Dialogue with Chinese Enterprises on Cross-Border Business: Long-Termism, the "Fast Forward Button" for Going Global

Going global is no longer merely an act of business expansion, nor is it simply a series of foreign trade orders issued by the Yiwu Small Commodity Market and OEM factories. Instead, it has become an unprecedented state in the growth path of Chinese enterprises.

The cross-border service field, which has remained low-key for a long time, has also ushered in the explosive period of the "second half".

Unlike the previous "fierce competition", nowadays, these digital service providers who once stood at the forefront of foreign trade digitization and cross-border e-commerce have become polarized. Some directly go global to seize the dividends of a single market; others have reached the IPO stage but are still struggling to make a profit.

A positive phenomenon is that in this year's trend of "sinking and returning to rationality", some enterprise service providers that have been established for more than ten or twenty years are standing firm in the wave of globalization with more effective business strategies and service models.

CEICross-border under CEI Group is such a company.

"We realized that new opportunities are right in front of us when we found that the professional level of our customers' going-global marketing is getting higher and the changes are becoming more and more."

Chen Mingfei, CEO of CEI Group and CEICross-border, told 36Kr that the value of enterprise service providers lies in the value of "initiating changes" of enterprise customers.

With a Global Vision, Focus on Depth

In 2005, CEI Group became the first domestic agent of Google. Starting from search engines, it has gradually developed into building private domain websites, optimizing advertisements, and aggregating channels. Now, CEICross-border has helped more than 300,000 foreign trade enterprises successfully go global.

But it wasn't until last year that Chen Mingfei felt so strongly that simple advertisement optimization and marketing methods could no longer meet the structural needs of Chinese enterprises going global.

Pushing Made in China to the global stage is also a process of the dynamic transformation of the entire Chinese economy. This dynamic transformation, focused on the cross-border service field, is mainly reflected in two changes:

First, the operational thinking of going-global enterprises has expanded to the full-domain traffic of social media and other localized channels, shifting from advertisement optimization to content marketing.

Second, the global vision and localization have shifted from mature service markets such as Europe and the United States to emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, where digital infrastructure is accelerating. The enterprise service field will also be reshuffled.

Thus, the opportunities for going global are becoming broader, but there are still many uncertainties in practice. However, in the face of the problems of survival and growth, one thing is irreversible:

The era of extensive operation and low-cost customer acquisition has passed. Going-global enterprises increasingly need refined operation, and cross-border services also increasingly need to focus.

"Only by focusing can it mean generating value in key links like a specific medicine, rather than making your products and services become an alternative that can solve everything."

Chen Mingfei said that there is another key value in depth: to fully match the services provided with the customer needs. Otherwise, it is inevitable to have the reversed effect of "making customers adapt to the products".

Out of trust and focus on cross-border business, CEICross-border, like other businesses under CEI Group, serves enterprise customers with an independent brand and a complete team. The consistent business depth strategy also enables customers to clearly know what value they can obtain from CEICross-border.

In fact, due to the rapid improvement in the cognition and growth rate of domestic enterprises, and the low degree of standardization of business processes, if industry-depth tools and services are not developed, it is difficult to truly meet the business needs of enterprises, and it is inevitable that digitization will become a burden of expenses.

In terms of the team, CEICross-border has professional optimization talents for various markets and various advertising and content channels, and can "build" a service team according to the needs of going-global enterprises to accelerate the cycle of local construction and global operation of enterprises.

In addition, focus and depth also mean greater openness in services and data. The essence of the cross-border marketing services that CEICross-border is good at, such as building websites and overseas promotion, is to enable going-global enterprises to better generate direct interactions with consumers and B2B customers through private domain growth.

Nowadays, many domestic enterprises take going global as the core strategy from the very beginning of their establishment, which further tests the depth ability of cross-border services. Because in this case, many advantages of the domestic SaaS era, such as efficiency improvement, advanced concepts, and closed-loop operations, are actually not applicable to the actual pain points of going global.

"Whether it is a service provider or a supplier, it is simple to make money, that is, to find ways to make your customers make money."

Chen Mingfei said frankly that CEICross-border aims to hit the core motivation of going-global enterprises.

