360 Business Product Launch Guide and Product Strategy

Preface: As the second largest search engine manufacturer in China, 360 has a more solid business product strategy and more stable development compared with other competitors. 360's commercial products include traditional search keyword advertising, the integration of Media V's Juxiao DSP, and 360 application promotion products built on the 360 ​​mobile assistant platform with 800 million installations, forming a marketing product matrix from keyword advertising, display advertising to mobile advertising. Jiuzhilan invited Quan Hui, Director of 360 Company's Small and Medium-sized Business Operations Department, to exclusively share with everyone the 360 ​​Commercial Product Launch Guide, including the characteristics of each product, suitable industries for launch, agency system and other very valuable content.

Q: Compared with Baidu, Sogou, and Shenma, what are the similarities and differences between 360 and the other three search engines in terms of product design, operation and promotion, and user value?

Answer: After several years of development, search engine promotion manufacturers have little difference in product architecture design, operation and other aspects. However, 360 has its own willful persistence in security core and user value, and is a company with feelings:

First of all, 360 focuses on users first.

"No matter how much users abuse me, I will still treat them like my first love" is not just a post on the company culture wall at 360, but is practiced in the behavior of every employee. Every time there is a major conflict between the company's interests and the interests of users, everyone debates fiercely, bangs the table, clashes and reflects, and finally makes decisions based on the adherence to the interests of users. These have gradually implanted the concept of user-first deeply into 360's bones.

360 promotion products aim to achieve business success, and in fact, it is also the success of a large number of advertisers that leads to the long-term development of 360 company. 360 search promotion, from the perspective of protecting legitimate advertisers, conducts strict dynamic audits of business owners' qualifications and materials, leaving malicious competitors nowhere to hide and creating a healthy competition environment for legitimate businesses.

Second, 360 adheres to the core of security and provides protection for enterprises and netizens.

Nowadays, the Internet has been deeply embedded in personal life and business operations. Internet security issues have become very serious, and malicious injury incidents occur from time to time. The property and information security of enterprises and individuals are all subject to huge cyber threats.

360, which started out as a security company, uses powerful security technology in its search promotion products, APP promotion products, and display advertising products to provide advertisers' websites with a range of protections from detection, prevention to attack interception. For APP products, it has products such as Reinforcement Bao and Bug Hunter, and provides comprehensive security services for corporate information and property.

In the industry, when 360 promotes each product, it promises to promote compensation and online shopping first, which greatly protects the interests of enterprises and netizens, and fully demonstrates 360's confidence in its security capabilities.

Third, 360 search promotion is not a simple bidding search engine.

The high weight of 360 search promotion ranking rules in terms of quality demonstrates 360's adherence to good user experience and its continued pursuit of creating a good corporate competitive environment.

Low quality means low or no user recognition. At this time, even if the advertiser's bid is high, it will not be displayed. The search ranking order is actually the result of the combined effect of quality and bid, and 360's quality weight is the highest in the industry.

Q: What is the history of 360’s commercial product development to date? What new business products have been launched to meet the increasingly diverse new marketing needs?

Answer: 360 commercial product development is mainly divided into three stages:

Phase One: Launch of search engine promotion products.

In August 2012, 360 launched 360 Search based on its search engine technology capabilities accumulated over the years, and relying on its own multi-port massive user base, launched the 360 ​​Search Promotion product, targeting a large number of advertisers and starting a systematic commercialization process.

Afterwards, in response to the demands of brand companies, 360 launched a series of branded search promotion styles, such as Brand Direct and Brand Sunrise.

The second stage: entering the comprehensive DSP stage.

In the second half of 2014, 360 began to introduce corresponding display advertising products through cooperation with Juxiao. After two years of running-in, it completed the acquisition of Juxiao in 2016 and simultaneously completed the construction of the 360 ​​display advertising platform and system. 360 is meeting advertisers' advertising needs in a more comprehensive and extensive manner by continuously expanding high-quality traffic and increasing media options. Among them, the product recommendation ads pioneered by 360 browser products provide advertisers with a very good option to find accurate customers in a wider space.

Currently, 360 display advertising has entered a very competitive stage.

The third stage: entering the mobile application promotion stage.

