Stop the Guesswork! The Ultimate 2025 Playbook for Global Brands, from Building Buzz to Driving Blockbuster Sales

“There are still over 100 days until Black Friday, yet I’ve already burned through a third of my ad budget, and my conversion rate is still stuck in the single digits…”

This is likely the late-night lament of most Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) professionals working for global brands. With Black Friday 2025 fast approaching, instead of continuing to navigate uncertainty alone, it’s better to hear from the experts.

A recent online webinar hosted by the SAP Martech Alliance brought together experts from KOL marketing, marketing automation, and user reputation to share insights on full-funnel operations for global DTC brands. Under the theme “A Full-Funnel Operations Breakdown for Global Brands and a 2025 Black Friday Playbook,” they delivered a practical guide to take you from building buzz and driving conversions to achieving blockbuster sales.

Acloudear has summarized the essence of this meeting—the “Three Core Battles” that global DTC brands must win in their full-funnel operations:

Battle #1: Precision Seeding to Ignite Traffic

With over 40% of Gen Z consumers drawing shopping inspiration from short-form video platforms, brands must accurately understand customer behavior to develop effective seeding strategies. The key to success lies in adapting leading social media tactics from the domestic Chinese market, following a four-step process of “enhancing tags, testing selling points, achieving initial conversion velocity, and scaling investment.” This approach, combined with AI-powered data analysis, allows for the refined assessment and optimization of seeding effectiveness, ensuring brand messages efficiently reach the target audience.

Battle #2: High-Efficiency Conversion to Build a Growth Flywheel

Global brands need to shift from traditional “funnel thinking” to “flywheel thinking,” creating a closed loop of “acquisition-conversion-retention-referral” to continuously lower customer acquisition costs. This requires companies to deepen their DTC strategy, truly own their customer data, and engage in personalized interactions. Using marketing automation platforms like SAP Emarsys to integrate multi-channel data allows for the easy creation of automated marketing workflows, efficiently converting traffic into sales and driving the business flywheel.

Battle #3: Building Reputation to Forge Brand Trust

User reviews are a critical asset influencing a brand’s long-term development, and during the Black Friday period, consumers pay extra attention to recent comments. Brands should proactively build trust through a three-step method: “establishing a searchable trust image, leveraging that trust image for business growth, and creating a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.” Using open third-party platforms to automatically invite and collect authentic reviews and applying five-star ratings across all channels are effective ways to build public credibility.

Acloudear: Building a Global Digital Marketing Engine for Brands as a Core Alliance Member

The event’s organizer, the SAP APAC MarTech Alliance, is dedicated to providing end-to-end digital marketing solutions for Chinese enterprises going global, powering their international expansion. As a founding core member of this alliance, Acloudear plays a crucial role.

The challenge for global enterprises isn’t just knowing what to do, but how to execute it effectively. Acloudear’s core value lies in our expertise at deeply integrating world-class digital marketing tools like SAP Emarsys with the actual operational scenarios of Chinese companies, helping businesses achieve cross-channel customer data integration, deploy automated marketing workflows, and make precise, AI-driven decisions, forming a closed loop of “Data-Insight-Action-Optimization” to truly implement full-funnel operations.

Specifically, we leverage SAP Emarsys to build three core architectures for global brands:

①A Unified Omnichannel Platform: Break down tool fragmentation and data silos by integrating multiple touchpoints like email, SMS, and apps. This achieves a dynamic customer view and consistent messaging, enabling, for example, personalized cross-channel campaigns at scale.

②An Intelligent Automation Engine: Replace inefficient manual operations with AI-driven customer journey automation (such as behavioral predictions and intelligent recommendations), elevating marketing from “rule-triggered” to “data-driven decision-making.”

③An Integrated Ecosystem: Seamlessly integrate with a company’s existing tech stack, especially solutions within the SAP ecosystem (like SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Customer Data Platform, and SAP Sales Cloud). For instance, the plug-and-play integration between Emarsys and SAP Commerce Cloud allows marketers to rapidly deploy omnichannel campaigns like order confirmations and abandoned cart reminders.

In short, Acloudear is the bridge connecting leading global technologies with Chinese global enterprises. We are committed to using the advanced technology of SAP Emarsys to help marketing teams evolve from relying on experience and intuition to making scientific decisions driven by data and intelligence, turning the blueprint of full-funnel operations into real business growth.

As global competition intensifies, isolated breakthroughs are no longer enough to sustain a brand’s long-term development. Acloudear, together with the members of the SAP APAC MarTech Alliance, will continue to integrate the best resources to provide more comprehensive and in-depth solutions for global brands, jointly embracing the opportunities and challenges of the global market.

This article "Stop the Guesswork! The Ultimate 2025 Playbook for Global Brands, from Building Buzz to Driving Blockbuster Sales" by AcloudEAR. We focus on business applications such as cloud ERP.

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