DP Technology: Network Marketing of a CNC Machine Tool Software Company

DP was a CAM software company located in the US, whose Chinese branch was mainly responsible for market development in the Asia-Pacific region, and the CAM software they specialized in mainly involved supporting imported CNC machine tools and milling machines. In 2013, DP began to invest in ads on Baidu, but it didn’t work out. In the whole two years, none of their customers were from the network channels. In 2015, with the courtesy of one of my friends, I started a cooperation in network marketing with DP.

After engaging with DP, I noticed that although DP was recognized as a high-end brand in the field of CAM software for machine tools, the market was not very large due to a niche industry. There were no more than a dozen people in its headquarters in Shanghai. Plus, because of the previous failure in network marketing, DP was definitely not supportive of setting up an individual network marketing team. Therefore, I chose to provide outsourcing service of network marketing for them.

In August 2015, we established our cooperation formally. The outsourcing service of network marketing included: 1. Taking care of DP’s ad account; 2. Publishing a large amount of free information; 3. Setting up and optimizing new websites in Chinese version.

I had done network marketing for several foreign enterprises before, so I knew the difficulty conducting the marketing work for them. The main difficulty involved as follows: 1. The website server must be located abroad—probably out of security concerns about their website data—but it would slow down the opening speed of their website for domestic customers.2. The Chinese website was usually a subdirectory of the foreign official website, which served us poorly in SEO. 3. The website structure and content couldn’t be modified easily, which was not conducive to SEO, either. 4. The contact information was very simple. They normally left the information of a landline telephone and an email, which couldn’t meet the various needs of customers and made it hard to distinguish their sources.

Having been mentally primed, and aiming to show the results to customers as soon as possible, we gave up our previous routine, i.e. Baidu ads + natural ranking + mass postings. Instead, we made our efforts in Baidu ads and mass postings in the first place. When the work was recognized by our customer, we would then propose to set up an individual Chinese website specializing in optimization and promotion.

The reason why DP didn’t get any orders through two years of Baidu ads was that they didn’t have network marketing professionals to manage the advertising work but left it to the customer service of Baidu Inc. For customers of this kind (who spent a few thousand yuan every month on advertising), Baidu would arrange a corresponding customer service specialist who needed to take care of more than 100 similar businesses at the same time. That is to say, the time a customer service specialist spent on a customer per weekday was just several minutes. As the squeaky wheel got the grease, the customer service would spare more energy to customers who often complained about poor results. Otherwise, they only came to you when you need to top up the advertising fees.

The other cause of the poor performance was the different positions between Baidu and its customers. Customers would like to achieve more with fewer investments, while Baidu wanted the opposite. Baidu had many advertising products: Baidu ads, online alliance, Baidu Encyclopedia, Baidu Commerce, mobile ads, Baidu Nuomi, etc. These products suited customers of different types, but in order to improve sales performance (to cost customers more money) and complete work targets (to let customers use more varieties of ads), Baidu’s customer service longed to persuade customers to use all of their products.

The difference between Baidu’s customer service and our outsourcing personnel was as follows: 1. The time we spent on the management of paid ads per day was ten times that of Baidu; 2. We could post 50 pieces of information for customers every week in major free platforms; 3. Every month we would discuss with customers and adjust promotion strategies through door-to-door or video conferences.

It was worth mentioning that mass postings (to post a mass of information on free platforms) was considered a time-consuming and poor-performing means But the result would be different if it were utilized by a professional network marketing company like ours. Let’s talk about efficiency first. Thanks to our rich experience in mass postings, the workload of our customer service for an hour was equivalent to that of normal people for four hours. People who knew little about mass postings wasted their time mainly on the failure of registering for websites, useless platforms, and wrong keywords.

Let’s speak with data. I’d like to share some charts with you to see the difference before and after the outsourcing service.



As shown above, we chose three months as a cycle for comparison. Data in the first row: the total visits to the website had dropped from 11,031 to 9,338 (considering that there was the National Day Holiday and a short holiday in September in memory of Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japan, the actual visits between should be about the same) and the views of paid ads, as shown in the data of the third row, had decreased from 9,575 to 4,587. Data in the second row: The number of visitors had fallen from 8,443 to 3,339. As was shown by the first three rows of data, many invalid and malicious clicks on ads had been filtered out since we took charge of Baidu’s ad account.

Data in the fourth row: The number of direct visitors to the website had increased sharply from 186 to 712. During that period, DP didn’t held any offline marketing activities. It was nothing but the valid paid ads and mass postings that prompted many new customers to visit the company’s website directly.

Data in the fifth and sixth row: The bounce rate had dropped from 89.18% to 64.92%, and the visit duration had risen from 1:08 to 3:01. People who had tried SEM knew that a lower bounce rate and a longer visit duration indicated customers’ preference for your website and their willingness to stay longer and browse more. As we had filtered out invalid and even malicious clicks and had optimized slogans, keywords as well as landing pages, the indicator reached the optimal level. If we were allowed to modify the website content and its structure, the indicator could be better.

Data in the seventh and eighth row: The advertising costs had dropped from 9,653.05 yuan to 8,689.95 yuan. The number of valid inquiries had grown from 0 to the current 7, half of which came from mass postings rather than the ads (Note: In order to distinguish the sources of inquiries, the telephone number left on the posted free information was different from that on the official website of the company). You would understand why mass postings were so effective from the figure below.


As we had mentioned at the beginning, the SAM products of DP were mainly used in imported machine tools, so our free information was aimed at the world-famous brands of machine tool programming software. Taking the data in the sixth row as an example, if customers searched for “Citizen machine tool programming software” on Baidu, our posted information would rank 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th on Baidu. That was to say, half of the information on the first result page was about DP. On the first result page of another search engine, 360, 8 pieces of information of DP’s ranked at the top, nearly monopolizing the natural listings.


Figure 3: this is the search result of “Citizen machine tool programming software” on Baidu when I was writing this article (March 25, 2016). Surprisingly, there were 9 pieces of information about DP on the first result page. It fully illustrated how important mass postings were as a network marketing method for a niche market like machine tool CAM software.

After three months of cooperation, customers felt a huge difference and got the first online order at last. DP then asked to expand the cooperation and authorized us to build an independent Chinese website dedicated to promotion.We could finally use to the advantage of our SEO skills. Therefore, we are confident that we will bring more business for DP in 2016.

More Successful Cases in the Software Industry:
The Successful Network Promotion of SAP, the Fortune 500 Company, in the ERP Software Industry
Data Can Speak: The Successful Network Promotion of an ERP Software Agent
When a Marketing Master Starts a Business—Network Marketing of a Small-sized Enterprise