On December 14, GroupM Greater China CEO and WPP China CEO Patrick Xu and Alibaba Group Vice President Liu Bo met in Hangzhou’s Alibaba Xixi Park where the two parties formally reached a strategic partnership. GroupM has become the first Alimama super m partner and will jointly explore more possibilities in the new customer marketing area.
A group photo of GroupM & Ali Representatives
Increased customer acquisition rate helps improve marketing effectiveness
As one of the main drivers of brand growth, "continuous customer acquisition" has been the priority of consumer operations for brands. To acquire new customers for e-commerce platforms, brands always launch massive marketing campaigns via off-platform channels to boost the acquisition. They then offer membership gifts along with generous discounts to encourage new customers to make purchases on platforms. However, in this process, brands often have to tackle the challenges of digesting the traffics channeled through off-platform promotions, as well as a lack of effective and continuous communication and engagement with consumers. What’s more, the scarcity of quality resources in the public domain of the platform further increased the cost of conversion.
As a key bridge between brands and platforms, GroupM will provide more brand marketing perspectives through this strategic partnership to help the continuous upgrade of Alimama products, hence stimulating more business possibilities, while presenting improved one-stop effective new customer marketing solutions for brands it serves.
"As an all-media agency, GroupM has been dedicated to using data and technologies to drive quality business growth for brands. For years, GroupM and Alibaba Group kept deepening their cooperation, with cooperation scopes further expanded and deepened. Becoming the first super partner of Alimama and Tmall operation team marks a new beginning of another digital marketing revolution. The three-party partnership will soon expand to other dimensions of the refined membership operation on the basis of new customer marketing to help clients solve problems they encountered in marketing and unleash more business opportunities,” said
Patrick Xu, CEO of GroupM Greater China and WPP China.
Integrating strategies and recourses across Alibaba ecosystem to drive brand growth
To address the challenges related to the new customer marketing, the two parties will further promote the integration of brand, media and e-commerce strategies. They will better integrate media resources across the Alibaba ecosystem to effectively cover the entire customer journey within and beyond the e-commerce platform, while improving media efficiency along the entire marketing chain, so as to help Ali official flagship stores promote new targeted customers’ conversion rates.
Liu Bo, vice president of Alibaba Group,
said: “For brands, new people, new goods, and new scenario are the three most important growth factors. Alimama will work with Tmall Taobao and ecological partners to explore more for brands and provide efficient marketing solutions in these fields. GroupM is the top agency in the industry and an important partner of Alimama. The strategic partnership in the new marketing area reached between GroupM and Alimama this time is another new milestone. It marks the deep integration of business and organizational cooperation between the two parties, and will work to innovate the new customer area, while continuing to promote the super linear growth of brand owners, and inject new ideas for driving new customers with new weapons and ammunition."
(Left): Meg Chen (Right): Mickey Zhang
Based on their business growth targets and business models, the two parties will develop a comprehensive “point-to-point” marketing plan at different stages of a promotional campaign. They will also integrate media resources across the ecosystem and explore big data as well as artificial intelligence algorithms to achieve the effective match of people-to-goods-to-site, while helping brands better understand their new target customer groups to create more personalized and customized communication with them.
