channel. Generally ROI measures the ratio between outputs and inputs. But when calculating marketing return on investment (MROI), we think of marketing as a one-off expense, rather than an investment vehicle with a fixed return. Unlike fixed investment vehicles, marketing has different returns over time.

Customer lifetime value and brand value may not have a direct impact that can be measured, but you should take them into account when calculating ROI.

After understanding more deeply these 10 marketing KPIs, do you have any ideas for the KPIs of your marketing department?

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After this stage the sales person will continue to engage, moving the prospect through a sequence of stages until the lead is formally codified as a sales opportunity within the sales management system. After that the sales person will actively move the opportunity through the sales funnel using various tactics such as negotiation, product discussion, and technical communications. The end result is to formalize an agreement with the prospect and sign a contract. In B2B industries this process can take a long time and can require a variety of resources. Therefore, in enterprise level organizations, understanding the division of sales leads and defining different follow-up strategies is essential to the process of cultivating leads.

MQL versus SQL

Now let’s turn our attention to Marketing Qualified Leads. MQL are the tangible result of your marketing activities and investments. Basically these are people who display quantifiable interest in your products and services, making them more easily convertible into proper sales leads. The data which we rely upon to determine MQL is generally based on measurable behavior and degrees of participation. Specific behavioral actions trigger upgrading a prospect to MQL status. Typically these actions would include interaction with products positioned at the very bottom of the funnel such as demos, free trials, buying guides etc. MQL display greater depth of engagement with the brand than ordinary leads, but they have not reached the buying-readiness stage. It is not uncommon for MQL also be divided into multiple levels depending on the complexity of the sales cycle.

As soon as a sales person follows up with an MQL and determines that the prospect has passed a certain lead scoring threshold, the prospect becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL). SQL is the next stage in the sales process and indicates that the sales department now officially views the prospect as a sales lead. Put simply, an MQL has not entered the buying phase, while an SQL is actively shopping. Turning MQLs into SQLs is a major KPI shared between marketing and sales and is a good indicator of the health of their cooperation.

According to research carried out by Hubspot, companies which report having unified sales and marketing operations show 20% greater annual revenue, whereas companies which report having greater disconnect between marketing and sales efforts show a 4% hit to annual revenue. Harmonizing cooperation between marketing and sales and placing the emphasis on high quality sales leads have direct impact on a business’s customer conversion rate.

So how should a company go about nurturing both types of leads?

• Define the target customer persona

Not every prospect will become an MQL and not every MQL will progress to become an SQL. Only companies that emphasize quality over quantity will see the highest conversion rates. Companies must strike a balance between quality and quantity. If the qualification criteria is too high, then there will be too few leads. If the criteria is too low, the sales team will be overworked without showing desired results.

Before setting criteria for MQL and SQL, it is necessary to establish the target customer persona. Who is the target audience and in what enterprise sectors will you find them? After you get clear on that, then you can begin to tap into the needs of this audience, identify your most effective positioning and craft your audience journey. Establishing your target customer persona and setting up lead criteria is not something you carve in stone. Both are dynamic. JINGdigital tools such as tagging, segmentation, parametric QR codes and data analysis empower brands to build out target customer personas and deeply analyze their customers.

• Lead scoring powers prioritization

Basing lead scoring and lead ranking on quality metrics and attribute values will improve the overall efficiency of analyzing leads. A robust quality scoring model needs to take into account a comprehensive set of data and behaviors, for example spending time on a buying guide, or filling in a form to see a demo, or visiting your official website multiple times over over a period of time. All of these behaviors indicate a higher probability of conversion. At the same time, we note that quality metrics and lead scoring work best when sales and marketing work in concert. Scoring sales leads based on your quality metrics model helps the sales team prioritize sales targets.

JINgdigital’s behavioral analytics tool suite uses client-defined actions and point-weighted algorithms to empower brands to automate the lead scoring process. Only when marketing teams and sales teams can confidently differentiate MQL and SQLs will marketing be able to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time and sales representatives follow up leads in a timely and efficient manner. In the end this helps the sales team determine which leads to prioritize for attention while preventing the sales team from excessively disturbing prospective customers.

