Top 10 Marketing Observations in 2020: Integration of Advertising and Private Domain Traffic

A sudden epidemic in 2020 not only affected everyone's lives, but also disrupted the original plans of many industries.

The epidemic has dealt a huge blow to China's economy, especially service industries such as catering, tourism, hotels, and cinemas.

The marketing and advertising industry is no exception and is facing the impact of the epidemic. What impact will this epidemic have on the marketing and advertising industry? After the epidemic is over, where will the marketing industry go?

Taking SARS as a lesson, Hua Ge believes that 2020 is still worth looking forward to.

This epidemic will not last forever. After the epidemic is over, demand in the consumer market will return to normal, and the originally suppressed consumer demand will also explode. For advertising and marketing, there will still be many opportunities after the epidemic is over.

Secondly, China is a major consumer country with a population of 1.4 billion, and its consumer market is huge and stable. It’s just that in special periods (the epidemic occurred during the Spring Festival), consumer demand and supply are difficult to match in the short term.

An epidemic will definitely cause some losses to the marketing industry, but it is not a catastrophic disaster. Faced with these uncertainties, should we cultivate our inner strength to face the challenges, or be swayed by external emotions and go with the flow? This is a question that everyone in the industry needs to think about.

I won’t say any more about chicken soup. What changes will there be in the marketing industry in this special year of 2020?

1. Retaliatory growth of online advertising

An epidemic has forced many people to stay at home. Except for sleeping, people's activities are almost all online, and mobile phones, televisions and computers have become the main ways to obtain information.

Offline traffic has almost stagnated, but online traffic has exploded.

According to the website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, during the Spring Festival holiday, mobile Internet traffic consumption reached 2.716 million TB, a year-on-year increase of 36.4%. Mobile data traffic consumption on New Year's Eve and the first day of the New Year increased by 42.1% and 40.8% year-on-year respectively.

The essence of Internet business is traffic business. Wherever there are users, there is traffic, and there are corresponding advertisements.

During the epidemic, in addition to the old faces of online advertising such as games, we also saw many other industries carrying out concentrated online advertising, such as online office, online education, online medical care, and even the real estate industry. A few days ago, a real estate developer launched online house viewing and selling, which also achieved considerable results.

As one thing grows, another shrinks. The inability of offline marketing to cope with emergencies also provides opportunities for online marketing. After experiencing this epidemic, I believe that more and more companies will regard online advertising as an important marketing method.

2. Integration of advertising and private domain traffic

Private domain traffic is a concept relative to public domain traffic. Simply put, it refers to a channel that can directly reach users at any time and frequency without paying.

Currently, the most recognized private domain traffic is WeChat. The core of private domain traffic includes two indicators, traffic cost (CAC) and traffic revenue (CLV), which together determine ROI (return on investment).

In fact, behind the rise of private domain traffic is essentially growth anxiety. In the era of traffic dividends, companies only focused on traffic conversion. However, as traffic dividends were exhausted, customer acquisition costs increased and it became difficult to monetize public domain traffic.

Therefore, tapping into the greater value of old users has become a consensus among all companies, and more and more people are beginning to target private domain traffic. Especially in the field of e-commerce.

The end of each marketing campaign is actually the beginning of the next one, and the cycle repeats itself. After this epidemic, more bosses have come to understand that advertising is not the end of marketing, but a new beginning. How to accumulate users attracted by advertising and build up your own private traffic to give the company an extra leg to walk. The key is to combine advertising and private domain traffic.

In addition, once users enter the company's private domain traffic, how to subsequently serve users and provide a good experience is also the core of everyone working with private domain traffic.

According to Hua Ge's observation, more and more platforms are now focusing on tapping into private domain traffic and providing assistance to brands in terms of traffic, conversion, and monetization, such as Douyin stores and WeChat live broadcasts. In the future, platforms that do not support private domain traffic conversion and do not support brand and effect integration will easily lose their advantages in commercial competition.

