The Matrix in Marketing

Grace Low
4 min readNov 4, 2020

Do you want to be a part of Chinese Ads Matrix Marketing?

Oh my, which good Samaritans did this chart?

Source: https://www.hicom-asia.com/chinese-kol-top-10-social-media-platforms-they-use/

The cooperation of various resources and channels have a been a norm to keeping up one’s enterprise onto the current trend. A Marketing Matrix is essentially a plot on a two or even more dimensional plane according to how well they meet customers’ key requirements. Digital market and environment have changed too rapidly.

Too many platforms, too many channels to study. Why and how?

  1. Changes in users lifestyle, which goes along with timezone differences and regions. The results of sub-divided by various platforms, the trendsetters.
  2. The Internet has shortened the life cycle of various marketing tools due to the acceleration of relatively comparison and product update iterations, and technological advancement. With regards to the acceleration of user migration, many startups can expect the possibility of instantaneous viral outbreak.
  3. The transformation of marketing methods. We started with traditional way of large-scales sales, to distribution sales, and then moving forward to community sales.
  4. The change of users spending behaviour. Before placing the orders, users will check on live broadcast platforms, shopping guides, etc. More often than not we have more sales placed in these channels than in TaoBao itself.

Thus, the next question is, what should we do to hit on these platforms accordingly? Prior to the importance of identifying the target troupes in different platforms, we should emphasise onto content creations.

Think about this, we are very serious in content creating, putting the fonts, the designs, the photos, the sentences. In my opinion, we are creating a cycle of letting clients to be able to identify us, and not the other way round. Those were the golden days that we need to hunt for clients and with the rapid change of social media, I should say, good contents will attract clients attention to look for us, no?

So where and how would the clients be able to search for good contents?

Adapted from vshouce

With this chart above, we noticed a segregations amongst official websites, search engines and also social media platforms. And these created a matrix in our strategic marketing plan.

And, amongst the social media platforms we will then subdivide according to their functions, regions and user base. Functions like brand story, sales tactic, the CRM managements; From these we will be able to identify contents matrix according to clients products- professional generated content (PGC), user generated content (UGC) , general reviews, ads, product placements, etc.

Given a case study of “S fashion brand”, its a tailor-made brand, focusing on young & swag streetwears. No physical stores, but online purchase. And we shall just skipping the real fact that we ought to list their products into Tmall, TaoBao, and WeChat Merchant Store. For content wise, let’s plan a matrix in its brand marketing:

— Target Platforms — Platforms Analytical Research — Social Media Crossover — Customized Content — Results Driven

Is this product for outbound tourists? Is this product for female? Is this product for age group 18–30? Clients answer: I want it all, for mass market. (If you ever hear this, trust me, take a bow and say goodbye) The core lies in understanding this new audience, their needs, and their spending behaviours, rather than a blanket-marketing campaign targeting everyone. In social media, you need to identify which platforms will lead their users to your brand and to making sure that these users will stay as your target audience.

Various platforms, little bullets; Specific and focus are two key words.

Matrix marketing draws the line of proper planning versus shooting all your bullets randomly and try your luck miserably. S fashion brand is for the students and mainly with high spending power, thus, will these group of target audience be using Red, or TikTok? Which bunch of KOLs to do distributions and media coverage to which forums then?

Combining with contents marketing, this matrix should be planned way ahead to avoid overspending. Putting ups the contents is an easy piece but not until clients need to be ready to spend on boost ads, how much? which regions? impressions and engagements and then leads, clients might not need to be familiarised with these jargons but as a strategic marketing partner, what’s your pick? guaranteed sales leads or to merely traffic generations? Pick one! Wait, so short videos or static graphic posts as marketing tools first?

Despite platforms are subdivided into various dimensions but this matrix needs to be gathered to client’s pool of data. At the end of each campaigns, your reports have to be as specific as possible to generate the next campaign in the next quarter; Rome wasn’t built in a day and so does client’s brand. It takes at least 6 months to see some results.

“These key China digital marketing trends demonstrate the level of creativity and innovation required to compete in this complex marketplace. It can be a tough nut to crack, but crack it you can … with the right support and expertise.”

From https://www.young-diplomats.com/chinas-go-global-media/

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