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In the past decade, most Chinese marketing still focus on the utilization of Adtech (Advertisement Technology), whereas Martech (Marketing Technology) is also the essential composition of marketing. Represented by marketing automation, Martech has become a way to fundamentally solve the marketing pain points of enterprises, with one of the essential function that tracks and nurtures sales leads over time. Now, we will study how to use the marketing automation software strategically to reduce and revive the cold leads.

Figure 1: 5 strategies to revive cold leads

• Take advantage of social retargeting to bring leads back to the funnel

For example, Jane is your potential customer and she is interested in your products (She’s already a sales lead). At 11 am, Jane browsed your official website, and followed the official WeChat account, and received an industry case study report after filled out contact information. However, she had to attend a meeting before having a look at the report.

She was busy until 4 pm. Afterward, Jane checked WeChat and found a message from the official account to ask for her feedback about the report and if meeting with sales for further discussion is needed.

With this reminder, Jane read the report and felt it was good. Thus she set up a phone call with sales.

This simple example illustrates the ability of marketing automation technology to retain and revive sales leads through customer relationship management (CRM), behavioral insight, and social retargeting marketing. With the further development of social CRM, marketing automation technology becomes more advanced in customizable sales leads follow-up journey.

• Provide time-limited campaigns for sales leads

The feeling of urgency is very effective in marketing, since it implies the sense of loss aversion, which refers to a psychological tendency to avoid losses in spite of the chance of greater gains. For example, it is better to not lose $10 than to find $10. While in daily life, we might be regretful if we miss using a coupon that will expire within 24 hours.

Thus, take advantage of time-limited marketing as a last-ditch effort to reengage with your cold leads if they do not respond to any other marketing efforts.

These notifications and campaigns can be pushed to leads automatically by marketing automation software. For example, you can schedule an urgent time-limited campaign to regain cold leads’ interest after several unresponsive tries.

• Market through multi-channel and multi-devices

The follow-up strategies of sales ready leads contain multiple channels and devices.

When contacting sales leads, you can combine diversified approaches by automation sequencing, such as social retarget marketing through WeChat official account, message, email, and pay per click (PPC) advertising.

Connecting sales leads through multiple channels and devices will not only strengthen the brand awareness but also reduce the possibility of non-received information.

• Establish educational nurture campaign for cold leads

When sales leads are not interested in your product, the worst response is to do nothing. Instead, it is the best way to bring them into a nurturing campaign, waiting and awakening their interests over time.

In fact, Regalix (2014) addressed that the improvement of sales leads management and nurturing is the highest rated benefit of marketing automation technology – supported by 86% of respondents in the survey.

Leads nurturing campaign plays a role in the long term. Drip marketing that provides information continuously will resolve concerns and educate the leads about your service advantages as well.

The nurturing method is determined by the business model. Mostly, the nurturing method includes articles, online courses, videos, and other educational contents to build trust and transform cold leads to hot leads.

• Arrange long-term annual follow-up

The marketing automation campaigns are supposed to include annual follow-up information, purposed to follow up cold leads after 12, 24 or even 36 months. And the impossibility today may become possible in the near future owing to job promotions and changes in both budget and demand.

Such follow-ups also systemize chronic strategies to connect with key contacts and enhance mutual relationships.

If you intend to adopt marketing automation software or are already using it but merely for lead generation, please take the above five strategies into account, in terms of their value to your sales and marketing team. Just imagine how huge your revenue losses might be without a cold leads revival strategy.

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Only 11% of total companies fall into the champion stage of digital B2B sales. According to their performance advantages, what are the necessary digital sales capabilities for B2B enterprises?

The Finest Tools. Big data analysis allows sales organizations to gain insight about everything from employee performance, customer journeys to product success. This requires a unified database (the single source of information), special tools like real-time KPI tracking system, and intelligent document management.

