Why & How to Use Social Selling in APAC
We’ve previously written about brands using livestreaming techniques as part of their Tmall marketing strategy, to build awareness in the Chinese market. In this blog, we’ll outline how other South East Asian markets are following in China’s footsteps and realizing the importance of social selling in APAC.
Maximize your brand’s discoverability
Customer acquisition marketing costs can be high when you first enter a new market. For all brands looking to internationalize through marketplaces, we recommend establishing brand awareness in the target market via social channels, along with advertising on the marketplaces themselves. Livestreaming content can be used to promote your products in several ways; both to engage those who are already aware of your brand, and also to help consumers discover your brand and products for the first time.
Livestreaming has been adopted by marketplaces across the APAC region. Tmall, JD.com, Lazada and Shopee have all developed livestreaming platforms and reported uplifts in usage during 2020; particularly during lockdowns when stores were closed.
How social selling in APAC works
Your trade partner should have their own presenters on staff, who can present your products on livestream shows that are dedicated to your brand. This can help you to educate and convert customers who already have awareness of your brand.
You may also work with influencers (called KOLs or key opinion leaders) to showcase your products to their followers and extend your reach. We’ve successfully used livestreaming platforms to engage and convert customers in China, and the same techniques can work in South East Asia too.
Collaborating with KOLs and micro-influencers
While the most well-known KOLs can have millions of followers they are also extremely expensive. If you are prepared to pay for their involvement, then you can work with more widely known KOLs to feature your products on a livestream and drive thousands of purchases during the stream.
Alternatively, some brands opt to work with micro-influencers with expertise in their category instead. This can be an extremely effective way of engaging smaller audiences who are most likely to purchase your products.
But collaborating with KOLs and micro-influencers should not be restricted to just livestreaming content—social selling in APAC can expand further to content on other offline marketing channels including Douyin (Tiktok), WeChat, and RED, ensuring that you have the optimal marketing mix in place for your brand.
Optimize your social selling strategy with Pattern
Competition for brand awareness in the Asia Pacific region is fierce, and international brands should be prepared to invest enough in marketing when preparing for a successful launch. When used effectively, social selling techniques in APAC can help your brand to engage and retain customers.
Or you can Contact us today to discuss how we could support your marketplace sales in APAC, or resolve other marketplace challenges you’re facing.
More Resources
Influencer Marketing Report: How to use influencers to acquire new customers on marketplaces
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APAC Ecommerce Report
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Marketplace Internationalization Checklist
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Aug 10, 2022
Pattern Increases American Pet Brand Tmall Sales by 500%
American Pet Brand, one of the largest manufacturers of electronic pet training products in the U.S., had entered into the China market and, after a few years, established an impressive level of brand awareness in the country. Content with their level of success in China, the brand was cruising on Tmall without much support.
However, without investing in their brand growth and maintaining a competitive edge with advertising on Tmall, sales slowed down and their social media engagement with customers became idle. The brand was left trying to figure out how to regain its momentum.
After a year of flailing, American Pet Brand realized they could not do it alone and partnered with Pattern to redirect its trajectory on Tmall. Pattern, an ecommerce accelerator, provided the global expertise and resources the brand needed to regain control and succeed on Tmall.
Pattern Developed and Executed a Brand Creative Strategy
Building from a strong brand foundation in one of the world’s largest ecommerce markets, Pattern’s experts:
1. Focused on Brand Image across Advertising and Marketing
Pattern’s China experts worked with the brand to reactivate the existing customer base and attract new customers through a series of marketing activities. Using proprietary technology and data-driven insights, Pattern developed and launched advertising campaigns to drive both traffic and conversion to its listings.
Additionally, the brand launched influencer marketing campaigns that heavily revolved around Key Opinion Leader (KOL) and Key Opinion Consumer (KOC) campaigns. With the extra validation from key voices in the market, increased the reach of and American Pet Brand profile.
2. Updated Product Listings to Optimize Tmall Presence for All Products
Pattern experts helped the brand optimize the Tmall store set up, design, and customer service support. The increase of customer support is essential to gain a competitive edge on Tmall. Primarily because positive customer experiences improve a brand’s Detailed Seller Rank (DSR), and is crucial if you want to ensure that one-time purchasers of your brand are converted into repeat purchasers. Together, these improvements provided for a global increase in customer experience satisfaction.
3. Re-established Seller Control with a New Reseller Cooperation Arrangement, including Marketing Terms
Pattern’s team worked with the brand to set and execute a new reseller cooperation arrangement that invited resellers to purchase through the official channel with better control of pricing, discount, content, and marketing messages.
Creative Refresh Leads to 500% Sales Growth on Tmall
Together with Pattern’s China experts, American Pet Brand was able to achieve incredible results:
500% sales growth in only 3 months
Successfully reactivated the customer base and existing resellers with effective, consistent, and focused marketing campaigns
Increased brand awareness from social marketing activities, which also increased engagement
Pattern Drives Revenue on Tmall and Beyond
Working together with the American Pet Brand team, Pattern revived the brand and redirected its sales trajectory on Tmall. The quick sales success showcases that by focusing an ecommerce strategy on key brand and advertising components that drive traffic and conversion, a brand will grow its profitability on global marketplaces.
