Chijing Tech: Rising Black Friday Marketing Costs Test Brands' Precision Operations | Black Friday Micro-Interview

【Ebrun Original】During the Black Friday promotional period, marketing costs are rising. How should brands adjust their KOL marketing accordingly? Overseas influencer marketing service provider Chijing Tech is emphasizing precision operations this year, making every budget allocation clear. Combining years of accumulated KOL resources with newly developed AI influencer marketing tools, Chijing Tech is more confident about achieving incremental growth.

Brands experienced in overseas marketing and those just starting out hold different considerations when doing overseas KOL marketing—cautious investment versus quick results—and content placement goals, placement performance, and various user interest points all need to be taken into account during the Black Friday promotion. Not only during major promotions, Chijing Tech upholds a long-term precision operations philosophy, benchmarking its developed AI marketing tools against overseas KOL operations roles to help brand clients improve operational and KOL matching efficiency.

According to Chijing Tech CEO Ji Xiang's observations, AI brings new variables to overseas KOL marketing, and both brands and service providers need to face how to deepen their marketing resource pools and improve marketing efficiency as the barrier to entry is lowered. With both ad placement and influencer quotes rising simultaneously, it is necessary to validate results before formal placement so as to amplify the placement effect. In addition, how brands convert the target users accumulated throughout the year into orders during Black Friday is also a highlight of overseas KOL marketing this peak season.

As the year-end promotional season arrives, Ebrun has specially curated the "Pulling Together·2026 Cross-Border E-Commerce Black Friday Peak Season" feature, inviting overseas brands and service providers to a series of interviews to discuss how enterprises can respond to market competition changes, plan for the Black Friday peak season, and convert promotional traffic into long-term brand value. Below is the interview content between Ebrun and Chijing Tech CEO Ji Xiang, edited and organized.

Ebrun: During this year's Black Friday promotional season, has your preparation investment increased, remained flat, or decreased compared to last year?

Ji Xiang: What we feel now is multi-layered; the experience differs for different clients.

Looking at brands' overseas KOL marketing business this year, the first tier of clients are brand enterprises that have continuously done KOL promotion for 2 years. We clearly feel that these enterprises are very cautious about their KOL marketing budgets for this year's Black Friday node. This caution is based on the overall environment and the company's stage, because companies will continuously cooperate upward with more influential KOLs, so the KOL path will follow a precision operations route. Once precision operations are involved, team decision-making time will lengthen.

The second tier of clients are clients just going overseas to build brands, such as those coming out of Amazon to build independent sites, or domestic Douyin brands going overseas to build independent sites. These clients are prepared to invest heavily at the Black Friday node and currently rely more on agencies to quickly get results. There are just many cultural communication differences between Chinese and American KOLs in the middle, and they hope agencies can help them integrate locally faster. This type of client is very strong in demand this year; whether the investment actually lands still depends on the team's maturity.

Ebrun: What goals have you set for this year's Black Friday promotional season? What breakthrough are you most looking forward to achieving?

Ji Xiang: There will be many goals, but the biggest goal is still that our operational capacity layout from last year can meet this year's Black Friday. Overall, the brand clients we serve quite recognize our precision KOL operations route. Personally, I look forward to the growth of independent site clients, because more and more independent site clients taking the brand route will see precision KOL operations as a long-term matter. To meet this market, we have already made long-term development plans internally.

Ebrun: What important layouts or adjustments have you made to welcome this year's Black Friday promotional season?

Ji Xiang: First, from the beginning of this year, our company brought in a genius AI engineer from Microsoft. Our AI technical team also has a strong background; we previously received investment from Sequoia Capital and are currently focused on AI application development.

We have been an MCN agency for 7 years and have accumulated very rich KOL precision operations resources. Relying on various demand scenarios in our KOL operations, we developed a set of AI influencer marketing applications, positioned to serve brands' overseas KOL operations roles. We are also continuously training this AI internally, which can let brand clients just going overseas quickly start KOL precision operations business, and can also let mature brands efficiently match the overseas KOLs they want to cooperate with.

Ebrun: In your industry, what new changes, new trends, and new challenges are there in the overall situation this year?

Ji Xiang: The development of AI will push overseas KOL marketing business to a new height. Both agencies and brands need to find a new balance point this year. The barrier to using AI to find resources will become lower and lower, and more people will enter the KOL promotion market. So the new challenge is how brands can make good use of AI development trends to build deeper marketing resource pools, how agencies can make AI tools efficient and effective, and how operations can use AI to master more localization resource methods.

Ebrun: Some say that this year's Black Friday promotional season, merchants' "entry ticket" is more expensive, requiring more investment and heavier work. What have you observed?

Ji Xiang: What we feel more obviously is that advertising placement costs have gone up this year, and the quotes of some influencers we work with have also risen by around 40%. Costs are rising on both sides, so brands naturally ask more detailed questions when budgeting: Who can this influencer reach? What value of the product can he explain clearly? After this content is posted, does it still have value for continued use?

This is also why we emphasize precision operations more this year. For example, when promoting a tech product, we first use small-scale cooperation to validate which type of influencer can explain the product clearly and which usage scenario can most arouse target users' interest. For brand awareness content, we look at whether it has reached people in the target market. For conversion content, we further look at clicks, add-to-cart, and first purchases. After obtaining authorization for well-performing content, we then use ads to amplify it. With every additional budget allocation, brands can clearly explain why they are investing, to whom, and with which piece of content.

Ebrun: Where do you think the biggest highlight and new increment of this year's Black Friday promotional season come from?

Ji Xiang: We think the increment we are more confident about this year comes from converting the user interest accumulated throughout the year into orders during Black Friday. Users may first learn about a brand when a new product launches, see influencer hands-on tests mid-year, and only seriously consider which model to buy at year-end. This round of Black Friday content can continue to answer the questions users were still hesitating about after their last viewing.

For example, if under a mid-year review many people asked "How do I choose between these two models?", during Black Friday we can invite the influencer who has been using the product to do a follow-up episode, talking about which functions he is still using after several months and who the two models are respectively suitable for, with links in the video directly leading to the corresponding products or bundles. For users who have already added items to cart, focus on telling them the current final price and discount deadline. For old customers who have already bought, we can give them a practical accessory bundle or upgrade discount.

As an agency, we will pull together the influencers we cooperated with throughout the year, the content, and the purchase questions in comments. For the same product, people first learning about it, people choosing a model, and people who have already bought it need different reasons to place an order. Matching content and discounts to these specific people is the increment we value most this year.

This article was first published on the Ebrun official website.