How to Create a Tmall Advertising Strategy in 3 simple steps?
By: Dmitrii Kuts
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Tmall, Alibaba, Chinese Marketing, Advertising

How to create a Tmall advertising strategy in 3 simple steps?

Tmall’s advertising system is very complicated. It has 16 advertising channels and probably will add more in the future. Each advertising channel has a separate top-up system. This means once you top-up the budget in one channel, you cannot move it to another channel.

At the same time, the strategy during a sales holiday will be very different compared to on a regular day. So is the strategy for each industry and each sales level.

How to build a budget allocation plan without all-in on test campaigns on every channel?

You could follow the 3 simple steps:

Analyze the spending plan of the top-performing stores, and close competitors in your industry Create test campaigns based on these results Optimize and create your own spending plan

The simplest way to create an initial plan is to look at how your competitors are spending their budget.

The Tmall App store has many 3rd party tools for monitoring competitor’s performance. The tool that we use at WalktheChat is called SYCM (生意参谋). It offers a competitor listening service that enables you to monitor the marketing spending and performance of 5 stores and 10 products for a fee of 1,188RMB per year.

You can find the list of the top 100 best ranking Taobao/Tmall stores (either by traffic or by sales transaction) in your industry using this link: https://sycm.taobao.com/mc/mq/market_rank

For example, Pandora was the NO.1 performing jewelry store on Taobao/Tmall during the Double 12 campaign.

With the competitor listening tool, we could graph Pandora’s spending distribution during December 13th (regular period) and December 12th (a promotion holiday Double 12). Note the data given is an index, not the actual spending budget.

Pandora’s spending index during a sales holiday of Double 12 was up by 44% compared to a non-sales day. The advertising channel that has the strongest surge was Juhuasuan (聚划算), the flash-sale channel.

Now you can check the strategy of your direct competitor that has a similar sales target.

MISSOMA is a premium jewelry brand that just opened its Tmall store in July 2020.

They achieved 2 million RMB sales result during the 2nd month of launching on Tmall, mainly by investing in WeChat and Little Red Book influencers. They are a good account to benchmark against if you are operating a new jewelry Tmall store.

According to SYCM, here is MISSOMA’s spending index:

MISSOMA spent most of the paid traffic on key-word search ads and product recommendations. It shifted 16% of its budget towards 智钻 Zhizuan (homepage ads) during the sales promotion period.

This strategy can help you decide how to properly allocate the budget between all the Tmall advertising channels.

The major drawback of this strategy is we can only look back on past data. Brands should clearly understand the ranking of each Tmall promotion in order to better allocate budget throughout the year.

The easiest way to see the competitor’s future spending plan is to acquire this information from Dingding group. The Tmall operation team usually creates groups of brands from the same industry and all the brands are required to share their promotion budget in a shared file.