Long-Termism Service, More Important than Traffic

The key ability to implement the depth strategy is the long-term service ability.

The value of long-term service not only helps CEICross-border achieve a three-year renewal rate of more than 90%, but also helps Made in China penetrate into more and more overseas enterprises, steadily reaching more end users.

Although the business models of making white-label products and taking orders are also very popular, there is no doubt that the global brand is still the inevitable choice for the vast majority of going-global tracks, especially in B2B foreign trade. If you don't build a brand, when the next traffic dividend peaks, the enterprise will face a "slash-and-burn" result, watching the former traffic turn into nothingness.

And to build a brand, the most important thing is precisely not the orders, customer acquisition and sales under the e-commerce logic, but how to turn customers into long-term customers.

For this problem, the solution of CEICross-border is to meet customer needs more accurately with heavier services.

At present, CEICross-border has established 22 branches and has service points in major cities and industrial belts across the country. For this manufacturer, if it wants to solve the "pain points at the throat" of customers, it must have close contact with customers.

"Through long-term contact, more specifically perceiving the needs that customers may not be able to describe themselves is truly having a customer perspective."

Take the cooperation between CEICross-border and a steel pipe manufacturing company as an example. As a "vascular" product of the manufacturing industry and an absolute advantage area of the production capacity of Chinese private enterprises, in the traditional foreign trade thinking, steel pipe manufacturing rarely places B2B business in C-end channels such as social media. However, with the trend of B2B branding, such enterprises also have the need to output product content and brand placement in social media marketing channels.

But before sufficient communication, these enterprises have no relevant experience in how to establish a brand homepage, what content to output, what kind of user portrait to anchor, how to convert the fans obtained through social media into high-quality leads and generate long-term interaction, and which target regional markets to conduct large-scale promotion, and what are the marketing strategies in different overseas regions.

Based on this, CEICross-border has formulated an integrated overseas promotion content structure and marketing plan for the enterprise in channels such as independent websites, Google, Facebook, Tiktok, etc., and helps the enterprise continue to operate and implement the strategy.

For example, after CEICross-border insight and analyzed the product positioning and advantages of the enterprise, and the marketing model of similar manufacturers, it jointly selected Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Southeast Asia, South America and other regions as the precise target markets with the enterprise, increased high-quality leads through instant form advertisements in the advertisement, and rationalized the account and budget structure at the same time.

Under the long-term running-in, the Google advertisement placement and the enterprise's Facebook and Tiktok accounts achieved conversion on the first day of launch, with an average monthly inquiry of more than 300, an increase of 43% compared with the previous inquiry volume.

It is not difficult to see that the management service of CEICross-border is heavier and the upfront investment is more. This model is rarely adopted by digital manufacturers such as SaaS that mainly focus on sales tools. But as Chen Mingfei sees it, starting from the actual situation that 95% of Chinese enterprises are small and medium-sized enterprises, such a service ecosystem is indeed needed to cultivate long-term customers.

Compared with pure sales and procurement, CEICross-border hopes that the relationship with going-global enterprise customers is "to jointly incubate a long-termist business model".

Therefore, while other service providers are obsessed with how much cost they have saved for enterprises, how much traffic and orders they have obtained, CEICross-border pays more attention to "long-term profitability" indicators such as the ToB business opportunity conversion rate of enterprises and the repurchase rate of old customers.

The idea of CEICross-border's long-term service for customers is worth learning from for going-global enterprises in traffic conversion.

Take cross-border e-commerce as an example. Successful brands often invest more in private domain marketing than in platform e-commerce, which is actually a long-term investment to manage old customers well. Obtaining the long-term memory and trust of customers through services is more important than the traffic and orders under the platform matching mechanism.

E-commerce platforms often tend to lead merchants to an order-oriented approach, invisibly weakening the merchants' awareness of serving customers, and may even prevent merchants from reaching consumers. With the support of the private domain and service providers, the foothold of brand autonomy is not only traffic acquisition, but also the experience of old customers, how to make enterprises and potential customers have more connections, etc.

