It is said that it’s not easy to do online marketing, but will it be harder to do than in the company registration industry?
One day in July 2013, one of my middle school classmates introduced me to a new client, a Shanghai-based registration company founded by a lawyer (refer to www.peiking.com.cn for a better understanding of the figure above). At that time, I was not optimistic about establishing long-term cooperation with them. The competition of registration companies in Shanghai was very fierce. Tens of thousands of registration companies take on the heavy registration workload for newly established companies. The advertisements were all over the streets, and even could be found in public restrooms. What’s more, online ads promoting the registration companies in the online marketing field have also stormed the Internet. It can be said that the competition of registration companies is drastically fierce both online and offline. Besides, entrepreneurs who wanted to register a company might not search for agencies on the Internet. And the online marketing services our company provided required clients to invest a certain amount of advertising fees and service fees every month. I had so much mental struggle before taking this job to start online marketing for registration companies. Was the investment within the acceptable range of the customer?
With these questions in mind, I had my first meeting with Lawyer Song. According to his introduction to the registration industry in Shanghai, I was more unsure if I could meet their expectations. In Shanghai, there were over 400 new companies registered every day, while there were tens of thousands of registration companies. What’s more, most newly-registered companies were micro and small-sized. The total cost of their registration was just a few thousand yuan, which meant the profit per order was only a few hundred yuan. Before contacting me, he had run Baidu advertisements for more than a year. In order to rank on the Baidu homepage, he paid around RMB 20 yuan per click, which was more expensive than the advertisements for many B2B businesses (such as packaging materials, equipment, and decoration industries). He invested RMB 6,000 yuan in advertising every month. They could secure 2 or 3 customers in a month at best, and none at worst.
After his introduction, based on my experience in doing online marketing and formulating online marketing solutions for so many years, I made a tentative conclusion about the cause of his failure in online marketing: they only relied on Baidu advertising, which was far from enough. During my years of doing online marketing, I’ve always considered coming upo with the right online marketing solutions is extremely important . For businesses who have no much experience in online marketing, they may not be aware of the suitble online marketing solutions for their bussinesses. While for those who have been cooperating with online marketing agencies for quite a long time, they might not know what online marketing solutions are more suitable for them like how they think, not to mention the online marketing solutions have to be updated according to the fast-chaging Internet world. Therefore, based on my experience, I offered him a few online marketing solutions, and that is, if we combined it with the services of search engine natural listings and mass postings (publishing free information in large quantities) provided by our company, a technique employed when doing online marketing, it would be more effective. However, it was difficult to say whether the effect could meet the expectation. So we agreed to have a 3-month trial cooperation first. If he was satisfied with our performance, we could seek for long-term cooperation then.
In order to improve the natural listings like how we planned when formulating online marketing solutions, our first step was to revise his official website, which was a very simple one provided by Baidu before, into a version conducive to natural listings, and had each page optimized. Secondly, we improved the Baidu advertisements and adjusted the ad creative and keywords by ruling out expensive core keywords (such as “registration company” and “registration company in Shanghai”) and using cheap long-tail keywords (such as “registration company in Pudong” and “registration company in Lingang”) as much as possible. Thirdly, we arranged for employees to publish a large amount of free information on online platforms (such as 58.com, ganji.com, and zg114w.com). Fourthly, we promoted the natural listings of the homepage and important pages of the website through the link resources we have. Fifthly, we published a tailored advertorial every week to meet customers’ needs according to their search terms (such as “The Procedure of Registering a Company in Shanghai”, and “Which Economic Park of Shanghai Offers Preferential Treatment to Companies Registered There”). Sixthly, we asked Lawyer Song to establish an effective evaluation mechanism, that is, assigning an employee dedicated to receiving inquiries from the Internet and keeping them in the record to evaluate the effect of online marketing.
The most difficult one in these six steps should be Baidu advertising. The monthly advertising budget of the customer was still RMB 6,000 yuan, which meant, not counting holidays, the daily budget for advertising was only around 200 yuan. But the search volume about company registration was very large. Even if we had used a lot of long-tail keywords, the daily budget still ran out quickly within 2 hours. We ran some tests with our client and finally set the advertising time at 18:00 to 21:00, during when the advertising fee would be lower because most people of the same trade were off work and had stopped advertising. More importantly, there were also fewer malicious clicks in this period of time. Plus, we had a set of methods to fight against malicious clicks. In this way, the conversion rate could be higher.