Keen Customer Insight. It is recommended to categorize customers, understand their needs and motivations, and track their journey. With these insights, we can design marketing and sales experience. At the same time, in order to better implement, enterprises also need to clarify the internal responsibilities and roles involved in the user journey. For example, in terms of WeChat official account followers, JINGdigital’s unique tagging function not only helps track sources but also records subsequent customer behaviors to help build a more customer-focused WeChat sales platform.

Modernized Processes. All sales processes are digitized, from inbound marketing to lead acquisition, bid preparation, customer visits, pricing, and customer retention. For instance, search engines and social media are used to generate leads, account-based marketing tools are used to personalize marketing pitches, and new technology of Internet of Things (IoT) is used for vendor-managed inventory (VMI) systems and optical ordering systems. New technologies allow enterprises to collect more data, such as product data to monitor customer penetration and product usage. JINGdigital’s customer journey design function is able to customize the entire WeChat automated B2B sales journey, making the WeChat sales platform more intelligent.

Integrated and Expanded Channels. Adding new digital and data-driven channels, such as inside sales and e-commerce, to existing digitized channels will reduce the cost-to-serve and better meet customer needs. Meanwhile, giving sales force the specific digital apps will improve their performance. And digitized channels usually increase productivity by 5-7 times. JINGdigital platform helps enterprises marketing on WeChat with functions like lead scoring and automatic assignment of sales leads.

Seamless Coordination. By using the centralized demand centers, digital champions can manage all sales channel activities, such as online WeChat sales, inside sales, and the field force. In this way, enterprises can coordinate digital sales across channels and avoid channel conflicts. These centers design and implement marketing campaigns and operations by using big data to analyze all web traffics and customer interactions. Digital channels also put the appropriate combination of incentives, pricing, and commissions in place on specific product and customer efforts.

Furthermore, we will learn from companies in the champion s and study how to plan systematically to improve digital B2B sales capability.

First of all, assess the status quo. Examine the digital sales organization – including existing infrastructure and digital capabilities – to understand how it compares with digital B2B sales champions. Survey available technologies in the marketplace. Study customers’ journeys, paying particular attention to the pain points of your current go-to-market approach.

Secondly, define the future. Based on the status quo assessment, develop the ideal go-to-market approach. Identify how your company can introduce new functions and channels, as well as how to optimize the existing channels to seize the opportunity of e-commerce and inside sales, such as coordinating the planning and management of the WeChat sales platform. Decide on the ideal channel mix by product groups, and develop strategies to achieve multi-channel coordination and navigation.

Thirdly, prioritize and scale initiatives. It is critical to prioritize the most achievable and beneficial undertaking so that the company can reap rewards as soon as possible. Leading sales organizations can use pilots to quickly test new digital initiatives and motivate the organization. On the basis of these pilots, you can develop a sales playbook and scale the initiatives into new markets, and continuously using lessons learned to improve the sales playbook over time.

Fourthly, adjust your operating models. To scale initiatives beyond pilots, enterprises must make several adjustments in their commercial operating models. First, acquire new capabilities, such as digital IT, content production, advanced analytics, inside sales and e-commerce. Second, marketing should play a greater role in generating leads through inbound marketing or account-based marketing. Third, companies should review and define the marketing and sales relationship, perhaps with a service level agreement (SLA). Last, decide which activities need to be handled by headquarters and which to be handled by divisions.

WeChat is the major sales channel in China. JINGdigital provides all-inclusive WeChat sales platform solutions, including integration with the enterprise’s existing customer database, data analysis of WeChat followers, customized customer journey, sales tools, and other functions.

Fill out the form below now to request a demo or learn more about JINGdigital.

