Understand how Baidu did promotion in the early days in five minutes!

First, let me answer the question of “killer promotion”. The so-called killer promotion is definitely a fatal blow. If after the promotion, competitors can revive and slowly erode market share, it can only be considered a sudden popularity, and it cannot be considered a “killer promotion”. Based on this, I feel that only the early promotions of BAT can be regarded as “killer promotions”.

Most of them are summarized from early news reports about BAT. Continuously updated. Let’s talk about Baidu first. If it gets over 1,000 likes, I’ll talk about Alibaba and Tencent.

Killer promotions are mostly based on killer products

In October 1999, Li Yanhong was invited to return to China as an expert to watch the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. During his return to China, Robin Li discovered that many of the business cards he exchanged with many people already had their e-mail addresses printed on them, and the T-shirt that Sohu CEO Charles Zhang gave him also had the word ".com" printed on it. Earlier in the summer of 1998, Robin Li was invited to give a technical lecture at Tsinghua University. Sohu employees who listened to his sharing were very interested in Li's technology and some even expressed that Sohu was willing to pay for Li's technology. These details continue to give Robin Li confidence that it is now the best time to start an Internet business in China. On Christmas Day in 1999, Robin Li gave up his stock options worth $500,000 at Infoseek and returned to China to start his own business, founding Baidu.

The reason why I talk about this paragraph is to say that most killer promotions are based on killer products.

1. Where did Baidu’s traffic come from at the beginning of its business? Business Cooperation

In January 2000, when Baidu was first established, the Nasdaq Index, as a barometer of the new economy, continued to rise from 1,500 points. On March 10, 2000, the Nasdaq Index broke through the 5,000 point mark. Chinese Internet companies represented by China.com, Sohu, Sina, and NetEase were listed on the Nasdaq one after another, and emerged in the international community. Portal websites were in their heyday. When the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released the seventh "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet", it mentioned that as of December 31, 2000, there were about 8.92 million Internet-connected computers in China, about 22.5 million Internet users, and about 265,405 WWW sites. At that time, portal websites completely dominated these traffic.

If Baidu wanted to obtain traffic at that time, it could not bypass these websites, just as today's startups think of Baidu SEO, WeChat and Sina Weibo operations first when they mention traffic. As early as the beginning of their business, Robin Li and Xu Yong established a business model that emulated Silicon Valley's Google and provided search services to major portals. However, as a little-known startup company, it was not easy to directly reach cooperation with listed portals.

Baidu effectively utilized the resources around it and reached a cooperation with Silicon Valley Power, an Internet upstart at the time. Silicon Valley Power went online on June 10, 1999. Eight months later, it received a $10 million investment from the top venture capital firms at the time, including Goldman Sachs, Red Dot, and Peninsula, becoming the startup with the highest financing amount among domestic Internet companies at the time. Peninsula Fund is also an investor in Baidu. With the help of Peninsula Fund, Baidu won its first big customer order. Riding on the momentum of its cooperation with Silicon Valley Power, Baidu decided to "strike while the iron is hot" and hold a press conference at the Shangri-La Hotel in Beijing. In the technology circle where search engine technology was not yet popular, it was difficult for reporters to understand the value of search engines through linguistic explanations. Then, embarrassingly, one minute before the press conference, the hotel's Internet connection was cut off and a demonstration could not be conducted. The reporters who came for "curiosity" looked at each other in dismay and returned home. The failure of the press conference rekindled the fighting spirit of the Baidu team. In the following six months, Baidu became the search engine service provider for portal websites such as Sohu, 21CN, Sina, Tom.com, and 263.com, and its share of the Chinese Internet search engine market increased to 80%.

2. Event Marketing: Sina is in arrears

At the end of 2000, NASDAQ suddenly collapsed and the Internet economy collapsed instantly. Although Baidu had 80% of the search engine market share, its corresponding revenue was only a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Small websites were in danger of becoming Baidu's customers, and large websites were unable to balance their income and expenditure and could not pay higher service fees. Baidu had to consider transformation. After careful thinking, Robin Li proposed the third law of search engines - the law of self-confidence, that is, whoever has more confidence in their website will be ranked first. The manifestation of this confidence is that the website is willing to pay for its ranking on the search engine. This is the prototype of paid ranking. From the current point of view, if you are confident enough in your product, you can ensure the paid conversion rate of users coming to your website. Your product is good enough, and 100 users visit, and 100 users will contribute revenue to your product. Then, if a part of the revenue is given to the search engine service provider in exchange for more and more obvious rankings, so as to obtain more visiting users and thus obtain higher revenue.