Mobile is the trend, and APP promotion is also an important aspect of corporate promotion.

360 Mobile Assistant is the largest APP distribution platform, with 800 million users and an average daily distribution volume of 180 million times. There are also many products with huge active users, such as 360 Mobile Guardian, Huajiao Live, Clean Master, and WiFi. Based on this, 360 launched the 360 ​​application promotion product in 2015, which brought huge promotion value to APP customers. Let numerous corporate customers benefit from 360 application promotion in the mobile market.

Of course, 360 has also connected with multiple advertising trading platforms and cooperated with many high-quality media, integrating the rich mobile and PC resources both within and outside the 360 ​​site to meet the advertising needs of enterprises in one stop.

So far, 360 has built a relatively complete commercial product system, covering all aspects of user promotion needs in PC and mobile, search and display, website and APP, becoming a must-have for corporate promotion.

In fact, all these forms of promotion are based on 360's accurate portrait of advertiser customers, which relies on 360's ability to mine and apply big data.

The big data products launched by 360 – Shangyi and DMP provide effective support for corporate advertising decisions and target audience positioning, helping companies achieve more accurate advertising effects.

Q: Many companies use search engine promotion as one of their main promotion channels, but many companies are currently reporting difficulties such as increasing advertising costs and decreasing ROI. From your perspective, what difficulties are the companies currently facing when placing orders for search engines? What are the causes of these difficulties? And how can they get out of these difficulties?

Answer: First of all, I do not agree with the statement that companies face difficulties in search engine advertising.

Indeed, companies that tried search engine promotion earlier, because they were the first to try, gained a large number of customers at a very low promotion price, which brought rich returns to the company, and this return is higher than the current ROI of the company. I think this is the due reward for entrepreneurs with keen vision and courage to innovate.

Search promotion has been developing for more than 10 years. As more companies discover the value of search promotion and enter this market, competition is relatively fierce, resulting in a decline in ROI. This is a reality. But I believe that the input-output ratio of search promotion in most industries is reasonable at present. It’s just that it has passed the stage of huge profits and entered a mature development stage. This rule is the same as in most industries. It is very unlikely that today's companies can make huge profits just by relying on search promotion. Enterprises must rely on the competitiveness of their own products and services to make comprehensive efforts and gain competitive advantages in the market.

Of course, new marketing methods for Internet delivery are constantly being innovated. It is recommended that companies can still boldly try new Internet promotion methods. The market will always reward early entrants and early tryers with bonuses. The suggestion to enterprises is that they can use search promotion as the most basic investment, and then carry out integrated marketing through methods such as display advertising.

Integrated marketing will maximize the effectiveness of the company's marketing. Search promotion, in response to users' explicit needs, can help companies firmly grasp these customers with clear needs. Display promotional ads to help companies regain lost users and tap into users with hidden needs. At the same time, because users also spend a lot of time on their mobile phones, companies can try to promote their applications on application promotion and distribution platforms. The combination of these three marketing methods can help companies acquire accurate users to the greatest extent. I think this kind of integrated promotion is very effective, but there are still few companies that understand and apply integrated marketing. Companies can achieve better results through integrated marketing than through a single channel.

For example, Pantene, as a world-renowned hair care brand, has always occupied an important position in the hearts of millions of girls with its image of a dignified goddess. In recent years, in order to expand its audience and maintain the youthfulness of its brand, Pantene decided to put aside its image as a dignified goddess and enter the consumer circles of those born in the 1990s and 1995s to hang out with these young people. 360 promotion integrates various resources such as banners and splash screens of the mobile Huajiao platform to expose the brand with a loud voice. At the same time, with the help of 360 navigation resources, hot entrances for traffic diversion, and the linkage between PC and mobile terminals, it has received two-way affirmation from netizens and brought good results to business owners.

Q: How is 360's small and medium-sized agency system different from that of the other three friendly companies?

Answer: 360 is the second largest manufacturer of search promotion and has a system of small and medium-sized agencies that are well-known in the industry.

In 2012, when 360 was building its agent system, during the investment promotion stage, 360 established very strict standards for the entry selection of agents: 360 not only examined the financial strength of the agents, but also examined the agents' experience and capabilities in Internet customer development and service. At the same time, it also paid great attention to whether the agents' philosophy was consistent with 360's philosophy of customer first and long-term development. The prior communication of these contents laid a solid foundation for subsequent long-term cooperation.