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Figure1: Soaring Customer Acquisition Cost in China

In addition to the reason mentioned above, companies can also efficiently increase their short-term revenue by focusing on converting cold leads. Most of the business activities of the sales and marketing departments are focused on increasing sales. When the company has unsatisfactory previous sales revenue or pessimistic market growth forecast, the fastest way to increase sales in the short term is to revive cold leads. Other ways to increase sales revenue such as investing in product lines, recruiting more sales force and expanding more market channels, would require longer time and higher costs. In turn, reviving cold leads can provide funds for the above longer-term investments and lay the foundation for the next stage long-term sales growth.

Reviving cold leads is not only necessary to improve business efficiency, but also is beneficial to create competitive advantages. According to Jim Obermayer, the author of Managing Sales Leads, 56% of sales leads still have purchasing need within six months of contact; the number of prospect with need would drop to 35% within one year. However, only 10% to 25% of the sales leads were followed up. Developing a follow-up strategy brings the company competitive advantages in lead nurturing.

Two Fundamental Reasons Responsible for Cold Leads

Broadly speaking, there are two reasons for the loss of sales leads: 1) prospects are distracted or 2) the solution provided by the vendor does not match the problem of the prospect.

1) Possible causes of distraction:

• They were acquired by competitors;
• This project doesn’t have the highest purchase priority, and decision-makers were distracted by other matters;
• They didn’t receive detailed information from the vendor.

In the “distracted” scenario, the way to reduce the number of lost leads is straightforward — set up reminders and incentives mechanism at the point where they left.

2) Another reason is a mismatch between the problem and the solution, which is usually difficult to correct. This is generally an inherent problem within the business. Common examples are:

• Prospects’ budget is not enough to buy your solution;
• Your solution cannot satisfy their needs;
• Two companies are lack of rapport.

In general, loss of sales leads due to distraction is more common at the top of the funnel, and mismatches between problems and solutions are more common at the bottom. It is feasible to use your own data to understand the stages and causes of the sales leads that you have lost.

Figure 2: Reviving Cold Leads

After understanding the causes of the cold leads, we can revive them in three steps.

1. Target the Most Promising Customers

Analyzing current customers’ purchase patterns can identify not only who is “underbuying” ­– or even who is buying competitors’ products – but also neglected sales leads. We would learn from historical sales data about opportunities to activate dormant customers. It’s important to choose only three to five of the most promising target groups to revive to make sure enough resources are available.

2. Design Focused Offerings for Each Target Segment

For these three to five target segments, figure out their immediate unmet needs, such as better product information, more technical support or more delivery options. Then customize the existing product offerings to meet these needs. This may require adjusting the following elements: pricing, service, delivery channels, sales approaches or contact frequency. The goal should not be the fundamental product innovation, but rather a repackaging of existing product or service offerings to meet the special needs and expectations of customers. Designing initiatives that have high impacts on each target audience.

3. Thoroughly Implement and Track Results

Rapid prototyping and close monitoring of the selected projects can reveal which projects have markets and which do not. Choose one or two representative or important regional markets to launch pilot projects. If the product or service supply is repackaged, make sure to give your sales representatives adequate training. Not every pilot project will succeed, and that’s okay – the most promising pilot projects provide a basis for rapid and company-wide rollout.

Failure is the mother of success, which is the key. Successful companies usually test three to six pilot projects. If there are too few pilot projects, the odds of success will be very low; Too many it may be difficult to determine what’s working. It is better to have shorter cycles of testing, learning, and improving, and do not forget to implement the appropriate plans and monitor results for each cycle.

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What is a persona?

A persona is a fictional character created as a proxy for a target audience. These audience archetypes commonly include illustrative pictures and fictional names that make them tangible to digital designers and marketers. Personas identify similar patterns of behavior that result in commonly held goals. Digital marketers craft personas by analyzing primary and secondary sources, including ethnographic insight arising from direct observation of people and from data on their behavioral patterns.

What is the value of Persona for content marketing?

If the user portrait is too general or one-sided, it will not be helpful to optimize content marketing. For example, 22% of people without a high school degree use the Internet, while about 90% of people with a bachelor’s degree often use the Internet. This insight does not help define a specific interaction design or audience interaction plan. Similarly, women accounted for 71% of online purchasers of clothing and accessories. This discovery does not help you create a good audience experience for the target audience.