Li Yanhong is no stranger to paid ranking. He mentioned paid ranking as early as in his book "Silicon Valley Business War" published in 1998. At that time, there was a company in the United States called Overture. It bought out the top 5 positions of keyword search results on portal websites such as America Online (AOL), and then sold these positions to related businesses to make a profit. After Overture adopted this model, its annual revenue exceeded 1 billion US dollars. However, because Overture lacks its own portal website, this business model has no support point. Therefore, if Baidu wants to transform into a bidding ranking company, it needs to launch its own website and this website needs to have a large amount of traffic. Because for small and medium-sized enterprises in bidding ranking, when considering which search service provider to place advertisements, network traffic is their primary consideration. On September 20, 2001, Baidu launched the Internet search engine bidding ranking service "What you want is looking for you" and officially launched the website: just Baidu it and you will know. However, once it was launched, it would face competition from portal websites such as Sohu, Sina and Silicon Valley Power, and quickly obtaining traffic became the top priority.

If you search on Baidu, you will find that as an independent Chinese search engine website, it has little daily traffic due to its lack of popularity after its launch, and more traffic still comes from cooperating portals. At this point, how to use limited funds to carry out large-scale promotion and how to make Chinese Internet users familiar with and use Baidu became a problem that Baidu founders such as Robin Li had to solve. The subsequent "Sina outage incident" helped Baidu quickly increase its popularity and traffic. In 2002, on the eve of the Spring Festival, Sina's one-quarter technical fee for using Baidu's engine had not yet been deposited into Baidu's account. In fact, due to the Internet bubble and Baidu's launch of a paid ranking search engine service, most portals were in arrears with Baidu's service fees. For Baidu, these fees are no longer important to the value of the cooperation between them. Baidu decided to use the incident of the portal giant defaulting on Baidu's service fees as an event marketing. On March 12, 2002, many journalists received calls from Baidu. They went to Sina's search engine at 7:30 p.m. and were surprised to find that after searching on Sina, the text displayed on the computer screen was: Due to Sina's arrears, Baidu has suspended its search service to Sina. If you need better search results, please log in to Baidu and you will know. The next day, the news that "Sina owes fees, Baidu is shut down" instantly became the headlines of various websites and newspapers.

At that time, Sina was the largest portal website in China, and netizens searched for key words in the search box on its homepage every day to find information that interested them. But before, almost no users knew that behind this small search box was a search service provided by a company called Baidu. After this incident, users positioned Baidu as a search technology service provider hidden behind the portal giant. Baidu became famous and its traffic increased dramatically. At the same time, Baidu has established a new cooperation model with other portal websites such as Sohu, NetEase, and Yahoo. The portal websites still use Baidu's search, and the bidding ranking income brought by the search is shared by both parties.

3. Baidu IE search companion

In June 2002, Baidu launched the "IE Search Companion" plug-in. Once users have installed this product, they can conduct relevant searches by directly entering keywords in the browser address bar without having to log in to the search engine website. At that time, users accessed the Internet in two main ways: one was to directly enter the URL address of the website they wanted to visit in the IE address bar; the second was to search on a website with a search engine function and then select the URL they wanted to visit; the third was to put frequently used URLs into favorites. However, the former requires netizens to know the registered domain name of a website clearly. Ordinary Chinese netizens have limited exposure to English and it is not easy to remember domain names. Using search engines to search adds a procedure and affects efficiency. Favorites are only suitable for users with personal computers. At that time, a large number of users accessed the Internet through Internet cafes. "IE Search Companion" greatly lowers the threshold for users to use it. By entering keywords in the browser's address bar, users can find the web content they want.

Then there are too many dark histories in the promotion process of "IE Search Companion". On December 23, 2003, Baidu sued 3721 for copyright infringement and unfair competition. The Beijing Chaoyang District People's Court made a first-instance judgment, stating that 3721 "shall not hinder the normal installation and operation of the 'Baidu IE Search Companion' software by clicking the left button of the mouse" from the date the judgment came into effect. At the same time, the judgment pointed out that Baidu and 3721 "both used improper technical means to prevent users from using each other's software", but "because 3721 did not file a corresponding lawsuit regarding Baidu IE Search Companion's impact on the download and installation of 3721's online real-name, the court will not deal with this matter." Both "IE Search Companion" and 3721's plug-ins are suspected of hindering the normal operation of each other. At the same time, users complained that they were forced to install "IE Search Companion". News and posts about them repeatedly installing "IE Search Companion" for a year were also circulated in various media and on the Internet. Although it is impossible to learn the traffic data that "IE Search Companion" brings to Baidu through first-hand data, this small plug-in is a strategy that cannot be underestimated in the rise of Baidu.