During the business development stage, the relationship between 360 and its agents is a win-win cooperative relationship like that of friends, where everyone trusts each other, develops together, and benefits together. 360 invests a lot of money to guide, support and help the growth of channel agents, providing agents with all-round and systematic support. It includes a standardized channel management system, a complete channel talent training system, a comprehensive market guidance and support system, a customer satisfaction support system, etc.

After four years of development, 360's agents have also achieved substantial growth and sustained profits as commercial products have grown rapidly.

Q: What concepts or points should CMOs, CEOs and other decision makers understand or focus on regarding SEM? What kind of knowledge structure and abilities should SEM account optimizers possess?

A: Here are some suggestions for CEOs and CMOs:

1. Be able to accurately locate your target customers and accurately portray them;

2. Be able to clearly explain the value of the company's products at different product life cycles;

3. Ability to accurately position the company's position in the industry's competitive market and identify its main competitors;

4. Pay attention to and follow the trends and changes in the Internet advertising industry, and be bold in trying new things.

Suggestions for SEM optimizers:

1. Have some feelings and long-term vision

2. Become an expert in the Internet industry and product promotion

3. Become an expert in one or several industries

4. Develop strong analytical skills

5. Additional Items - Art Skills

Q: What is 360's future product direction?

A: 360 will continue to focus on the precise positioning of users:

360 has very rich and comprehensive user behavior chain big data. We will continue to dig deep and apply these valuable data to help companies more accurately locate users and create more detailed user portraits, thereby providing companies with more cost-effective promotion services.

In addition, because I come from a small and medium-sized enterprise system, I can talk about our considerations in product direction based on the characteristics of small and medium-sized enterprises.

We know that small and medium-sized enterprises have their own attributes, such as a very complex industry, many products, and relatively few professional marketers. Targeting this group, 360 will create more suitable commercial products for small and medium-sized enterprises in multiple directions in the future.

1. Taking advantage of 360's powerful terminal product advantages, 360 has expanded the product recommendation advertisements originally targeted at the e-commerce industry to scene window advertisements for the entire industry, helping small and medium-sized enterprises from all walks of life to conduct intelligent delivery, quickly and effectively acquire users who match the company's products and services, and freeing companies from the complex delivery setting threshold.

After testing, it can be seen that this advertising product model can indeed bring satisfactory traffic and good ROI to enterprises, and is a good choice for enterprises.

2. 360 will integrate its advantageous resources on PC and mobile terminals to provide cross-screen marketing services for enterprises, which is especially important for small and medium-sized enterprises today.

Through 360 big data's connection with users' cross-screen device IDs, we can help advertisers make full use of their user portrait data on multiple devices to achieve all-round precision marketing. This is especially important for our small and medium-sized enterprise marketing. We know that for many small and medium-sized advertisers, especially toB advertisers, their target users' main business decision-making behavior is still on PC. They will look for information and communicate about business opportunities on PC. Therefore, by connecting these users' behavior on PC to mobile, we can help advertisers find this user and deliver precise advertising regardless of whether the user is on PC or mobile. 360 has a significant advantage in this regard.

3. Based on in-depth research in the industry, 360 will further design regionally localized advertising products to help small and medium-sized enterprises with intelligent delivery in various aspects such as regionalized media combinations, sales method selection, and consumer insights, so as to better meet the characteristics of small and medium-sized enterprises.

4. We also see that small and medium-sized business owners have a need for brand marketing, which is also what our products will meet in the future.

360's PC products have more than 500 million users, and its mobile products have more than 800 million users. This enables 360 to fully cover more than 90% of China's Internet users. We have gradually opened up all of 360's best resources, including the best brand advertising resources in navigation, mobile guard, and mobile assistant, to our small and medium-sized advertisers, using the precise marketing capabilities of the 360 ​​Dianjing programmatic marketing platform, as well as 360's innovative scenarios including Huajiao Live and Shuidi Live, to provide our small and medium-sized advertisers with stronger brand communication capabilities.

Author: Jiuzhilan

Source: Jiuzhilan