COVID-19 has not only accelerated digitalization in innovative companies but also in the traditionally less digitalized part of the economies, such as traditional enterprises. The pandemic caused digital marketing costs to go up further as virtually every brand doubled its efforts to reach Chinese consumers digitally, with some shifting their entire market budget to digital. As a result, retaining existing customers and refining the marketing brand’s core battlefields now.


Under such circumstances, Wanjia Liu, Director of Brand Marketing of FAW-Volkswagen Sales Co Ltd; Peng Lin, Marketing Director of Puxin Limited, Beijing; Yi Zhou, Product Solution Director of Data Intelligent Product Department of JD Cloud; Yanyan Song, China Media Director, Kantar Worldpanel; And Yuji Cao, VP of Product Solution, DeepZero | iPinYou joined the panel “How to build a consumer-centered digitalization strategy” at the 5th Marketing Summit and shared their insightful opinions.


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Identify business scenario

 “For companies that are embracing digitalization, there are two things they need to go through”, said Yuji Cao. “First of all, identify your business scenarios. Some companies started to build DMP in 2005, but most of them failed due to the ignorance of actual business pain points. That is to say, is the data collected by your CDP/DMP can guide your business? One of our most valuable experiences is that the starting point of building any digitalization-related product is solving business pain points, which requires the co-construction effort of both brands and vendors”.


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A consumer-centered whole-domain digitalization approach

“Secondly, once a brand knows the business pain point, the next step is to digitalize every part of your consumer-centered business. Indeed, companies would do a better job of running consumer-centered businesses if they understand their customers. For large and mid-size enterprises, establishing a first-party data management system and integrating data from other sources can solve this problem. IPinYou has made some whole domain digitalization endeavors with strategic partners like JD.com and Kanrar. And our partnership with all three telecom operators also helps many automotive enterprises onboard their online and offline data and develop an impactful traffic generation engine."



An agile organization model

“China’s digital landscape is continuously changing. Our experience of serving hundreds of brands shows that in an unpredictable environment, brands need a flexible organizational model that will let them constantly monitor changes and adapt quickly to go after new opportunities.  This means an organization can digitalize their workflows, team building, and infrastructure with a mindset where nothing is final over.”