Make Honey

Alibaba Cloud

Driving revenue and generating leads

Client

Alibaba Group

Service

Content marketing
Alibaba Cloud is a cloud computing provider and part of Alibaba Group. It is the largest cloud vendor in China, but wanted to stand out beyond its home market where competitors such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are more established.
The challenge

Alibaba Cloud is the largest cloud computing provider in China, and part of Alibaba Group

Alibaba Cloud wanted to establish itself as a thought leader and appeal to its target audience of English-speaking developers, chief information officers and IT decision makers across South-East Asia, Europe and the United States.

Specifically, Alibaba Cloud needed content that would drive revenue and generate leads; nurture leads by converting marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads, and upsell its existing paying customers.

Make Honey and Alibaba Cloud devised an ongoing content series covering both highly technical issues and relevant business topics, such as digital transformation, launching a business in China and e-commerce.

Content pieces included ebooks, whitepapers, blogs, social posts, infographics, videos and animations. Shorter form content led to longer form pieces that captured user data. Make Honey also developed email marketing to encourage the audience to read further content and move further down the sales funnel.

Campaigns included ‘Alibaba Cloud’s Ten-Year Anniversary’ and ‘Journey to China and How to Supercharge Digital Marketing’.

Make Honey also created qualitative research to help Alibaba Cloud better understand its target audience in South-East Asia and used that information to tailor content to address their needs. It identified Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) to help spread content, and carried out research projects into rival cloud providers across South-East Asia.

The results

The series contributed to increased pipeline leads and conversions, as well as providing more content pieces to share with prospective clients.

Top performing content pieces included ‘Five Foundation Tools of Cloud Based Digital Transformation’, which generated the most pipeline leads for potential revenue. While ‘Managing Your Virtual IT Infrastructure on the Cloud’ set a record of just five days from download to conversion.

Sales staff gave positive feedback as they had more support, with relevant content to share with prospective and existing clients, resulting in a happy client.