Looking to succeed on Tmall and beyond? Contact Us.
Aug 9, 2022
The Ecommerce Equation: 4 Levers CEOs Use to Drive Marketplace Revenue
Developing your ecommerce strategy for digital marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Tmall, and Alibaba gets complicated fast—there’s a lot to think about, including marketplace SEO, product photography, advertising tactics, disjointed sellers, distribution logistics, managing ratings and reviews, and more. It can be overwhelming for brands, especially those with small teams, to know which behaviors to optimize for for the highest gains in profitability.
The good news? Revenue performance all comes down to data. Pattern was built on a data science approach to ecommerce success. We find the patterns that drive profitability, then apply them to boost our brand partners’ revenue on ecommerce channels.
And a key pattern we follow for all brands on digital marketplaces is the ecommerce equation: revenue = traffic x conversions x price x availability. As brands zero in on these four pieces of the equation, they can simplify and focus their efforts to reach truly profitable ecommerce growth.
1. Drive Traffic to Products
The first part of the equation is traffic—you need to get people to see your listings if you want to generate sales. There are two ways to drive traffic to your products: through organic search and paid search. Striking the right balance between both for your brands is crucial to driving enough of the right traffic to your products, ultimately increasing your ecommerce revenue.
Knowing this, Pattern provides the resources and technology needed to drive traffic to your product listings. Our brand management team, advertising specialists, and SEO technicians work in harmony to create a unified strategy to boost your brand’s organic profile and balance that with a paid advertising approach that works for your brand and listings.
Using this method, we took Feetures socks from ranking on longer-tail terms like “no show athletic socks black” to driving traffic on parent keywords like “no show socks.”
2. Create Content that Converts
Getting customers to your product listing is only half the battle. Once on your listing, you need customers to convert. Conversion is key to the ecommerce equation because it leads to real product purchases and revenue. Traffic without conversion leads to more time and ad spend without the ROI.
Optimizing your images, product description, bulleted details, customer reviews, and buy box performance is key to successful conversion. If you’re going to spend time and effort driving traffic, you should make sure customers can easily and clearly find what they’re looking for when they arrive at your listing.
While your imagery and descriptions are important, you also need to build customer trust to drive conversions. Studies show that your customer service efforts matter too—84% of people trust online reviews as much as friends, making strong reviews an important factor of conversion on marketplaces.
The good news is as you provide a quality product and a great marketplace experience, you’ll build brand equity, increasing your customer loyalty. Then, as your reputation, reviews, and traffic grow positively, marketplace algorithms will recognize your popularity and improve your rank accordingly. Rank drives both traffic and conversions, helping you to optimize your performance further. As your brand equity grows, your conversions will continue to grow with it.
3. Control Your Price
While setting a strategic price is an important step in your ecommerce strategy, it takes more than that to truly control your price on marketplaces.
Without proper control and with wide distribution, your product could end up in the hands of disjointed sellers who lower your marketplace price to sell their inventory and make quick profits. With one seller lowering price online, other authorized sellers and retail partners are forced to lower their price to compete, creating price erosion and sending your brand down the profitability death spiral.
This Death Spiral damages brand equity, hurts conversions, and can lead to Buy Box Suppression on Amazon, hindering traffic as well. And as prices get lower and lower, your profit margin withers away, decreasing your overall revenue.
Using our data-driven insights and Pattern’s eControl partner Vorys, we help brands implement narrow distribution, identify and take-down unauthorized sellers, eliminate price erosion, and control their price online. Focusing on price control, Pattern helped LifeSeasons, a premium supplement company, take back 91% control of the Buy Box on Amazon.
Download the LifeSeasons 1-Page Case Study Here
4. Optimize Your Product Availability
The last piece of the ecommerce equation is availability. It makes sense to think of availability as a contributing factor in conversion, but we felt that it’s important enough to call out on its own—you can fully optimize your traffic, conversion, and price, but without availability, you can’t grow revenue for your brand.
A lack of availability leads to stock outs, losing conversions to competitors, losing possession of the buy box, poor customer reviews, a decrease in traffic…the list goes on. The best-performing brands on ecommerce digital marketplaces optimize their availability with high-end technology, optimize their cash on hand, and inventory time on hand to keep the ecommerce equation powered and optimized in their favor.
How Pattern Drives Revenue Using the Ecommerce Equation
Pattern is committed to solving the ecommerce equation. We partner with brands to provide the expertise, resources, and technology needed to drive traffic, create content that converts, protect price, maintain availability, and ultimately accelerate ecommerce revenue and profitable growth.
Interested in improving the results of your ecommerce equation? Schedule a call.
