From social product seeding to final checkout, how do Chinese brands expanding globally influence consumers' choices?
A single overseas shopping trip is turning into a cross-platform migration.
Consumers may first come across a product on TikTok, then go to YouTube for reviews, look up specifications on Google, check ratings and compare prices on Amazon e-commerce, and even ask AI for better options during the process. By the time they actually place an order, several days have passed. The report *New Horizons for Going Global: Understanding the Real Traffic World of Overseas Consumers* jointly released by Amazon Ads and Kantar shows that from the first exposure to a product to the final purchase, consumers go through an average of 8.8 days and 4.5 channels. 64.7% of consumers later use different channels to query product information from where they first learned about the product.
Behind the frequent switching between multiple channels is consumers repeatedly confirming their reasons for purchase: Can this product solve my problem? What are other people's experiences like? Is this brand trustworthy? For brands expanding into overseas markets, the problems have also become more complicated. Each platform retains its own views, searches, clicks and orders, but when these data are put together, they may not be able to answer a more critical question: Which touchpoint actually influenced the user, and which investment truly drove the subsequent choice?
This has also led many Chinese overseas brands that have gone through the early stage of pure product sales to face new growth challenges: Where can they find new incremental growth as traffic becomes increasingly expensive? When consumers are scattered across more platforms, what kind of consistent and clear perception should brands build for their audiences?
Finding New Incremental Growth Beyond Search
Dora, Marketing Director of Vidi Group, has a direct perception of these changes: When the traffic growth of a certain category stabilizes, more and more brands join the competition. Relying only on the original advertising placement method will easily lead to problems such as insufficient traffic and rising costs.
"Our CPC has risen from a very low level at the beginning to a very expensive stage now," Dora said. "You can't just rely on search term placement. Although Sponsored Products (SP) is effective, it will become more and more expensive." Baseus has also encountered a similar situation. Gosen, Head of Overseas Brand and Marketing at Baseus, also mentioned that "you will find that you have already covered all in-platform advertising, and it is very difficult to achieve incremental growth this way. There are natural bottlenecks in expanding the audience to get more growth. Therefore, in this dimension, brands will naturally seek opportunities outside the platform."
The mobile phone selfie light under Ulanzi, a brand owned by Vidi Group, is a typical example. Ulanzi's accumulated user base in the past was mainly male photography enthusiasts, while selfie lights correspond to more daily selfie and fill-light scenarios, which need to reach more female consumers. New target users may not know that Ulanzi also produces such products, nor will they actively search for a photography accessory.
Vidi Group began to find its target audience in places where female consumers are more active. On social platforms such as Instagram, the brand cooperated with female influencers to show real usage scenarios such as selfies and fill lighting from their perspectives. "It is difficult to get the expected sales only with in-platform traffic, so we must use off-platform methods to fill this part of the traffic gap," Dora said. After the content on social media attracts audiences, search results, product information and reviews need to be well connected. Dora gave an example: if consumers have developed interest in the product but cannot find it after searching, or the brand's own product does not appear in time when they search for relevant keywords, the previous interest may still be lost.
From the perspective of Vidi Group's overall Amazon Ads placement, the team is also adjusting its advertising portfolio. While retaining Sponsored Products (SP), Vidi Group has increased investment in ads such as Sponsored Brands (SB) and Sponsored Brands Video (SBV), hoping to reach more new consumers. Dora mentioned that the ROI of these two types of ads has been higher than that of SP. For Vidi Group, the work of finding new incremental growth has extended to the stage before consumers take the initiative to search.
Connecting Scattered Touchpoints into Clear Purchase Reasons
After reaching more people, brands need to solve another problem: What exactly do they want consumers to remember? "There are too many fragmented channels and media that affect users' decision-making, but if all these fragments convey the same core message, it will be extremely critical," Gosen said.
When Baseus promoted its MC2 clip-on earphones, it took long-time wearing comfort as the breakthrough point. Because this open-ear clip headphone adopts a wrapped air cushion design, Baseus integrated the concept of "cloud air cushion" throughout product naming, visual design and content expression. No matter through pictures, videos or product detail pages, consumers who are exposed to this product on different platforms are gradually deepening their memory of the feature of "comfortable wearing".
Gosen summarized this set of practices as "selling point nail, text nail and visual nail". In his view, these expressions need to trace back to the product itself: start from the real problems encountered by users, then push back R&D and product iteration, and finally convert the solution into selling points that consumers can understand.
