Internet marketing service gets recognition
TV audience will always change channels during the lengthy commercial break, so, how on earth could the internet make people accept commercial information willingly? Internet marketing expert Liu Dongming has once stated that China’s internet marketing was lack of various modes, but now, things are changing silently.
“Suddenly, internet ads become not so hateful.” Bian Zeheng, 28, working in Beijing, is a loyal user of online video and usually enjoys music video on major video websites. She said, “One year ago, when I watched online videos, I had to spend 10-odd minutes on waiting for the cinema advertising to pass, but now, on most online video websites, only when you pause the video will the ad appear.”
More importantly, thanks to the rapid development of internet technologies, the value of internet marketing is now improving, so users can have comparatively good using experience and accept the internet marketing in an undisturbed condition.” On the other hand, enterprises could evaluate their products and the future purchasing trend of consumers with new marketing methods like internet survey and online data analysis. Because of the huge cost advantage compared with the traditional offline methods, these new marketing methods become popular with more and more enterprises.
Large companies: Online marketing is still making progress
The “online torch relay” jointly launched by Coca Cola and Tencent was seen as one of the most successful internet marketing cases. Once the user won the qualification of online torch relay, an unlightened icon will appear beside their QQ faces. If they successfully invited other users to participate in the activity, the icon will be lightened. In a short period of 40 days since March 2008, the activity attracted 40 million people to attend, 120,000 people per second in average.
Same with Coca Cola, the internet marketing has now become the new battle field of brand development of many large companies. Compared with the single product sales, they prefer to improve their brand reputation and realize long-lasting customer relationship with internet transmission methods. Considering that in the Chinese netizen age structure, people from 18 to 24 take up the largest proportion (till the end of June 2008, and the proportion is 30.3 percent), creativity and interactivity have become the key words of the internet marketing implementation of large companies. They carry out product placement marketing with games and videos, or interactive marketing with community websites.
On the other hand, for large companies, internet marketing is now becoming their new source of commercial data. Guerlain, Lancome and other top cosmetics websites got a large amount of key data like consumers’ region distribution and income level by means of lucky draw of trial products, P&G got data analysis the consumers’ purchasing of high-end consumables through Taobao, and Philips and Google cooperated in the first trial of integrated marketing in China. Lu Fang, Senior Marketing Manager of Philips (the Greater China) stated that the free website analyzing tool of Google could provide detailed data for companies, help them know the activities on and demands for their websites, including the pages from which the users log on Philips’ website and on which they log off, or on which they stay for a longest time. With these data, Philips can clearly know the interest concentration of customers and conduct consequent adjustment and control.
Small companies: Make every cent count
Two years ago, clients in the customer database of Shandong Qingzhou Weijin Stainless Steel Equipment Co., Ltd., were mostly from the North China, without even one from the South China. While in 2008, the largest order of this company was from Japan. The General Manager Ren Xinguo stated that the rapid business development was closely related with the promotion on the platform of Baidu. “Traditional methods are seriously restricted by region and time, while for SMEs, it is very important to choose the quickest and most effective marketing method.”
Compared with large companies, SMEs like Weijin Stainless Steel Equipment Co., Ltd. pay more attention to the effect and return rate of the internet marketing. They quite need to spend the cost on places which can best present its value through right choice, precise match and control and management with emphasis on effect. President Dai Lvxian of Guangdong Marketing Academy pointed out that in order to help SMEs deal with the impact of the international financial crisis, the internet marketing innovation had become the key promotion project of the SME department of Guangdong province in 2009.
For a long time, the internet marketing method of the Chinese SMEs is restricted to be the application of search engine, while with the deepening of their knowledge of the internet marketing, they pay more attention to the analysis, optimization, and improvement of ad effects, and the optimization of their websites with various analyzing tools.
In the meantime, these SMEs incapable of ad launch on large portals have begun to carry out oriented public-praise marketing, like blog marketing, with the interactivity of the internet. By the end of 2008, the total number o blogs in China has reach 107 million. Experts stated that with the present search engine weight advantage of the blog providers, the useful information issued by SMEs can accept a great deal of attention of the numerous users more easily, and the probability of directly bring potential users also increases rapidly.
By Chen Jing