Learn about these ways to promote on the Internet without spending money

Different periods of Internet development have different bonus period marketing strategies. During the bonus period, the customer acquisition cost is low and the marketing effect is good.

So what were the marketing methods and channels that once enjoyed a bonus period? After reading this article, you will learn:

1. How to do Internet marketing?

2. How to choose the most appropriate channel?

3. Is Baidu advertising still effective?

4. How does Keep, which has over 100 million users, perform a cold start?

5. Is short video the future marketing bonus?

Search Era

One Baidu Knows attracts over 10,000 traffic per day

Before 2014, the main battlefield of Internet marketing was still on search engines such as Baidu and Sogou. Whenever people want to acquire customers from the Internet, the first thing that comes to mind is to build a website, optimize keywords on Baidu, and get rankings.

How is it done specifically?

First, build a website. The threshold is not high. There are a large number of ready-made templates available on the Internet. Then buy a cloud server space and a domain name, and the website is online. A simpler method is to directly use QQ Space or Sina Blog to operate.

Then, start keyword ranking. As long as the ranking goes up, there will be a steady stream of traffic coming from Baidu every day.

Poorer companies would hire an operations manager to slowly figure out how to design keywords and update website content. They would spend half a year getting the website to the front page of Baidu search, and then wait for traffic to pour in every day. After that, they would only have to maintain it and keep the ranking growing. The richer ones can directly place bidding ads to keep the website on the homepage forever.

What is the effect? Some people can generate tens of thousands of traffic to their website every day by making one Baidu Knows post, with zero investment and great traffic-generating effect. If we were to do this now, it would be basically impossible.

Baidu makes a lot of money from advertising. Some of the websites that follow behind are also living very comfortably on the revenue earned from affiliate marketing ads, and SEO optimizers who help rank company websites have become the most popular profession. Around 2011, the salary of an average SEOer in Beijing was generally around 8k, while other operational positions only paid 4k to 5k.

Later, people's attention on the Internet shifted from PCs to mobile phones, and the shift in traffic meant that the main marketing battlefield also changed.

WeChat Era

Reposting and moving content can also gain tens of millions of fans

The second dividend era, from 2014 to 2018, was dominated by social platforms, including Weibo, WeChat, Zhihu, Douban, etc. WeChat, in particular, has been the mainstream all year round.

The most common way to do this is to open a public account and attract traffic through articles and small events. No matter what industry or product you are in, if you want to promote it on the Internet , you should first open a public account. In 2013, the number of public accounts was only about 2 million, and in 2017 it reached more than 20 million.

In the early days, the threshold for creating a public account was also very low. Like Kawa Weika, WeChat Traffic Conditions, Feng Webmaster's Home, Lengtu, Visual Journal, etc., you don't have to spend too much effort to create original content in the early stage. You can quickly accumulate fans by reprinting and moving content from other platforms. Moreover, the conversion effect is also very good. The click-through rate of articles can reach 30%, and the conversion rate of reading the original text is nearly 5%. Up to now, the click-through rate has reached 10%, which is very high, and the conversion rate of reading the original text is as low as 0.5%.

Prosperity is also accompanied by chaos, and some public accounts rely entirely on inflating their readership. In 2016, WeChat upgraded its backend system, and click-through tools became ineffective. The number of readers of many WeChat accounts that originally had tens of thousands of readers shrank significantly, with the number of readers decreasing by 70-80%.

I have a friend who is working on a tourism project. He once published a soft article on a local media’s official account. He spent more than 20,000 yuan, but the article got more than 50,000 views, but there was not a single conversion.

Now, with the increase in the threshold for content creation, the cost of relying on official accounts to obtain traffic has increased a lot. It requires a professional team, at least 2-3 people, to produce original content.

In addition to relying on official accounts and soft articles, different ways of playing have also been derived based on the WeChat platform. The more popular ones include H5 games/tests/simulation scenarios, mini-program group buying/fission/check-in, friend posters, etc. All this happened in just two or three years.

In July 2014, the H5 mini-game "Surround the Nervous Cat" went viral on WeChat Moments, attracting 5 million users and 100 million visits in three days, with the only cost being the development cost.

Now these two types of gameplay are outdated. If we make a game like this now, users will not be interested in it at all. Even if it becomes popular, it will be banned within two or three hours.

Community Era

Become an opinion leader with high-quality content

From 2010 to around 2016, some companies focused on community social platforms such as Zhihu, Douban, and Tieba. Although a marketing campaign did not cause a sensation in the industry, it was effective and they made a lot of money quietly.

For example, the Keep "Mine-laying Plan" which is quite famous in the circle.

Keep was launched in February 2015 and gained 5 million users in just 6 months , thanks to the mine-laying plan.

One month before the App was launched, the five members of the operation team serialized high-quality fitness content on various fitness-related Weibo, QQ groups, Tieba, Douban groups, and WeChat groups. Through long-term communication with users, they became the most active users who spoke the most, and eventually became opinion leaders. When the product is officially launched, the operation department will "detonate" these posts at the same time to recommend everyone to experience the product. When I posted the download link in a group of 2,000 people, more than 100 people downloaded it. This conversion rate is already very high.