Qianxing faced the problem of misalignment in product value expression. When the team first introduced the AI vision system of its pool cleaning robot, it paid more attention to recognition and algorithm capabilities. But from the user's perspective, these parameters cannot be directly converted into reasons for purchase. After in-depth analysis, the team found that what consumers really care about is very straightforward: whether the cleaning efficiency is high, and whether the cleaning result is thorough. Therefore, Qianxing began to translate technical terms into specific user-perceivable values: whether leaves and debris that are easy to miss can be efficiently handled, and whether daily pool maintenance can truly save time. After adjusting the value expression on the product page, the conversion rate increased by 45% compared with the previous level.
From Baseus to Qianxing, channels and content formats can be different: videos can describe usage scenarios, product pages can explain differentiated advantages, and search and reviews help consumers compare and confirm. But the final purchase reason left to consumers needs to be clear enough.
Re-evaluating Results After Multi-Platform Investment
When brands start to find audiences and create content on more platforms, another problem soon arises: Do these investments really bring business growth?
Qianxing once cooperated with a top tennis star. When reviewing the campaign, Wang Shengle, Founder and CEO of Qianxing, found that the team did not fully figure out at that time whether this cooperation focused more on long-term brand building or short-term sales conversion. The final result was that consumers' attention was more focused on the star himself, and the transfer of brand and product awareness was not sufficient. In another content placement, a piece of content got a huge number of views and interactions, but the short-term sales did not grow proportionally. Later, Wang Shengle noticed in the comment section of other content that some users mentioned that they had seen this product elsewhere long ago, and did not complete the final purchase decision until they saw a more in-depth technical disassembly and value analysis.
When reviewing these placements, Qianxing also began to observe the entire consumer purchase process more completely. Wang Shengle mentioned that users' decision-making naturally occurs across platforms, and transaction is only the final result of the whole journey. Qianxing is also trying to combine the previous brand searches, user visits, as well as the performance on Amazon e-commerce and independent sites for analysis, even though many of the influences are still difficult to accurately attribute.
Baseus evaluates the effect from both sales results and long-term brand accumulation. The team first checks the revenue, the attributed income brought by promotions on other platforms, the ranking of search terms on Amazon e-commerce, and uses Google popularity and other indicators as auxiliary judgment. An integrated marketing project usually takes three months as a cycle. After each round of review, the team will fine-tune the resource allocation, and after two or three rounds of verification, gradually concentrate resources on places with higher reach and conversion efficiency. Different tools have their own divisions of labor: Amazon Attribution helps the team observe the direct results brought by promotions on other platforms, while AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud) helps optimize Sponsored Products (SP) by combining the user purchase journey. The team also pays attention to another type of result: whether the brand terms, core selling points and understanding of the target audience accumulated in this marketing campaign can be extended to the next product of the same series, so as to make subsequent promotions more efficient.
Qianxing has also gone through similar adjustments. The team initially had doubts about Amazon Ads DSP placement: with the same budget, why not directly use it to create its own content? After actual practice, Wang Shengle mentioned that the ROI of early DSP placement "can probably exceed 5", which is a result that Qianxing can hardly achieve by placing off-platform ads and marketing content on its own.
From a Single Placement to a Complete Purchase Journey
Putting the experience of the three companies together, the concept of "full-funnel marketing" becomes specific: Consumers' first exposure to a product, subsequent search and comparison, and final purchase often take place on different platforms. Vidi Group finds new audiences before the search stage, Baseus makes content on different platforms clearly convey the same product value, and Qianxing tries to figure out how previous investments affect subsequent choices.
In this journey, Amazon connects both consumers' purchase judgment and brands' subsequent operations. Consumers will continue to learn about products, check reviews, compare and make purchases on Amazon e-commerce; post-purchase reviews and user feedback also become the basis for brands to understand their users. Gosen said: "Amazon is definitely our brand position, and Amazon is one of the important carriers for our brand value and product value." Amazon Ads also participates in multiple links before and after purchase. Through Sponsored Brands, video ads, DSP and other methods, brands have the opportunity to reach more potential consumers; combined with attribution tools and data provided by Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), brands can further understand the promotion effect, identify suitable audiences, and adjust subsequent placements.
Looking at a longer time span, brand perception will also change. Every time Dora visits overseas markets, she will ask local people if they have heard of Ulanzi. From shaking their heads at the beginning, to answering "I seem to have heard of it" later, to someone telling her that they have already bought many Ulanzi products, local channels have also taken the initiative to inquire about brand agency. These changes can hardly be attributed to a single placement. Wang Shengle also regards product innovation and brand marketing as two types of work that require continuous investment: "The former continuously creates user value, while the latter continuously precipitates perception, memory and trust."