At present, the three-year renewal rate of CEICross-border has reached more than 90%, which is sufficient to prove that the long-termist service concept is effective.

The more pressured by survival, the more necessary to do a long-term and stable business, which is the case in all walks of life.

If You Don't Go Global, You're Out

In terms of customer targets, CEICross-border is positioned as the "going-global accelerator for China's growth-oriented enterprises". Focusing on the long-tail market is also different from the big customer strategy of mainstream cross-border service providers.

The long-tail strategy, combined with the heavy investment in long-term services, to a certain extent, also reflects the natural advantages of CEICross-border: CEI Group has a stable profit-making business and cash flow. In the long run, CEICross-border has a relatively strong ability to resist investment-type expenditures and market risks.

At the same time, most domestic cross-border service providers operate independently and it is difficult to achieve this. Facing survival pressure, they are eager to realize returns or complete capital bets, and therefore are more inclined to serve big customers.

But in fact, the success of innovative small and medium-sized enterprises going global is the key to driving China's future economic growth.

Looking back, as early as more than ten years ago, there were big brands such as Lenovo going global in China. However, without the "point-to-area" cluster effect, the benefits to the industrial belt and supply chain are not obvious, and it cannot be called a going-global wave.

Therefore, the outbreak and steady growth of small and medium-sized enterprises are particularly important from the "hot land of OEM" to the birthplace of global brands. This is why, in this wave of globalization, consumer electronics, small household appliances and other tracks have become the earliest categories of Chinese foreign trade enterprises to gain a reputation overseas.

From Anker's overnight fame with non-core electronic products to Ninebot's sales from hit electric vehicles to lawn mowing robots, these going-global brands have achieved global leadership in both user base and product reputation, while continuously innovating and growing. Accompanying them to go global is investing in the future.

Especially in the past two years, the going-global presence of small and medium-sized enterprises is no longer limited to traditional battlefields such as consumer electronics and home kitchen and bathroom, but has begun to sharpen their knives and is committed to breaking through from the high-precision and advanced industries that were once monopolized by large enterprises.

"When we go to a second-tier city for an investigation, we will find that several companies in a park are engaged in the semiconductor industry, and intelligent transportation and robots are also everywhere."

Chen Mingfei mentioned that this kind of situation is also positively expressed at the Canton Fair. Nowadays, trade partners from emerging markets such as Africa and the Middle East are no longer only concerned about consumer goods from China, but are gradually becoming interested in China's production automation equipment.

With the upgrade of exports, many small and medium-sized enterprises have also found a more long-termist self-rescue method: brand added value and technological upgrading, these are two "truth"-like rules.

Nowadays, the competition in China's manufacturing industry is no less intense than that in consumer goods. Compared with the previous idea of casually expanding overseas, the consensus demand at present is to have the productivity that can participate in global competition.

If the awareness of going global is a kind of self-driven force, then the production capacity base and supply chain advantages are the "light source" of small and medium-sized enterprises.

In B2B industries with high growth potential and long life cycle such as chips, photovoltaics, new energy, and robots, the cost performance of Made in China is significantly higher than that of the overseas market, and the price can be compressed to a fraction in some technically mature细分 tracks.

Based on this situation, even if there is no technological upgrade in the short term, there is still a considerable brand added value space for going global through cost compression. This is completely different from the product selection logic of the "Yiwu hit products" in the previous foreign trade era.

In the short term, the hidden concern of enterprises for going global is not the willingness issue, but the inability to integrate the hard barriers of key technologies and product cost performance with the soft barriers such as cross-border marketing and local construction.

Therefore, cross-border service providers are still the "specific medicine" to solve the business return problem for Made in China.

"The resilience of Chinese enterprises and the professional cognition of Chinese people for the replacement of old and new production capacity jointly determine that no matter how many enterprises are eliminated, new forces will emerge."

Under the gentle domestic demand, if the reality of "if you don't go global, you're out" is the wave that promotes change, the courage to leave the port comes from the resilience of small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as the experience and clear instructions of manufacturers like CEICross-border with many years of enterprise service experience as "professional helmsmen".

When both courage and hard skills are indispensable, going global can become a structural opportunity.