Resources
Industry insights, SCRM best practices & digital transformation know-how
No customer is born a great customer. Choosing the right customers is one of the most critical decisions a business can make — and lead scoring is the systematic framework that makes that decision rigorous.
As marketing management philosophies continue to evolve, leading players in China's apparel and footwear industry are actively rethinking their business models to break free from legacy distribution constraints — turning losses into profits and staging remarkable comebacks. While Li-Ning is often cited as the textbook example, today's focus is on Anta Sports, a brand whose transformation story is equally worth studying.
They say life is full of big decisions — and you rarely want to face them unprepared. If you're a marketer, the same holds true for your business and its campaigns. Knight often reminds marketers: don't market for the sake of marketing (always keep your Call to Action in mind). Marketing without purpose forces you into endless justifications of spend, rather than thinking clearly about what return you actually want from your efforts.
As marketing technology continues to advance, businesses across industries are leveraging these tools to power their go-to-market strategies — touching every stage of the marketing funnel. The cumulative effect has reshaped the marketing landscape in profound ways.
Two things determine whether a consultative sale succeeds: establishing professional credibility and earning genuine trust. Once both are in place, revenue follows. But how quickly that happens depends entirely on what the buyer wants — and when they want it. The critical principle: your effort must stay in sync with the buyer's signals and stage. As Knight has noted in multiple articles, a healthy buyer-seller relationship is always reciprocal. The moment it becomes one-sided, something has gone wrong.
For virtually every business, 2020 has been an extraordinary and challenging year. Companies can prepare for gray rhino events when they see them coming — but black swan events strike without warning. And as the commercial environment and global landscape shift at an ever-accelerating pace, black swan disruptions may land on your doorstep more frequently than ever before.
A great product has long been considered the cornerstone of business success — but in today's market, it is no longer enough on its own. The old saying still holds: even the finest wine goes unnoticed in a back alley. That is precisely why many VCs shy away from funding founders whose background is purely in R&D. Once you have a great product, the people who understand marketing and operations can be worth even more than the product itself.
Do you truly control the pace of a sales conversation — or are you just following your prospect's lead, performing on their turf with nothing to show for it? There are two ways to build a relationship with a prospect: as a trusted, credible advisor, or as someone chasing them around hoping for scraps.
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing activities. Many marketing teams can automate repetitive tasks — from email campaigns and social media scheduling to paid advertising. But it isn't just about efficiency; it's about delivering a more personalized experience at scale. Marketing automation technology makes all of this far more achievable.
When marketing is powered by technology, the results can be extraordinary. Use free marketing tools to execute real-time communication, email campaigns, form embedding, ad integration, web tracking, and reporting — giving your business everything it needs to create a remarkable customer buying experience.
Do you take the time each year to rigorously develop your team's marketing strategy? Knight firmly believes that a solid annual marketing plan is the key to achieving your business goals more efficiently and effectively.
Inbound marketing is a business methodology in which companies attract prospects and customers by creating valuable content and delivering personalized experiences tailored to each buyer's unique journey. Rather than interrupting people with irrelevant messages the way outbound marketing does, inbound marketing connects you with people who already have a need and are actively looking for your help.
When you ask most marketers how their companies generate leads and fill the top of the sales funnel, the answer typically involves trade shows, brand advertising, cold visits, cold calls, and other outbound tactics. Yet since 2019, a growing number of innovative and market-leading companies have been embracing inbound marketing. So what exactly is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?
Organizations use a wide range of methods to score their sales leads — from comparing prospect profiles against ideal customer criteria (explicit scoring) and assigning A/B/C/D rankings, to measuring engagement signals such as "hot," "warm," and "cold" (implicit scoring). The real goal is to define exactly what makes a lead sales-ready, so both marketing and sales can operate at peak efficiency.
Unlike explicit scoring criteria, implicit scoring rules are driven by actual prospect and customer behavior — revealing where a lead stands in the buying lifecycle and giving you a more objective read on how close they are to converting. Knight has compiled the most important implicit scoring dimensions across 12 major marketing channels.
ABM (Account-Based Marketing) is a focused growth strategy in which marketing and sales teams collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a defined set of high-value accounts, built on a foundation of shared understanding and alignment. In plain terms: it's the enterprise deal playbook — the "feast or famine" approach where landing one account can sustain the business for years.
The most critical element of any ABM strategy is alignment: ensuring every member of your ABM team shares the same understanding and objectives. This means involving all relevant stakeholders in every stage of ABM decision-making — so you can deliver a consistent experience to target accounts and keep your strategy as efficient and streamlined as possible.
