Text | Pan Xiaoyu, Yuan Xiaole
Editor | Peng Xiaoqiu
36氪 was informed that the partner marketing management platform “Impact” has recently completed a new round of financing of 100 million US dollars. The investors in this round are W Capital and Providence Public. This round of financing will be mainly used to expand the global market, continue to improve the product matrix and build a research and development team.
In 2008, Impact was established in California, USA, and positioned as a partner marketing management SaaS platform. In recent years, domestic cross-border e-commerce has developed rapidly, and overseas marketing needs have increased significantly. Under this market opportunity, Impact began to enter the Chinese market in 2019 and set up a Chinese team.
With the industry pain brought by Amazon’s “shop closure tide” last year, the cross-border e-commerce industry is quietly changing, which is first reflected in the overseas marketing side. On the one hand, affected by the epidemic and overseas e-commerce platform policies, the cost of overseas traffic continued to rise; on the other hand, the marginal utility of traditional digital advertising gradually diminished, and marketing began to return to the essence of the market, that is, to gain consumers’ trust in brands and products. As a result, a “user-centric” partner marketing model has ushered in new development opportunities.
A simple understanding of the concept of “marketing partners” refers to all partners that may be covered in the marketing field, including traditional affiliates, social media influencers, media owners of news and content publishing, mobile apps, non-profit organizations, sponsors , brand ambassadors and strategic B2B partners.
These partners are usually subject to their own reasons, and it is difficult to efficiently quantify or explain their own business value when they need to achieve performance income. This has also led to the unsustainable development of the content marketing projects embedded in the brand. As a result, partners also need to make corresponding adjustments to meet the constantly updated market demand.
Based on this, Impact has created a partner marketing ecosystem. On the platform, advertisers can choose to link and cooperate with partners through tools; and partners can also directly contact advertisements and launch marketing content, so as to obtain commercial value and generate monetization.
Specifically, Impact’s products mainly cover the three major aspects of the full-cycle partner project management SaaS platform Partnership Cloud, the full-process influencer marketing project SaaS management platform Activate, and the traffic main content marketing project management platform Pressboard.
Among them, Partnership Cloud focuses more on automated marketing and partnership management services for brands. From advertisers recruiting partners, to signing and paying, to contact and communication, and finally to marketing data analysis, all processes can be automated on Partnership Cloud, and both parties can get fraud protection.
Activate is more focused on overseas influencer marketing. Advertisers can use Activate’s SaaS management platform to realize the process of understanding, recruiting, and managing overseas influencers, and the platform can match advertisers with suitable influencer resources and reduce communication costs for both parties.
The Pressboard platform focuses on providing a series of tools for content media and traffic owners, including data analysis and evaluating the data performance of marketing content.
In fact, since 2020, Impact has made several acquisitions. These include the acquisitions of Influencer marketing management platform Activate, content publishing data optimization tool Trackonomics, analytics and automation platform Affluent, and 2B marketing technology company Pressboard.
Jennifer Zhang, President of Impact Greater China, told 36氪 that Impact has completed its own product matrix through acquisitions, thus building its own ecosystem in the field of partner marketing. In addition, the purpose of the acquisition is also based on resource orientation. “Behind each acquisition, a large number of advertising and traffic resources are gathered to achieve resource integration and business expansion.”
impact.com’s attribution model
In Jennifer Zhang’s view, Impact’s core advantages are mainly reflected in three aspects:
One is to have global marketing resources. At present, Impact has set up 15 offices in 11 countries around the world, with more than 10,000 customers worldwide, including Walmart, Uber, Lenovo, Levi’s, etc. And through the acquisition, it has also supplemented Impact’s resource shortcomings in different functions to a certain extent.
The second is the algorithm level. In addition to the rapid iteration system, Impact also has the ability to automate traffic attribution analysis. “Attribution analysis is very important in marketing, it can clarify which link is the most important factor in the promotion of the transaction from the consumer’s contact with the product to the final order. For example, whether it is directly converted by Internet celebrities or because of consumption Coupon discounts to place orders, etc.” Jennifer Zhang said.
The third is the product level. Impact makes the transaction process more detailed, including how advertisers send emails, and what content needs to be set for emails at different time points. “The ease of use of products is more reflected in making the entire business process more granular.”
According to Jennifer Zhang, since entering the Chinese market in 2019, more and more domestic brands have realized the importance of partner marketing. At present, Impact has served OnePlus, OPPO, Banggood, PatPat, Youdao and other leading overseas companies in China.
Jennifer Zhang believes that the current domestic cross-border e-commerce is undergoing a key step from brand globalization (Globalization) to global localization (Glocalization), and partner marketing will play a greater role in this. “Partner marketing can use localized high-quality resources to truly reach local consumers, find core users to build a circle of trust, and allow overseas brands to truly integrate into the local market.”
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Related events
- Impact completes a new round of financing of 100 million US dollars and continues to build a partner marketing ecosystem2022-05-16
- Impact completes a new round of financing of $150 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion2021-07-14
- Jingdong Marketing 360 officially released
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