DeepZero | iPinYou worked with the Department for InternationalTrade UK to target B2B Chinese decision-makers (March 2022)
With China’s middle-class population set to reach 40 billion by 2030, according to a new report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), there are plenty of investment opportunities for Chinese B2B decision-makers keen to develop their interests in overseas growth sectors.
The UK’s Department of International Trade (DIT) approached DeepZero | iPinYou to execute a targeted advertising campaign in China, raising awareness for the trade organization. Its goal was to better understand the digital footprint of stakeholders across four of the DIT’s priority sectors in China: consumer (including education, retail, healthcare, sports, creative industries, food and drink), finance (banking, fintech, pensions), manufacturing (marine, green tech, e-vehicles) and energy/infrastructure (environment, urban regeneration, aviation and rail, energy storage).
Using its proprietary and third-party data capture intelligence tools across all these online search behaviors, DeepZero | iPinYou was able to provide a detailed snapshot of engagement levels and performance metrics for the DIT campaign over 2 weeks in March 2022.
The BCG report predicts that from 2022 to 2030, China’s middle and upper class will increase by over 80 million to account for 40% of the country’s total population; 70% of this affluent demographic will be located in third or lower-tier cities.
DeepZero | iPinYou can identify such shifting trends in Chinese consumer behavior through its targeting capabilities and the DIT case study showcases an increasing need for B2B campaigns to provide sub-segmentation for key consumer sectors.
DeepZero | iPinYou’s third-party data tools allow it to build highly targeted audience segments - its proprietary DAAT (Digital Advertising Audience Taxonomy) system is a database with 6000 pre-defined separate labels.
DeepZero | iPinYou harnesses China's 'Super Apps' to provide audience segmentation tools
For the DIT campaign, DeepZero | iPinYou’s technology harnessed the power of China’s ‘Super Apps’ to target consumers by demographic, industry, and personal interests, geo-location, and search intent - combined to create custom segmentation.
The campaign audience segments were based on app usage for the WeChat official account, Weibo accounts followers, and keyword searches of users. To aid IPinYou with the selection of segment criteria, DIT supplied a list of companies that fall within each sector and keywords that had been historically used for SEO campaigns.
DIT supplied sector-specific creatives which would only be shown to the respective audience group. The campaign ran for 14 days and the DeepZero | iPinYou team was able to optimize the campaign based on over 70 targeting criteria.
DIT supplied sector-specific creatives which would only be shown to the respective audience group. The campaign ran for 14 days and the DeepZero | iPinYou team was able to optimize the campaign based on over 70 targeting criteria.
Audience analysis - insights
To carry out the audience analysis the anonymized device ID data from each sector was shared with the AsiaInfo DMP to be mapped and matched across 980m users A total of 9,295,190 mobile ad impressions were delivered with 205,424 clicks giving an overall CTR of 2.21%. The campaign overachieved the predicted benchmark of 1.5% CTR. The consumer sector had the best campaign performance in terms of scale and clicks followed by Manufacturing, Finance, and finally Energy. Consumer accounts for nearly 33% of the total audience as the sub-sector list contains retail, education, and food and drink, which have the largest online presence. Energy (15%) on the other hand is the smallest with smaller online activity based on having lower search term frequency, plus the social accounts are smaller in terms of followers and users within the DAAT audience.
Higher than expected engagement
The precision of the audience targeting is reflected in the above benchmark CTR performance of 2.21%. From a B2B campaign perspective, CTR ranges from between 0.3% to 1.5% - meaning the core selection of audience, media, and creative contributed to higher-than-expected engagement. The Consumer sub-sectors make up the largest share of audience targets: DeepZero | iPinYou for DIT B2B campaign
Top 5 performing sectors
The top five performing creatives by sector and theme were:
Consumer – Education (CTR 2.62%),
Consumer – Food (CTR 2.53%),
Consumer – Fashion (CTR 2.48%),
Manufacturing – Innovation (CTR 2.27%),
Consumer – Sport (CTR 2.21%).
Top performing media
The top ten best-performing media included leading news portals such as Tencent News and Sohu News, the Q&A platform Zhihu, and China’s professional networking platform MaiMai.
Highlights from the Consumer themed creative:
- Consumer sub-sectors achieved the highest performance
- The Consumer sector achieved the highest performance with the largest audience footprint as the majority of the sub-sector targeting parameters apply to B2B decision makers.
- 2,351,246 unique users were targeted.
- Insights are based on 60,903 users who clicked on the Consumer sector creatives.
- 55% of users who engaged with the campaign fell within the 19-34 age bracket with a third in mid-level roles.
- Those in decision-maker positions had a strong TGI (Target Group Index) interest level in the campaign.
- Across all sectors Consumers also had the highest proportion of business owners (8000 approximately) engaging with the campaign – especially education, medicine, and law.
- The best-performing media for the sector focused on popular TV, food and beverage, news, music, and shopping apps from Tencent, Mango TV, and Netease. Over 90% of the audience in the consumer sector are active on WeChat, Douyin, Taobao, Pinduoduo, and Tmall which is representative of how these consumers use Chinese ‘Super Apps’ to conduct end-to-end business operations.
- The WeChat accounts of Chanel, Burberry, and Hermes had the highest TGI interest score for the audiences targeted.
- The top search terms focused on food and beverage, fashion, education, healthcare and current affairs. For food and beverage, organic snacks, whisky, milk tea, and restaurants saw the highest TGI.
- The prominence of French and Italian luxury brands in the Baidu report highlights potential competition for British brands such as Burberry.
- Education creatives had the highest CTR for the sector and related search terms for master qualifications such as CFA and MBA scored highly.
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