4. Monopoly: Game marketing 10 years ahead of HTML5

SP (abbreviation of Service Provider) is an organization that makes profits by providing mobile value-added services such as short messages and multimedia messages on the platform provided by telecommunications operators. SP provides services to users through the value-added interface provided by the operator, and then the operator deducts the relevant service fees from the user's mobile phone and broadband fees. Finally, the operator and SP share the profits in proportion. The early SP industry was very chaotic. One person, a few servers and some communication resources could become an SP. You could make a profit without any technology or even any content. In 2002, SP traffic even saved China's Internet and helped the three major portals find a way to make profits.

NetEase, which was facing the risk of being delisted from the Nasdaq, took the lead in relying on text messaging and online games to become the first profitable portal website, and made NetEase's stock the leader of Chinese concept stocks. At the same time, websites such as QQ, Sina, Sohu, and TOM all rely on text messages and their respective SP identities to make profits. In the early days, the SP industry's profit mechanism was very lucrative. For example, a text message would be sent to mobile phone users saying, "Sorry, I accidentally deleted you from my phone book. Would you mind texting me to let me know your identity?" There was nothing unusual except that the mobile phone number was different from a normal one. Then, as long as the user replied to the text message, no matter what the reply was, the mobile platform system would determine that you had actively sent a message to the SP to subscribe to his service, and then deduct the fee on a monthly basis. In the process of formalization of the SP industry, interesting game competitions have gradually emerged. Just refer to CCTV's "Happy Dictionary" and "Lucky 52" and you will know how popular this kind of text competition via text messages is.

It was in this context that Wang Zhan, now vice president of Baidu, sharply discovered that the SMS guessing games provided by SP service providers were very popular, but the cost of using mobile phones was very high, and users were unable to find the answers after being stumped by some of the various exciting mini-games. If the two could be combined, users could play text guessing games, and at the same time, if they got stuck during the game, they could use Baidu search to find the answer, and it would also deepen their understanding of Baidu. It was simply the best of both worlds. On November 7, 2002, Baidu launched the game "Baidu Search Monopoly". The questions in the game are varied and strange, for example, "After Hong Kong Phoenix TV's Liu Hairuo suffered a serious car accident in the UK, which hospital in Beijing did he go to for treatment and recover?" Without the help of search engines, users basically have no way to answer these questions. Users only need to answer 5 questions a day and use Baidu search engine to find the answers. If they answer correctly, they can participate in the lottery. The first prize every month can get a computer, and the special prize every season can get a car. To ensure the effect, Baidu has integrated a large amount of resources on its site, other websites, and offline media to promote this game and attract user participation. When the grand prize winner of the first season was a junior of Li Yanhong, a student at Peking University, the event reached its climax when the media and users wrote articles or posted messages to express their attitudes and opinions. The event attracted hundreds of thousands of participants, and Baidu's traffic continued to rise during the event.

5. Traffic Pillar - Baidu MP3

The early 2000s was a period of vigorous development of MP3 players. According to statistics from market research company IDC, the global scale of MP3 players in 2000 was approximately US$580 million. In 2002, global sales of MP3 players reached 11.62 million units, and the annual growth rate exceeded 50%. Obtaining music in MP3 format became a rigid demand of users. Based on this demand of users, Baidu launched Baidu MP3 in November 2002. Baidu does not store MP3s on its own servers. Users can easily find music content on the Internet through Baidu MP3's search service, most of which are pirated music. But ordinary users do not pay attention to copyright and do not care whether the songs are pirated. A search engine that can search for songs is a good search engine. This has become the reason why many users switch to Baidu. Due to its corporate philosophy of "don't be evil", Google took eight years to deal with the relevant copyright content before launching the MP3 search function, but it was too late. MP3 search traffic became the mainstay of Baidu's traffic growth, once accounting for one-third of Baidu's overall traffic. Baidu also gradually surpassed Google to become the preferred search engine for Chinese users.

6. Baidu Union

Since its launch, Baidu has focused on business cooperation with other websites. From the early cooperation with portal websites to the launch of Baidu, you will know that after the user-oriented search engine, more attention is paid to the importance of business cooperation. Baidu works closely with many partners such as websites, software, Internet cafes, telecom operators, terminal manufacturers, etc. to form the Baidu Alliance. The way Baidu cooperates with other websites is very simple. Baidu provides search engine services for websites, and users can get a share of the advertising revenue generated by using the search engine. Relying on the support of partner websites, Baidu's traffic has continued to grow from zero to its current scale.

