Xinfumei Network Marketing in Auto Maintenance Industry

XFM Group is a leading enterprise in China’s auto gearbox maintaining industry, whose business is developed mainly through long-term cooperation between 4S stores and insurance companies. The offline gearbox maintenance volume has maintained a steady growth for ten years. the company recruited an employee dedicated to network marketing for over a year. However, not only did it fail to achieve the expected results, but it was under malicious attack by competitors every day. Under the circumstances, the CEO of the company made up his mind to ask for external help only when I got to witness the "The Kingdom of Hackers in Network Marketing."
In November 2015, I was invited by Shanghai XFM Group to make a customized network marketingplan for them. During my research on the Internet market in the early stage, I found that their competitors were using every conceivable means to get traffic.

Method 1: using hacking techniques to tamper with customers’ Baidu search page


Figure 1: the above picture shows the first page of search result of the keyword “gearbox maintenance” when I was doing Internet market research. They were all advertisements on Baidu, of which Xinfumei ranked the second, and the other four seemed to be from different companies. But after deeper research later, I found out that they all came from the same company. This is not the coolest part. Let’s check the next picture.



Figure 2: when I clicked on the first advertisement link to enter the company’s website, my previous search results changed suddenly, and the search term in my search bar turned from “auto gearbox maintenance” to “recommended best auto gearbox maintenance station”. The whole page looked like a Baidu page, but if you looked closely, you would find it no more than a fake one. All the information on this fake page came from this very company.



Figure 3: I searched on Baidu using my mobile phone again on the same day and got the same result. The left half of the above picture was the normal result page on Baidu, while the right one was a tampered result page after clicking on the first advertisement.

When doing research on the Internet market for enterprises, I needed to collect data from the Internet and make phone calls to learn about the competitors’ hotline services. When I called the company that ranked first, their attitude showed little respect. This was because they believed that with the help of their hacking technology, customers could turn to no one but them anyway

This kind of hacking technology was not very advanced. In fact, it was similar to the technology of preventing from malicious clicks in recent years. First, you needed to install a piece of code on the corporate website. When someone visited the website, this code will run the program to determine whether it was a malicious click. If it was confirmed a malicious click, the system would warn the visitor or directly hack their browsers to cause a blank screen or system crash. The company mentioned above used a similar code to tamper with the visitor’s browser directly when they visited the website for the first time, turning the search result page into the one filled with their advertisements.

Method 2: using DDOS attack to prevent users from accessing the website


Figure 4: the number in the red box in the picture shows the traffic attack (or DDOS attack) Xinfumei was suffering at that time, which was at more than 5GB per second. An average phone had just a few gigabytes of data per month, but this kind of traffic attack on the website would cost several gigabytes per second, which directly led to system crashes, leaving the website unable to open. Xinfumei’s website was under such attacks many times every day, each lasting more than 1 hour.

Method 3: discrediting the company by using Baidu search technology


Figure 5: the association function of the Baidu search bar is known to be very convenient. It will offer associative words you want automatically right after you input a few words, thus sparing the time of typing. The competitors took advantage of this function and searched for certain keywords lots of times. After a while, they reached such a goal: When someone searched for “Shanghai XFM”, the smeared words would be listed among the suggested words.


Figure 6: at the bottom of Baidu search results, the related search terms would also be listed. If someone hyped some negative keywords maliciously, they would also be listed there.


Figure 7: I tried to search again with the smeared keyword “Shanghai Gearbox XFM unscrupulous”, and the related searches at the bottom included not only XFM, but other counterparts such as Shanquan and Tenghua. It seemed that the competitor was attacking not just us. The other companies in this industry were also under its attack.

Method 4: posting negative information on free platforms



Figure 8: If you searched for “Shanghai XFM” on Baidu when its official website was unable to open due to malicious attacks, the first search result you would find was a piece of discredited information posted on Dianping.com by competitors. Fortunately, they didn’t manage to publish negative information on more free platforms.

Method 5: maliciously clicking on Baidu advertisements to gobble up the advertising fees


Figure 9: the above picture shows the access data of XFM website.It can be seen that at around 16:11 on March 18, a visitor from Shanghai clicked on the advertisement with the search term “gearbox maintenance” 4 times in a row within ten seconds, and left at once after each click without any move of browsing. This was an obvious malicious click, aiming to gobble up XFM’s advertising fees. Based on the bid price of more than 20 yuan for this keyword, 100 yuan was gone in ten seconds. This kind of situation happened every day.

How to tackle:
Under such malicious attacks by people of the same trade, almost all the businessmen would choose to answer blows with blows.But I wouldn’t do this in my marketing planning. On the one hand, mutual attacks on the Internet would only lead to a lose-lose situation, while network companies could earn a lot from it—Baidu could earn more advertising fees, server providers could earn more security and traffic fees,nd hackers and Internet water army could earn more by click farming (a form of click fraud where a large group of low-paid workers are hired to click on paid advertising links); on the other hand, these methods were disgraceful and even illegal. Only by powering the network marketing of the enterprise itself could we leave our opponents at the end of their tether.

Let’s solve the problems one by one:
Method 1: using hacking technology to tamper with customers’ Baidu search page. Solution: Baidu hates it the most when companies use dirty tricks. It could have earned more advertising fees when the real customers click on different advertisements to compare different service providers, but now they can only earn advertising fees from one company. If everyone does this, how can Baidu get benefits? Therefore, if you ever find such behavior, just take a screenshot as evidence and make a complaint to Baidu company. After that, your opponents won’t dare to do it anymore.

Method 2: using DDOS attack to prevent users from accessing the website. Solution: All major providers of website services actually have their countermeasures against DDOS attacks, but the charges are different. For example, Alibaba Cloud, Xinfumei’s website service provider, charges more than 100 thousand yuan a year. Fortunately, 360 Search insists on providing free services. So by putting the website on its server, the problem can be solved thoroughly.

Method 3: discrediting the company on Baidu. Solution: As Xinfumei was also an advertising customer of Baidu, it lodged a complaint to the corresponding customer service and soon the smeared information was deleted. If the opponent wanted to use this trick again, they needed to pay for click farming. In comparison to the simple complaint, the cost of discrediting was too high, so the opponent had to give it up. This kind of trick only works for companies that have never done network marketing.

Method 4: posting negative information on free platforms. Solution: No one could help deal with the issue of free negative information except the enterprise itself. Only by piling up more positive information on the Internet for a long time can the negative information be ranked on the latter pages of Baidu search results, and thus become useless. This kind of trick only works for companies that don’t attach importance to mass postings.

Method 5: maliciously clicking on Baidu advertisements to gobble up the advertising fees. Solution: Malicious clicks are divided into two types. One is like a stupid thief who clicks repeatedly on his own computer. Using Baidu’s background tools to block his IP can help us block such malicious clicks easily; the other one is like a smart thief who frequently changes his IP and computer ID through certain software or Internet water army. This kind of malicious click is a little difficult to tackle. We need to find out their patterns of behavior first and then adopt corresponding preventive measures.

Conclusion:After seeing my Internet market research, the executives of Xinfumei Group realized the seriousness of the problem. The smearing of opponents on the Internet had seriously damaged the company’s brand and image, which may also affect their offline business. Therefore, they made the decision to carry out comprehensive network marketing work.

For more successful cases, please refer to Chapter 6 Classic Cases in Enterprise Network Marketing in How to Use the Internet to Get Orders in Traditional Industries