Now try to use the character Ashley, a professional woman with a bachelor’s degree, because time is not enough and she needs to be multi-tasking. She uses mobile devices to buy brand-name clothes at a low price for her two-year-old son (because her friends think that saving is a virtue) (She often buy at home, but sometimes buy at coffee time with friends who have children of the same age). In this way, Ashley can spend more quality time with her family instead of spending time on a stressful shopping trip. This persona provides a much richer insight for digital designers and marketers, helping to guide the design of marketing activities, audience interaction plans and digital experience.

How to Create a Persona

Personas are derived from a combination of five research modalities:

• Demographic — Defines the basic structure of a population-based on geography, income, level of education, and other standard descriptive attributes.
• Psychographic — Focuses on values, opinions, interests, aspirations, attitudes and lifestyles.
• Ethnographic — Involves participatory observation where insights are gleaned by watching subjects in their daily routines and capturing what isn’t explicitly reported.
• Transactional — Reveals insights through a historical customer relationship, including first- and third-party purchase histories and post-sale service records.
• Behavioral — Captures data passively through engagement with websites, mobile devices and other media, content and channels that reveal how audiences engage over the course of a relationship.

How to carry out the research based on these five modalities? Stay tuned for our next article How to Design Persona for Content Marketing. The content will include how to define the audience’s scope, how to ask correctly to effectively collect the need of a specific audience group, and how to determine the focus of content marketing.

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Meanwhile in China, people are more likely to use a super application, WeChat, to complete all the tasks mentioned above: social networking, shopping, payment and even public services.

By the end of 2018, WeChat user volume ranked first in the smartphone community with more than 1.098 billion MAU (monthly active user), only topped by that of Facebook and Instagram. When it comes to the mobile consumption in their respective main market, WeChat has 34% market share in China, while Facebook only has 14.1% in North America. WeChat also has an increasing impact on economy: In 2018, the information consumption driven by WeChat reached 209.7 billion RMB (~30.4 billion USD), accounting for 4.7% of China’s total information consumption. It is clear that marketing on WeChat has a huge user base, which would bring competitive advantages compared to anyone who doesn’t.

If you belong to a B2B multinational company and want to tap into the Chinese consumer market, there is no doubt that WeChat will be the most important marketing channel for you. What exactly are the advantages of WeChat marketing? Does WeChat triumph over its rivals just because of its huge active user base in China?

First of all, being the Chinese consumers’ major smart phone community does  bring a huge advantage. Furthermore, WeChat’s dominance is still expanding rapidly, where even people’s lifestyle has changed. WeChat is a marketing platform that can reach the potential customers with highest efficiency.

In 2018, a report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) showed that Chinese consumers prefer mobile social networking: They spend on average 3.9 hours on smart phones daily and prefer super apps with multiple functions integrated (Ah, WeChat!). In contrast, American consumers spend less time on smart phones and would spread their time evenly on different mobile applications.

Here is some data showing the impact of WeChat as a super app:

Social Function

• In 2018, 45 billion messages were sent daily, an increase of 18% over last year, and 100 million audio and video calls were successfully sent, increased by 100% from the number last year.

Payment Function

• In 2018, WeChat Pay ranked first in terms of daily active users, monthly active users and the total transaction volume;
• The daily average transaction volume exceeded 1 billion times, of which commercial payments accounted for more than 50%;
• The number of monthly active businesses increased by more than 80% compared with last year, and the revenue from businesses registered a year-over-year growth of more than 100%.

Communication Function

• In 2017, the total number of registered WeChat official accounts has exceeded 10 million, and the number of active official accounts is 3.5 million, a 14% increase over the previous year;
• The official accounts have 9.7 billion monthly active users, a 19% increase over the previous year.

Business service function

• In 2018, the number of active users on the WeChat mini-program has increased rapidly by a 54% in average daily traffic. The services covered more than 200 sub-industries, with more than 100 billion users in government and business field. Mini-program achieved over 600% increase in annual transactions.