B2B marketing is a source of silent frustration for many companies — especially startups and growth-stage businesses that are already stretched thin. With limited resources funneled into product and sales, marketing teams are often left behind, and some organizations have no dedicated marketing function at all. So when you look at competitors who seem to have it all figured out, how do you get B2B marketing to actually work for you?
As you grow your business, you'll quickly find that the ever-shifting digital landscape is becoming the defining arena for competition. Marketers today juggle countless responsibilities — so how do you efficiently build, adapt, and sustain a flexible digital marketing strategy?
Omnichannel marketing is widely defined as engaging prospects and customers through a coordinated mix of online and offline channels. Rather than relying on a single tactic like TV or email, today's marketers adapt to where and how consumers actually behave — and that means going omnichannel.
The flywheel model is a proven way to attract new customers and retain existing ones. It also helps eliminate friction and reduce the inefficient handoffs that plague traditional team workflows. In the funnel model, buyers are passed from marketing to sales to customer service — and at each step, information gaps and inconsistent service quality erode their experience. The flywheel changes all of that.
When I talk with marketing colleagues at client companies, they often say: "Oh, I handle marketing — we have a separate team for operations." That response never fails to leave me speechless. What immediately comes to mind is: "So what exactly are your SEM/SEO campaigns, your WeChat account, your website, your social channels doing?" None of those channels can produce results without content. Before you call yourself a marketer, do one thing first: get clear on the purpose and desired outcome of the content you publish on every channel. All marketing is built on content, and every marketing action should be underpinned by a coherent, end-to-end customer-acquisition logic.
Walk through any modern office building, ride an elevator, or sit in a client's conference room, and you are bound to hear the word "funnel." For years, companies have built their go-to-market strategies around the funnel — and it worked. But increasingly, marketers, salespeople, and business leaders are finding it falls short. Customer referrals and word-of-mouth are now the single biggest driver of purchase decisions, which exposes the funnel's critical blind spot: it treats the customer as an end result, not as the most powerful growth engine available. The funnel is designed to generate customers — not to leverage them. That is exactly why it is time to switch to the Flywheel model.
"Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action." — Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute
You might spend hours crafting what you expect to be something remarkable, only to see minimal audience engagement, negligible traffic, and almost no leads — then have to explain the dismal ROI to your boss. If you've ever felt frustrated and burned out by content creation, this blueprint is for you.
Before diving into marketing content mapping, let's start with what a content map actually is: a plan for delivering the right content to the right people at the right time, built around the characteristics of your audience and where they are in their lifecycle. Knight highlights two non-negotiable prerequisites — find the right person first, then say the right thing. Imagine a salesperson spending an entire visit talking to the building's security guard instead of the actual buyer. It sounds absurd, but this kind of misdirected effort happens in B2B marketing far more often than anyone would like to admit. This is precisely why inbound marketing insists on identifying the right audience before anything else.
The social media landscape shifts dramatically every single day. As a marketer, the key to building an effective social media strategy is grounding your decisions in reality rather than outdated assumptions. To help you separate fact from fiction, Knight shares hard-won lessons on social media marketing — so you can avoid the most common pitfalls.
Whether you're a marketer or a customer, we all live in an era where technology makes virtually anything possible. The ability to craft a unique experience for every prospect inevitably leads to more relevant, more useful, and more enjoyable buying journeys. As we explore this new frontier and shape our strategies, it is important to keep an open mind — to honestly discuss what works and what doesn't in a world built on personalization. These data points help businesses think through how to structure early-stage customer communication, and we hope they inspire more companies to embrace personalization as a way to bring greater humanity back to marketing.
There is no shortage of international content on Inbound Marketing, yet most companies in China are still in the early stages of understanding what it actually means — which is exactly why it is worth explaining from the ground up.
A step-by-step guide to implementing inbound marketing, including a practical channel checklist and key metrics for B2B companies.
Client: A premium Southeast Asian property developer. Year: 2019. Author: Knight CRM. How Knight helped a high-end developer penetrate the China market through trackable offline-to-online funnels, unified customer data, and personalized content delivery.
Client: International bilingual education institution. Year: 2018. As competition in the education sector intensifies, discover how Knight CRM helped one institution overcome fragmented lead sources, slow response times, and poor conversion rates.
B2B Industry Case Study — Client: a world-leading manufacturing brand. Year: 2019. Author: Knight CRM. Discover how Knight helped unify fragmented acquisition channels, score and qualify leads, and automate personalized nurture journeys to generate more high-quality MQLs.