When formulating the website natural listings strategy for Lawyer Song, we didn’t choose the most expensive keywords in this industry for ranking, such as “registration company” and “registration company in Shanghai”. It was very hard to improve those natural listings, and we were unsure if we could rank the website on the first result page of these keywords. We optimized the natural listings of Song’s website based on his advantageous regions. He was the contractor responsible for attracting investment in Pudong Industrial Park and Lingang Economic Park. If the new company was to be registered in these two areas, he could offer preferential treatment. In the end, we set our goal as follows: to rank the website top on the first result page of such keywords as “registration company in Pudong”, “registration company in Lingang” and “registration company in Zhoupu” on Baidu. As shown below: the website was ranked tenth on the first result page of “registration company in Putong” on Baidu.
In addition, we made targeted answers to the questions frequently asked by customers and had the answer page improved and promoted. As shown below, whenever someone ever searched for “Shanghai’s newest business license”, “which district has high tax refund for company registration”, or “tax refund for company registration”, they would find Song’s website on the first result page of Baidu.
The advantage of natural listings is that once the website is successfully optimized and promoted, it can reap the benefits not only on Baidu but other search engines. As shown below, if searching for “registration consulting company in Shanghai” on 360 Haosou, you would find Song’s website ranked eighth on the first result page.
The act of mass postings is dubbed as “adding water”, but I believe the effect is no less than that of Baidu advertising or natural listings. I assigned specific personnel to publish all kinds of free information about Song’s website every day. Every website has its own area of specialization. Such service-oriented classified information platforms as 58.com and ganji.com had become the focus of our information release. Finding that some free platforms had produced effective results, we even started paid advertisements on 58.com.
Three months passed quickly. Our service was recognized by Mr. Song and he decided to renew the contract for another year. After a year of cooperation, we reviewed the results of online marketing as follows: There was an average of 10 customers acquired every month at a total cost of RMB 12,000 yuan, including 6,000 yuan for advertising and 6,000 yuan for online marketing outsourcing service. This input-output ratio was within his expected range. We are still working together and have expanded the business into his lawyer practice.
Background: seeing this, some of you may ask, “There’s something wrong with what you said. Isn’t this a loss-making business indeed? You spend thousands of yuan on advertising only to get an order of a few hundred yuan?” Let me explain it to you. The registration companies on the market don’t earn money by helping others register a company. They rely mainly on the consequent bookkeeping agency business after registration. Normally, a newly established company wouldn’t hire a dedicated accountant. They would ask the registration company to do the bookkeeping as an agent, which costs them around a few hundred yuan per month. Besides, the economic parks of governments at all levels will give certain incentives if the registration company has an enterprise registered in their own parks. That’s why you will see many registration companies advertising that the registration is for free.
Now let’s sum it up: Before cooperating with us, Peiking invested RMB 6,000 yuan in Baidu advertising every month. Since there was no one managing them, the ad creative and keywords were both determined by Baidu customer service (a customer service specialist is said to manage hundreds of ad accounts. They could only spare a few minutes for each customer and don’t have time for specific optimization). Plus, there were many invalid and malicious clicks, which naturally led to poor performance. At that time, they could only receive around 2 customers per month. After our cooperation, we optimized every detail of Baidu advertisements, and achieved double results with the same ad investment of RMB 6,000 yuan. Now they can acquire an average of 4 customers per month. Of the 10 customers on average per month as mentioned above, the remaining six come from either natural listings or mass postings.
The following two figures show the comparison of the visit data of Mr. Song’s website in November 2013, when we just started working together, and in this month. These two charts clearly indicate that the overall website traffic and organic traffic have grown significantly after two years of effort.
It is true that enterprise online marketing is not as easy as before, just like what most people think of opening a Taobao store. They both need specialists for refined operation and maintenance. It’s not just about money. With the correct notion and strategy, coupled with professional online marketing personnel, you are able to take bold and innovative measures and make your business more prosperous.