Secondly, WeChat has several functions that are especially helpful for B2B companies: Mini-program, official account, WeChat Work and mobile payment. Companies are empowered to engage with and convert customers more conveniently and efficiently with these integrated functions. This is one of the most prominent advantages of WeChat marketing. Furthermore, WeChat can help companies operate with higher cost efficiency. In a survey led by WeChat, 34% of WeChat official account operators said that the WeChat official account helped them reduce at least 1/3 of the costs.

Most marketers in China realize that the popularity level of e-mail is low in China, and majority of people tend to use WeChat instead of e-mail for work-related communications. International B2B companies should pay special attention to this culture difference, in order to carry out smoother communication with local businesses.

Thirdly, B2B companies need to quickly improve their digital sales capability, and among other mobile social networks, WeChat is the best one to be used as a digital sales channel by B2B companies.

Let’s first have a grasp of current B2B landscape. Nearly half of the B2B buyers are millennials (a generation reached adulthood around 2000). Their preference for online interaction has been rapidly changing customer journey and communication method between buyers and sellers. While there is a shift of communication routine in the B2B buying process, most of the companies are yet under prepared.

How are B2B companies adapting to this shift? BCG released a report that surveyed 723 global B2B companies. The report measures a company’s digital B2B sales capability based on how they managed the following five dimensions: understanding the customer journey, optimizing individual channels, integrating across channels, and offering digital tools and training. On the basis of the analysis, these B2B companies are classified into four evolutionary stages for digital B2B sales:

• 19% are beginners: They’ve made initial efforts to optimize each sales channel. Overall, they pay more attention to products improvement rather than to sales improvement.
• 48% are intermediate:They’ve optimized sales channels and processes, but had little channel integration and no overarching digital sales strategy.
• 23% are mature: They developed a digital sales strategy based on their solid understanding on customer journey. Furthermore, they’ve equipped with digital tools and training are supported to help improve sales performance.
• 11% are champions:They’ve achieved everything their competitors had, and more importantly, they have integrated all digital channels and proactively manage them to prevent channel conflicts. Their expertise rewarded them with at least 3% higher EBITDA (earnings before interest and taxes) than that of the beginners.

Translate the digital sales capability to revenue, each progression to next stage will result in at least 1% EBITDA increase.

How can WeChat play a role here? For majority of B2B companies who are in the beginner and intermediate stages, providing digital sales tools like WeChat and the training, and develop sales strategy can largely improve their business efficiency, and ultimately translated to competitive advantages.

Firstly, having a digital sales management tool is essential due to the richness of the customer journeys. According to the BCG survey mentioned above, compared to the previous customer journey that started with personal connection, current customer journey starts way earlier before the personal contact: Prospects would utilize online marketplace, search engine and online forum to collect information, filter vendors and evaluate proposals. Appropriate sales management tool enables a company to monitor and manage channel dynamics. In China, WeChat official account provides a sales platform for companies to communicate with a large group of potential customers: Companies can use the subscription account to release product and service information, and chat with customers.

Secondly, from the perspective of improving conversions, the new sales method—the customer conversion method combining data-driven sales process and customer journey—are three times more effective than the traditional sales method. With in-depth data insights, companies are able to identify different customer segments based on their needs, and therefore optimize investments, meanwhile customers will receive customized journeys. In fact, based on a survey, current social interaction process between brands and Chinese consumers are in great need of improvement: For example, social content with low quality and low relevance, social relationship focused too much on profits, and lack of personalized content. This finding indicates that companies need to improve in terms of interaction effectiveness, frequency, duration, and social stickiness. WeChat is a great platform to engage customers, collect customer data, grant customers with shop access, which can all achieved in personalized customer journey. Click here and select B2B Case Studies to learn more about how B2B companies are using JINGdigital to improve their WeChat sales efficiency.

Contact us to learn about how JINGdigital can help enhance your company’s digitalization in China utilizing WeChat!

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