3. The rise of zero-budget marketing

How to do marketing without money? Perhaps this is the first reaction of many people after seeing it. Before Hua Ge talks about zero-budget marketing, let’s talk about Xinchao Media first.

Two things about Xinchao Media have attracted everyone's attention in the past two days. One is the "layoffs on the first day of resumption of work"; the other is that Xinchao Media donated 10 billion advertising dollars to caring enterprises.

Regarding the first layoff, Xinchao Media denied it and we did not get involved in it too much. What Brother Hua mainly wants to talk about is that Xinchao Media donated 10 billion advertising dollars to caring companies.

According to Xinchao Media, the amount of advertising donations given to each company is equivalent to the amount of charitable donations made by the company during this epidemic. The amount of donation and gift shall not exceed the publication price of RMB 50 million, which is the upper limit.

It is understood that Xinchao Media's advertising space is mainly in elevators and outdoor screens. This epidemic can be said to have dealt a heavy blow to offline advertising. There are no customers to bid for advertising space, and no one comes to watch the displayed ads offline. Rather than letting it go to waste, it is better to donate it.

This also confirms Xinchao’s statement: the epidemic has had a huge impact on offline advertising, resulting in idle inventory of media resources. Because trendy inventory is time. If it can’t be sold out today, it will have no value tomorrow.

Charitable donations are of course a good thing. In times of national crisis, every company and individual has a responsibility. However, from the perspective of the marketing industry, the essence of this matter is - zero-budget marketing.

Xinchao Media’s 10 billion advertising space is its budget, and this resource does not require any money. By using donations, we can establish connections between the companies that donate and Xinchao, thus achieving the marketing goal.

In addition, there is a more critical factor behind this. By donating advertising space, more companies can become aware of Xinchao Media. This will invisibly bring many potential customers to Xinchao Media. After the epidemic is over, offline advertising is bound to rebound, and Xinchao Media is already one step ahead.

Zero-budget marketing actually achieves marketing goals through resource replacement. Of course, this trendy approach is just one of them. I believe that in 2020, there will be more and more zero-budget marketing cases.

4. Offline enterprises redefine O2O

The outbreak of the pneumonia epidemic has caused the flow of people and customers to drop to a freezing point, which has also brought offline activities to a near standstill and dealt a heavy blow to the offline physical industry.

With the outbreak of online office, online education, fresh food e-commerce, online medical care and other industries during the epidemic, more companies have realized that online operations have greater flexibility and operability than offline operations in special periods.

In the past O2O model, enterprises realized transaction services after diverting traffic from online to offline. However, many companies choose to end after completing this step.

In fact, it is also extremely important to know how to transfer offline customers back to online. Especially when the traffic dividend disappears, these users can be transferred online to provide secondary value-added services, thereby creating new value.

In addition, many companies currently fall into a misunderstanding, that is, when doing online or offline marketing, the two are just independent events and they do not promote real integration. "Focus on the bottom and neglect the top" or "Focus on the top and neglect the bottom", this uncoordinated marketing approach can easily make you feel overwhelmed when facing emergencies.

The marketing process from "online to offline" is a way for enterprises to acquire accurate users. But in order to maintain these precise users, we need to return from offline to online. In the future, companies will update their focus on the integrated "online-offline-online" approach.

5. The trend of listed companies acquiring MCNs

Since 2017, top internet celebrities represented by Papi Jiang, Liziqi, Mizijun, Li Jiaqi, and Viya have attracted the attention of the Chinese people, and the MCN agencies behind them have also made a lot of money.

How hot MCN is in the capital market today can be seen from the following examples.

On January 5, the products of listed company Jinzi Ham were shown in Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room. The battle report showed that more than 100,000 packs of Jinzi spicy sausages were sold in 5 minutes in Li Jiaqi’s live broadcast room, with total sales exceeding 3 million yuan. The next day, Jinzi Ham’s stock price rose, driving a market value increase of 548 million yuan.

