rethinkCase

Alibaba & Alimama – marketing innovation & „segments of one“

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU

The wildest dreams of marketeers could become true. Creating micro-segments, even „segments of one“, in order to individually target customers one by one and rethinking the way how to deal with them.

Possibly you’ve never heard of Alimama, Alibaba’s secret weapon to move customer understanding to the next level. That’s how it’s meant to be: even the website of Alimama阿里妈妈 is only in Chinese. And though the company may be responsible for more than half of the revenue of its mother Alibaba, it’s rarely mentioned in corporate statements. Let’s have a look behind the scenes.

Customer at the center of everything

HIGH PRECISION FOR ADVERTISERS THROUGH GRANULAR CUSTOMER INSIGHTS

Beyond providing the infrastructure for marketplaces and facilitation of trade Alibaba is heavily focused on enabling its merchants to reach their customers more efficiently and effectively through marketing innovation. That’s what Alimama does. Within the Alibaba network it develops marketing solutions for merchants as well as for advertisers. Additionally, Alimama leverages network effects across the giant Alibaba ecosystem from food delivery, entertainment content, e-commerce shopping, finance to social media to many more. Alibaba’s platforms cover pretty much all needs and touchpoints along the customer journey – so they know pretty much all about those customers.

CUSTOMER DATA LOOP – MORE THAN 4000 DATA POINTS PER USER

The platform ecosystem provides a rich and vivid data profile of each individual user including behavioural data, tribe affiliation, attitudes, needs and wants expressed on social media and search. On average there are more than 4000 data points per ecosystem user accessible for the Alimama marketing solution platform. Through the various dynamic digital products of the Alibaba ecosystem, Alimama is the central marketing hub able to integrate tools for the marketing needs of merchants in one place. The central marketing hub enables merchants through algorithms and learning systems to target their customers ever more precisely at the right moment on the right platform.

Alimama Uni Desk Model

LEVERAGING PLATFORM SYNERGIES TO EXPAND CUSTOMER INSIGHTS

The information inflow as well as the targeting take place on several of those products, on e-commerce platforms (TMall, Taobao) as on digital banks (Ant Financial) as on local services. The formats range from live streaming promotion, brand search, interactive location-based activation, display ads, consumer insights, to product development and recommendation marketing and are continuously iterated. This utilises the cross-network ad potential and synergies that stem from the integration of payment, logistics and marketplace infrastructures. Ultimately, these highly granular detailed profiles enable customised targeting to a segment of one single customer at scale across the platform ecosystem. Every network interaction is not just a shopping or advertisement endpoint, but also a new starting point to observe user behaviour.