Amanda Liu | Data, Analytics, and China's Social Media Landscape

For Amanda, who is involved in the client support side, gaining a deeper understanding of their experiences and identifying potential needs for their product is of the utmost importance. Amanda also generates web analytics reports based on the client's website data that the company has collected.

Amanda talks about the changes in traffic and customer acquisition strategies in recent years, including marketing campaigns. Almost all B2C companies as well as some B2B companies, even in traditional industries, have been expanding and diversifying channels in an effort to broaden their marketing reach using social media campaigns and social media marketing.

Amanda also speaks about how a lot of companies have built their own accounts on the popular Chinese social medias. Given the diversification of internet services, the ranking of social media giants in China has changed dramatically. Users moved on to newer platforms such as QQ, Weibo and WeChat in recent years, with the most up-and-coming of them being ByteDance. She goes on to say that people spend less time on search engines because people don't need to search anymore with the invention of machine learning.

She then talks about companies in China having a unique relationship with customers and that brand loyalty is key. Building brand loyalty is hard and takes a tremendous amount of time and resources, but once built it is set in stone and hard to lose.

Amanda describes data-driven marketing and operations as the key to success in today's world, and not just in China. Omnichannel aggregation data is integrating into our websites, converting to massive insights. It’s the key to knowing our customers, knowing what they want and how to give it to them and on which platform and at what price. She also mentions that this data and insight is also what drives marketing decisions and direction.

Finally, Amanda talks about how marketing and operations will go beyond digital, and how more advanced technology, including AI, VR, et cetera, will benefit people working in the industry in the very near future, with the widespread move to 5G playing a large role in that. She believes that we will enter the age of IoT, the internet of things. And IoE, internet of everything. And even AI IoT, combining AI technologies with IoT.