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Many people who have done digital marketing are very envious of the leaders in their respective industries because they are very rich. Whether it is Baidu bidding advertisements or the natural listings on search engines, their websites are always ranked in the top, while others are often burdened by the considerable cost involved in doing Baidu bidding advertisements to start the enterprise digital marketing online. In addition, as they have also joined the online advertising alliance on Google or Baidu, their advertisements will always follow you as long as you are browsing industry-related websites.

But this is not the coolest part. In recent years, I have been working as a digital marketing consultant for several large companies, including the world’s top 500 companies, whose enterprise digital marketing resources and operation methods will suffocate the other companies of the same trade. Due to the confidentiality agreements with these enterprises, their information and data won’t be provided in this article. Please pardon me for that.

It was my first time serving as a enterprise digital marketing consultant for a Fortune 500 company. I was very excited and spent several days listing out a detailed budget for capital and manpower investment. But when I met the project leader, it was rejected immediately. The reason was very simple. Although big companies were well-funded, it was very complicated and difficult for them to go through the process of applying for capital and manpower because of the large scale of their organization. Therefore, the budget plan I provided them in doing Baidu bidding advertisements was well rejected. This is when I realized it is rather difficult to do Baidu bidding advertisements for the enterprise digital marketing on a scale so vast. However, having the experience in carrying out enterprise digital marketing with the help of Baidu bidding advertisements for so many years, I was not defeated.

Inspired by one of the cases, Working Together—Monopoly Marketing of Some Decoration Companies in Section 6, Chapter 6 of my book, we decided to adopt an enterprise digital marketing plan by virtue of the advantages of the distributors of the company, that is, to support the hundreds of agents distributed in major cities across the country to jointly carry out the enterprise digital marketing as a whole.

In order to establish an excellent example, we didn’t hasten to offer support to all the agents at once. Instead, we eliminated inappropriate agents step by step, aiming to screen out and develop the distributors who were most willing to grow with the company. First, we asked these enterprises to fill out a questionnaire, and about 100 of them sent it back. Among them, we selected 10 enterprises with both good hard power and soft power and launched a four-day training for them. Through this training, the agents had learned something as follows: 1. The company was fully capable of doing enterprise digital marketing on its own, and didn’t need to hand it over to outsourcing companies; 2. The cooperation of multiple enterprises in digital marketing was much more powerful than doing it alone; 3. Digital marketing was more efficient than other marketing methods (meetings, telephone calls, etc.) because the traditional ways of marketing appear to be struggling to get solid inquiries or sign long-time deals when it comes to enterprise digital marketing; 4. The earlier you invested in digital marketing, the greater the benefit you could get; By doing Baidu bidding ads, most of the companies have managed to increase their turnover with a reasonable investment. 5. Digital marketing should take into consideration of different areas and industries and be refined based on the advantages of the agents themselves (for example, some distributors only specialized in the food industry, and some only run businesses in Beijing).

After the training, we picked out four outstanding enterprises for further support: First, guide them to rebuild their corporate websites so that it could be easier to start Baidu bidding advertisements and improve their natural listings; second, guide them to improve their corporate websites by adding external links to attract more natural traffic; third, guide them to maintain Baidu bidding advertisements and online alliance advertisements and realize refined management based on website access statistics; fourth, guide them to publish a large amount of free information (mass postings) and answer questions concerning the industry on the Internet. The steps mentioned above are vital for the enterprise digital marketing.

During the three-month support, all of the four companies had achieved good results. The input-output ratio of digital marketing reached more than 1:10, beating all other marketing methods. Therefore, although the head office cut off the support funds later, they would still love to continue their enterprise digital marketing with the assistance of Baidu bidding ads, which the head office was also happy to see.

The success of these companies was soon publicized at the distributor conferences. Most distributors were regretful that they hadn’t taken the questionnaire about enterprise digital marketing seriously at that time. After that, it became much easier for the head office to push forward with this project. There were more than 300 enterprises responding to the second questionnaire. What’s more, all of these agents were scrambling to show their strengths and promised generous cooperation benefits. The head office took this opportunity to shorten its support cycle to one month.

During that year, hundreds of companies participated in the project. Each of them had shown their strong strengths in different areas and their efforts made in running Baidu bidding advertisements soon began to pay off. Some distributors were in a good relationship with major websites and could get link resources easily, so it didn’t take long for their websites to be ranked on the first result page even in searching for top keywords in the industry. Some distributors had long-term cooperation with schools and could hire personnel at a very low cost, in which case mass postings became their strong suit. The Internet was full of free information from this company, and 50% of the online performance came from mass postings (I have never seen any other company with a better effect of mass postings than this). Some agents had many secondary distributors all over the country, so they copied the model of the head office and arranged for the secondary distributors to follow it. This agent had later become the largest first-class agent of the head office.

Everyone that has done enterprise digital marketing knows that a company’s website can only appear on the homepage of Baidu once, whether it is Baidu bidding advertisements or natural listings. But because the distributors were from different companies all over the country, the rule didn’t work for them. After a few years, no matter what kind of core keywords or long-tail keywords you searched for, the products of this big company would always be seen on the first, second… page on Baidu. If you were in the same industry, you must feel suffocated.

So clever this company was. They didn’t invest a lot of money and manpower actually, but with the leverage effect, they had supported and guided many distributors to carry out digital marketing at a very small price.

The story wasn’t over yet. Under the auspices of the head office, the distributors formed a digital marketing alliance, where they shared website visits, information of competitors, and customer data, making their marketing more accurate and efficient. If necessary, they could even launch counterattacks against competitors who maliciously attacked them. They gradually gained a voice in the mainstream online media in the industry, and didn’t have to worry about the negative news on the Internet, for it would be soon overwhelmed by the positive news published by hundreds of agents. Public opinions then were also following their lead.

That was so powerful of them, so terrifying…

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