A French premium spirits brand operating in China turned to Knight CRM to overcome the limitations of its multi-tier distributor model, re-engage its WeChat following, and build a structured loyalty program — all in service of building a direct, data-rich relationship with the end consumer.
How a UK diamond jewelry brand used Knight CRM to unify online and offline customer data, activate members, and deliver personalized experiences at scale.
What exactly is the "new economy"?
"New Retail" has become one of the hottest buzzwords in recent years — but what does it actually mean?
Every brand needs to build its own customer journey and become its own ecosystem — not just another player inside someone else's.
Most people know Li Jiaqi — China's "Lipstick King" — but fewer realize the force behind his rise is L'Oréal, the world's largest cosmetics company.
How do you earn more from each customer? A practical framework for traditional businesses stepping into user operations.
How should 'positioning' be reimagined for the mobile internet era?
Essential reading for every marketer navigating digital transformation.
Whether it's Mini Program transactions, online content marketing, or offline acquisition campaigns, all roads eventually lead back to the brand's own traffic pool — becoming lasting digital assets for the business.
We have entered the marketing era of 'consumer engagement.'
The real battleground for new retail and new consumption is increasingly looking like nighttime.
Customer experience is the sum of every interaction a customer has with your brand throughout the buying journey — and it shapes how they perceive, talk about, and ultimately stay loyal to you.
Do you know what 'pull marketing' and Inbound Marketing really mean? This deep-dive breaks down 13 masterful growth tactics HubSpot uses to drive explosive, sustained growth.
Fitts's Law: the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target.
Every customer tiering framework must be designed around a company's current stage and product maturity — and updated continuously — to drive sustainable customer growth.
Great copy is never just a few catchy lines. It conveys product value, sparks the desire to act, and — in B2B — serves as a cornerstone of brand credibility.
Heatmaps use color-coded highlights to reveal which page zones attract the most visitor attention and where visitors are geographically located.
A great landing page minimizes wasted clicks from your most valuable users.
With feed advertising's push-based mechanism, achieving high ROI is far harder than keyword-targeted search marketing. This guide walks through a complete, systematic framework for running feed ad campaigns — from audience targeting to creative design to landing page optimization and performance analysis.
Mastery comes through practice — writing great customer case studies is no different.
Value seed user feedback, build lasting engagement, partner with external ecosystems, and align internal resources.
Used strategically, coupons don't require you to save everything for one big annual campaign — you can run proactive, high-impact marketing every single day of the year.
With so many WeChat marketing tactics available, one stands out for its ability to connect the dots across the entire funnel: the parametric promotional QR code.
When building a customer loyalty program, brands can apply the RFM model to design tiered membership rules that lower acquisition costs while multiplying marketing impact.
The China Retail Technology Decision-Makers Summit 2019 and China Retail Industry CIO Alliance Annual Conference were held in Shanghai on December 6–7, 2019. Knight, the omni-channel intelligent SCRM management platform, was honored to attend and engage in in-depth exchanges with industry leaders from e-commerce, traditional retail, established technology, and emerging technology sectors.
How can you reach your highest-value customers with pinpoint accuracy and achieve sustainable, measurable business growth?
Rather than blindly chasing new eyeballs and sifting valuable customers out of inflated data, brands should focus on two fundamentals: retaining existing customers and turning them into advocates who bring in new ones.
By running automated marketing within the WeChat ecosystem, every touchpoint in the customer journey becomes a golden opportunity — and cutting 100 million yuan in paid distribution costs is entirely within reach.
The workforce is shrinking. Marketing automation is a solution businesses must embrace sooner rather than later.
Evolve or be left behind — that is the existential question every traditional retailer must now face.
Knight launches in September with an AI-driven, omnichannel approach to full consumer lifecycle marketing.
Fueled by emerging technologies, retail models that blend online and offline—"buy online, pick up in-store" and "buy in-store, deliver to your door"—are set to deepen and accelerate.
Consumer spending on accommodation, goods, arts, entertainment, and retail continues to grow — and social media is emerging as the dominant force shaping purchasing decisions.
Information technology and the internet have transformed not only consumers, but also the way information travels.
New findings from Think with Google — Google's marketing data and research division — show that during the decision-making stage of travel booking, customer service matters more than loyalty programs.
Consumer attention has never been more expensive — even the most carefully crafted campaigns risk being tuned out in a sea of noise.
What does digital transformation really mean for consumer goods companies — and where should they start?
¥1,498 Moutai, a ¥13,999.9 PRADA tote bag, a ¥199/year membership fee that undercuts the global average — and a nation gone wild.