In December 2019, Saturday, the "No. 1 stock of women's shoes", had 13 daily limit increases in 19 trading days, and its stock price rose by as much as 350%. It is reported that Zhang Zemin, the founder and actual controller of Saturday, is an investor in Li Ziqi's agency. Saturday officially denied this "connection". However, Saturday has also been quick to invest in MCN. In August 2018, Saturday acquired an MCN agency - Yaowang Network.

Coincidentally, just a few days ago, A-share listed company Sanwu.com issued an announcement to acquire MCN company Shanghai Wanrui. After the plan was disclosed, Sanwu.com’s stock price hit the daily limit for eight consecutive days. It disclosed the plan on February 11 and hit the daily limit again on February 12.

MCN has demonstrated strong capabilities in e-commerce sales and integrated marketing, especially in an economic downturn, through which users can be found more accurately. According to incomplete statistics, there are more than 8,000 MCN agencies in China alone (some say more than 10,000).

Nowadays, more and more listed companies have begun to acquire MCNs. According to incomplete statistics from Douban Entertainment, there are currently 26 listed companies that have had connections with MCN, with investment, mergers and acquisitions, or self-construction being the main ways. It is foreseeable that there will be more and more MCN mergers and acquisitions cases this year.

However, with the intensification of industry competition and the entry of capital, MCN will also usher in a reshuffle period, and high-quality players will become the final winners.

6. Short video trading platforms become popular

Short videos entered their explosive growth phase in 2017 and are now gradually maturing. Short videos have evolved from an entertainment app into a platform that integrates entertainment, product promotion, and live streaming.

During the epidemic, users' entertainment time at home increased significantly year-on-year, and short videos, mainly on Douyin and Kuaishou, became an important way for people to kill boring time.

As a new traffic entrance spawned by the mobile Internet, short videos have also become one of the few remaining tickets in the mobile Internet era. But being a super portal is far from enough.

With the current very complete capital flow, goods flow and logistics systems, short videos mean the largest flow of people. With strong branding capabilities, grass-planting capabilities and the ability to bring goods, short videos can exert tremendous energy.

Short videos are not only a traffic entrance, but also a trading platform. It is understood that short videos have a high conversion rate. The number of reposts caused by videos is 12 times that of text and pictures. The willingness of users who have watched the video to purchase is 1.8 times that of other users.

Currently, short videos are the only remaining value gap, which contains huge treasures waiting to be discovered by every advertiser. If you miss the opportunity, your users are likely to be taken away by your competitors.

The short video trading platform of the future will be a visual and data-based platform.

7. New interactive advertising upgrade

Recently, Brother Hua saw a very interesting patent application.

Sony recently applied for a patent. When watching TV, if an advertisement appears, you can skip the advertisement by standing up and shouting the corresponding brand name. Sony describes the patent as a "system for converting television commercials into interactive networked video games."

Don’t you find this idea very interesting? This form of interactive advertising can not only deepen users' impression of the brand, but also does not damage the user experience.

Interactive advertising is actually a new form of advertising, saying goodbye to the previous static form of advertising. Nowadays, situational interactive advertising and sensory interactive advertising are common. Interactive advertising uses ingenious ideas and integration with computer high-tech to achieve imaginable display effects, making the advertising deeply rooted in people's hearts.

Nowadays, more and more advertising and marketing are choosing to embrace interactive advertising. Interactive advertising companies, including Doumeng, also provide various imaginative interactive forms for interactive advertising.

Currently, most interactive advertisements are in the form of games such as roulette, smashing golden eggs, scratch cards, shaking dice, opening gift boxes, and fishing. In the future, with the support of technologies such as 5G and AI, interactive advertising will also be upgraded. 2020 will be another golden moment for interactive advertising.

In 2020, the advertising industry will enter an era where there is no advertising without interaction and interaction means results.

8. WeChat Ecosystem Advertising Closed Loop

Although WeChat remains very restrained, it is now constantly exploring its marketing commercialization capabilities.

