The Power of Big Data in China Market

As the digital world is undergoing an ever-evolving process, it’s hard to define big data with simple terms. Thanks to lots of coverage of big data these days, people are witnessing all the innovation that happened in the west, and particularly in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in China, an online industry has emerged to cater to the business and leisure needs of the world’s most populous nation.

Big data can be used in different ways, and sometimes it may be a little tricky for a company with massive data to deal with it. In China, marketing behaviors become increasingly data-oriented with the support and insights obtained from big data, and following from that, the value of social media marketing channel is enhanced. Big data for marketing is a way to market programmatic buying ads more reasonable, and improve the effects of personalized services. To apply data-oriented marketing in China, a business may get benefits such as below:

1.     Combination of data and media

2.     Customer orientation

3.     Precise audience targeting

4.     Lower cost

5.     Link between online and offline

6.     Proactive marketing

7.     Break of the limits of time and space

As for the old topic of “How to reach target market effectively”, business can now obtain deep insights by using data capturing tools and other ways to record customer information. The information gained from marketing analytics can be easily attained with the right tools and then evaluated for a better ROI for your next campaign. This is why so many Chinese advertisers are in favor of big data for marketing.

A good example about using big data for marketing is the marketing practice made by Taobao. According to the data, the peak time of online users usually appears before 12pm. Some Taobao sellers took advantages of their consumptive features to carry out promotional activities (for some new launched goods) campaign at midnight, which can improve sales.

JD is also a good example of conducting mailing marketing using big data (a Chinese B2C E-commerce website). With the strong support of JD big data mining technology，JD is able to read consumers’ minds and navigate their online behaviors. The data of users’ behavior in JD.com can be fetched, including very useful data such as searching items, viewing page, clicking, consulting, paying attention, putting in the shopping cart, placing an order, and filling in the address. Moreover, to target every users’ preferences, JD has built a model based on these data to store every users’ profiles, including age, gender, marriage status, and favorite brands, etc. Then, JD proposed the scenarios to cater to different strategies.

One more best practice is from Tencent. To tackle the problem on how to find target audience, an intelligent data management platform was developed by Tencent to integrate internal data with external data and provide the advertisers with diversified, open, and safe communication service platform. All the data is classified according to different dimensions and is made into more than 3,000 tags, including basic attribute, social interests, entertainment interests, media preferences, etc. By getting the most of these data, a business will be able to customize profiles of target audience.