7. Versus Google

On May 28, 2003, China Computer Education News, a subsidiary of CCID Group, held a public beta test event for tens of thousands of people titled “Baidu VS Google – Two major search engines battle for the top of search.” The specific approach is to have ordinary users rate the results of the two search engines without any hint, and to judge the quality of the two search engines based on the users' ratings. Google is good at processing English, and Chinese is a very distinctive language. The way it is expressed on the Internet is different from English. Therefore, Google's English processing method is difficult to show its advantages in Chinese, so there is basically no suspense in the evaluation results. After the public beta began, 10,015 Chinese Internet users from all over the world used 10,050 search keywords to evaluate Baidu and Google within a week. In the end, 55% of people chose "Baidu is better than Google" and only 35% supported Baidu. For a time, Baidu became the focus, and domestic mainstream media and websites all immediately released press releases saying "Baidu is better than Google". The marketing plan of "Ten Thousand People Public Beta" itself was aimed at novice users who do not understand technology. The evaluation results won their favor. The conclusion that Baidu optimized Google rose to the level of national self-esteem, such as that China's Internet is ahead of the US Internet and China is more advanced than the US. Therefore, it generated a lot of response, and ordinary users began to use Baidu and became loyal users of Baidu. Baidu's popularity has been boosted again.

8. Event Marketing: How Baidu Consumes the Hurun Rich List

In 1999, British economist Hurun consulted more than 100 newspapers, magazines and announcements of listed companies to compile the first wealth ranking list in Chinese history that was in line with international standards. It was released through Forbes, a world-renowned media outlet. The rich list won widespread attention from Chinese people at home and abroad. Hurun went from being unable to contact any of the rich people on the list before the list was released to being able to meet with more than one-third of the people on the list and contact all of them after the release. He was ahead of Yao Ming and Run Run Shaw, and was jointly selected by the media as the "Rising Star of 2002". He was also able to invite the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair to endorse him, which was a great success. But Hurun also faces an embarrassing problem. Listed companies can estimate their wealth through financial reports, while non-listed companies can only infer their wealth through rough estimates. Although not many people question it, the credibility of the index data has always been low. If an authoritative company can provide authoritative data, the value of the Hurun list will undoubtedly be huge. Although Baidu had authoritative data at the time, it had never stopped pursuing traffic and brand. The two hit it off, and the following story happened.

In October 2013, Hurun released the "Top 50 IT Richest People of 2013". Baidu CEO Robin Li ranked 11th on the list. However, on the day the list was announced, Li questioned the value and authenticity of the list in front of the media. If there were social networking sites like Weibo at that time, Hurun and Robin Li would have started a war of words on Weibo even if they had not made an appointment to fight in Chaoyang Park. However, Baidu and Hurun resolved the awkward situation and jointly launched the "2003 Hurun Popularity List", which was a popularity list based on the search popularity of all users in 2003. The rich popularity list ranked by search volume has aroused great interest among users, and the Baidu traffic of "2003 Rich Popularity List" has increased by 17%.

At the same time, according to Baidu's internal data, in 2003, Chinese netizens used Baidu 11 billion times, and 700 million of them were searches for Chinese celebrities. In line with this trend, Baidu cooperated with Light Media to launch the "Global Chinese Celebrity Popularity List 2003". I believe this data is also the basis for Baidu's decision to cooperate with Super Girls.

Baidu’s killer promotion:

On the surface: strong business cooperation ability + event planning ability

Killer promotion on the dark side: Baidu IE search companion + MP3 + online alliance + Monopoly game

What are the basic ideas or tools for promoting a website?

For example, Baidu’s business cooperation ideas:

• Analyze the current situation: Where is the traffic? Offline or online (What products are online?)
• How to obtain traffic: How to obtain traffic based on these products, marketing OR cooperation (such as now everyone is based on WeChat and Weibo for new media promotion, that is, marketing based on products, another is to have in-depth cooperation with WeChat and Weibo, such as JD.com, Meilishuo, Dianping, Didi and Xing, live broadcast and WeChat cooperation) Compared with marketing, if you can cooperate directly, the traffic will definitely be more impressive
• How to conduct business cooperation: The needs of both parties should match, portal websites need search tools, and Baidu needs more users;
  Next, Baidu used the resources around it as a breakthrough to create a case, and then began to cooperate with other portals.

1. Where are the users?

What is the product, who are the users of the product, and where are these users?

A. Internet:

PC: WEB sites, such as Weibo, PC products such as pre-installed computers, PC software such as browsers, etc.

Mobile: mobile products, application market, hardware channels

B.Tradition:

TV, subway, outdoor, newspaper, office building, etc.

for example

• O2O services based on geographic location, ground promotion or building advertising
• Popular tool applications, perhaps an application market
• Rural elderly users can paint the walls
• Online education products may be video channels and new media such as Weibo and WeChat.

Each product has its own characteristics.

2. How to acquire users

• Budget and goals
• How to get it

marketing:

Free and paid marketing based on channels

MP3: Based on user word of mouth, you can download it for free

Baidu IE Search Companion: Browser-based virus promotion, please note that this is a real virus

Marketing plan: Promote Monopoly game on various portals to gain traffic

cooperate:

Cooperate with TV stations, websites, and apps to guide traffic

Network Alliance: advertising cooperation share