From Moments ads to native promotion pages, from regular ads (pictures and text) to video ads and then to interactive ads and mutual selection ads. WeChat advertising constantly updates product forms to help brands communicate in richer ways.

At the same time, WeChat advertising is also exploring commercial traffic scenarios, including public account articles, Moments, mini-programs, and mini-games. Today, we can see that under the WeChat ecosystem, service companies such as Youzan and Weimeng have emerged to help small and medium-sized enterprises and even individuals maintain their customers and build their own sales systems.

Regardless of internal pressure or Zhang Xiaolong's wishes, WeChat's commercialization path is constantly moving forward, and in 2020, WeChat's advertising ecosystem will form an ecological closed loop.

Understanding the WeChat advertising ecosystem and learning how to efficiently place WeChat ads will become a compulsory course for marketers in 2020.

9. Financial marketing is on the rise again

Under the epidemic, we have seen many companies say that they are facing the crisis of interrupted cash flow. “We won’t survive more than three months”, this is the inner statement of many companies.

If you sit and wait for death, you will only die. The only way to protect yourself is to save yourself.

Catering companies such as Xibei and Haidilao are focusing on food delivery, and companies in the education industry such as Squirrel AI are offering a 35% discount on all employees' salaries, with core executives receiving no salary. Some companies are even starting to lay off employees to temporarily weather the crisis.

Not only businesses, but also individuals are facing an "economic crisis" because of the epidemic. Many people who resigned before the New Year could not find a job due to the epidemic and had to stay at home and live off their savings.

Businesses need money to keep running, and individuals need money to maintain their lives. Where there is demand, there is a market. For financial products, 2020 will be a new beginning.

The market needs education. After experiencing black swan events such as SARS and COVID-19, companies and individuals will also realize the importance of finance. Xibei's Jia Guolong once said that Xibei would never go public, but now Jia Guolong's attitude has changed. According to ChinaVenture, Jia Guolong expressed his willingness to re-evaluate the possibility of Xibei's listing in the future. It’s not for any other reason, but because the lessons learned from this epidemic are too profound.

Of course, for most companies, going public is a bit far away. However, how to build one's own financial system so that companies have sufficient funds to overcome difficulties will be a major demand in the future.

From stocks and bonds to credit cards, this will also provide new opportunities for the marketing of financial products. For financial companies, having the business team take stock of financial needs in advance and look for new growth in 2020 will give them an advantage in competing with other companies. But as for some illegal financial matters, Brother Hua said please stay as far away as possible.

10. Brand PR upgraded to brand-effect PR

"I know that at least half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I don't know where exactly it is wasted?" This is a long-standing question in the advertising circle.

In the past, many brands tacitly accepted the existence of this behavior. However, as advertising budgets are cut, brand owners are paying more and more attention to sales conversion, which has led to a process from brand advertising to performance advertising and then to brand and effect integration.

The so-called "integration of brand and effect" can be simply put as both the dissemination of brand reputation and the conversion of sales.

Nowadays, more and more brands and advertisers are promoting the integration of product and effect. However, in the process of delivery, it is easy to fall into the trap of "focusing on effect but not quality, or effectiveness but not quality". If you ignore the effect, the money you invest will easily be wasted. Ignoring the brand can lead to short-sightedness and quick success.

Nowadays, setting brand advertising and performance advertising in opposition to each other is obviously inconsistent with the real motivations of advertisers. Brand-effect integration has become a common demand of advertisers. As brand-effect integration becomes more popular, brand advertising and performance advertising will be integrated and penetrated into each other in the future.

As a part of marketing, brand public relations can no longer represent the trend of future advertising marketing. In the future, brand public relations will also be upgraded to brand-effect public relations.

Conclusion:

The marketing market in 2020 will be reshuffled. It’s still the old saying, when two meet in a narrow road, the brave will win, those who change will survive, and those who don’t will die. Good things always start with an accident, and there is great potential for marketing in 2020.

Author: Hua Ge

Source: Party A Finance