If you go to Tieba, Douban, or Zhihu to lay mines now, they may never explode. But the way to play in the community is still not outdated, only the channels have changed, and it has become vertical communities such as Xiaohongshu, Keep, SoYoung, and What’s Worth Buying.

The era of community

A company worth more than 36 billion US dollars built by group buying

Social media marketing has become popular since around 2016. Until now, there are still many articles and courses on social marketing.

Social marketing has existed since the QQ group era, but it is not used by most companies. It was not until the advent of WeChat group control software that social marketing based on WeChat groups became easy. Group control software can save a lot of manpower. It can create groups with robot accounts, scan QR codes to join groups, and automatically create new groups when there are 100 people. Messages can also be automatically released, allowing 24-hour online access.

In an era when the opening rate of public account articles is low, communities have the advantages of high reach, high opening, and unlimited number of publications.

Pinduoduo was built on the basis of social networks, and its approach is more sophisticated than that of ordinary people. Through the group-buying mechanism, Pinduoduo no longer has to rely on building WeChat groups on its own, but can achieve user growth by using other people’s WeChat groups. It took only three years for Pinduoduo to go public, with its market value reaching a peak of more than US$36 billion, and its market value once surpassed that of JD.com.

Now group buying has become a standard marketing tool for many e-commerce platforms.

The era of short videos

Current marketing dividends

Short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, as well as the gameplay of live streaming sales.

Many brands have become popular thanks to short videos, including Heytea, Answertea, Uncle Reese, etc. These are all consumer products. Around 2017, the content on Douyin was mainly entertainment and consumption. Last year, Tik Tok launched the Sunflower Project to weight knowledge and cultural content. Up to now, there are many knowledge-based short videos on Douyin. Therefore, education, knowledge payment, and publishing products have gained opportunities on Douyin.

Recently, Douyin has used 1 billion traffic to support Vlog, which is a bonus for travel and food products. Selling goods on Douyin is the biggest bonus for Taobao sellers. Douyin has also launched the Taobao shopping cart function, which can jump to the Taobao product page with one click.

Taobao men's clothing store "Gu A Xin" started to focus on online sales in 2017. As of May 2018, it only had 100,000 fans, with an average daily sales of 7,000 to 8,000 yuan and a monthly turnover of more than 200,000 yuan.

In July last year, the Douyin shopping cart function was still under small-scale testing and was not open to everyone. As a Douyin expert, Gu Axin opened the Douyin shopping cart in July, and his monthly turnover reached about 1 million at that time. On the Double 12 day in 2018, the sales volume reached 1.08 million, while in the same period of 2017 it was only over 400,000. Today, 60-70% of Gu Axin’s sales come from Douyin.

This is all growth brought about by seizing the first wave of dividends. It can be predicted that Douyin will be a good marketing platform in the next one to two years.

This is a simple summary of the mainstream marketing methods in different periods. Does that mean we must do Tik Tok and live streaming now? Is bidding advertising useless?

Not really. It mainly depends on what type of product you have.

How to choose the marketing channel that suits you

If it is a low-frequency consumption product, such as studying abroad, medical care, chain franchising, wedding photography, etc., when people encounter such problems, they generally search on Baidu, so it is effective to place search ads and do keyword optimization ; if it is a high-frequency consumption, such as eating, drinking and having fun, it is better to spend money on short videos and live broadcasts than to place search ads, because people rarely go to Baidu to search for how to eat and how to play. Instead, when they are browsing Douyin and Weibo, they will be aroused by the delicious food and beautiful scenery.

1. Target population matching

This is the most important thing. Marketing will only be effective if it targets users who have demand for your products. If your product is not aimed at the general public, don't use a wide-net approach; it's cheaper to target with precision.

2. Is the willingness to pay strong? Do you have consumption habits?

The willingness to pay for advertisements on Taobao is strong, as people come here just to spend money. The same goes for live broadcasts by internet celebrities, as they have consumption habits. The same is true for Xiaohongshu. People who used this app in the early days did so for the purpose of buying things. Spending money was a natural thing for them, and users of the platform have consumption habits.

3. Conversion Path

Why sell goods through live streaming instead of short videos?

Of course, the shorter the better. Every fewer link means a higher final conversion rate. For example, if you want to promote a public account or mini program, you should never run Baidu ads. Doing so would require users to switch to the Baidu webpage, take out their phones, open WeChat, and search for keywords before they can follow you. This conversion path is very long, which means the churn rate is very high. However, promotion on WeChat is different. You can just leave a QR code and long press to scan it to follow. The conversion path is short and the conversion rate is high.

4. Large flow

Attention to traffic should come last, and the amount of traffic is not really the most important thing.

To find marketing bonus channels and gameplay, you can read more of the latest articles on vertical websites and public accounts such as operations and marketing, or operations/marketing courses, to find out what kind of gameplay their topics are about. Of course, it would be best to mix with some circles. By hanging out in the circle, you can not only learn about the latest gameplay, but also have the opportunity to connect with large traffic channels.

Author: Wei Qiao

Source: Egg Startup