Getting Orders of Ten Million Every Year on the Internet Big Return on a Small Investment in a Paper Mill
Shanghai Jixiangbao Industrial Co., Ltd. is a factory that produces release paper/film. In 2007, when I was the director of the blister factory, there was a customer who was in need of food-level grease-proof paper to match the blister trays and asked us to supply it together. I found Jixiangbao on the Internet and noticed that there was a wide discrepancy between the purchase price and the quotation, which meant that there were high-profit margins. So I tried adding the grease-proof paper and moisture-proof paper as products to the blister website I managed (just added a subpage to the blister website), hoping for getting business in this area. With the help of the strong promotion of the blister website, the words “moisture-proof paper” and “grease-proof paper” were soon listed on the first page of Baidu, which brought business naturally. And of course, the orders received would be handed over to Jixiangbao for production. After a while, the boss of Jixiangbao became curious and went to our factory for consultation. When he learned that by simply adding their products to our corporate website we could make many deals, he was convinced that there must be great business opportunities on the Internet and asked me to build a website for their company. This is how my doing digital marketing for release paper came into being, and my very first and formal try to do digital marketing for release paper mill via Baidu marketing..
Building a website needed some preparation, of which the most important thing was to go to their factory to take photos and learn about their products. Please note that this step can’t be skipped when doing digital for release paper factory because buyers would always want to see the products personally. In the process, I learned that the main technology in a release paper/film factory was to coat the base paper with plastic or silicon, which had a high technical threshold. The equipment alone cost tens of millions of yuan, let alone the raw material reserves also worth tens of millions of yuan. Not everyone could afford the operation. It was not like the blister industry, where anyone with hundreds of thousands of yuan in hand could set up a small blister factory and expand the business step by step. Therefore, there were only dozens of large-scale factories in the release paper/film industry in China, which is certainly a good news for the digital marketing for a release paper factory. Why? Because less contestants means less competition. The manufacturers were busy with production and had no time to do digital marketing for relaese paper factory of their own, on the other hand, their distributors promoted their products on the Internet. If the factory started digital marketing for release paper factory of their own, it must work out pretty well. Besides, their products had great market potential, for they were widely used in many industries such as food, daily necessities, electronics, building materials, and adhesives. Once the enterprises chose the product, they would place regular orders of big quantities, each order worth hundreds of thousands of yuan.
After the market research, finally I started the digital marketing for release paper factory. I emphasized that it was a factory rather than a trading company while building the website, and put on the Internet a lot of pictures of the equipment in the production workshop and raw materials in the warehouse, so that customers could see the strength of the factory. To underline the expertise of the factory, I also included some processing knowledge of release paper/film in the technical knowledge column. It was distinctly different from the websites of other trading companies. The preparations that I did at the initial stage really helped the digital marketing for release paper factory via Baidu advertising in the future.
Three months after the establishment of the website, the word “release paper mill” was listed on the homepage. Jixiangbao received inquiry calls from new customers every day thanks to my well-thought plan in carrying out digital marketing for release paper factory of their own, and in just one month, it had signed an annual sales contract of 2.3 million. Seeing the huge business opportunity, the factory owner came to me again and asked if there are more ways to expand their business. And of course I was ambitious to upgrade my plan of digital marketing for release paper to the next level. I made the following plan for him:
1. Continue to strengthen the promotion of the website via Baidu advertising(www.tuguizhi.cn) and improve its organic rankings to attract more professional customers (this kind of customer was very familiar with the keywords in this industry, such as release paper, release film, silicon-coated paper, silicon-coated film, and glassine paper, which were often searched for by buyers who had used these products for a long time). If thess keywords are found in the search terms on Baidu advertising, it often signals future purchases.
2. Build another website (www.fangchaozhi.cn) to attract non-professional customers also via Baidu advertising. This kind of customer hadn’t used the company’s products before and had no idea of any professional keywords. So they might use some functional search terms such as moisture-proof paper, anti-stcik paper, grease-proof paper, steamed bread paper, food-level paper, and baking paper. When such search terms appear on Baidu advertising, the motives can be uncertain.
3. Since the products were widely used and had many different specifications, we were not able to rank all the product models top via Baidu advertising with just one or two websites. Therefore, it was necessary to assign a full-time network information assistant to manage the information on the Internet, which is to strengthen the positive feedback from Baidu advertising, and rank more professional words top on Baidu through mass postings of free information.
On the basis of the above work, build a website in English version (www.release-paper.com), hoping that foreign customers could find us directly through Google. This would also require them to start doing digital marketing for release paper in English version.
Since the previous work via Baidu advertising proved fruitful, the boss didn’t hesitate to carry out the plan and asked me to build another Chinese website and an English website to carry out the digital marketing for release paper of their own in full swing. In addition, he hired a clerk dedicated to mass postings and network business after training. In 2009 alone, the online sales hit 5 million yuan, and rose to 8 million yuan in 2010. It is estimated to reach more than 10 million yuan in 2011. The products are also exported to Japan and Europe. Now the boss of Jixiangbao is planning on building a third factory in Jiangsu Province, and of course he would need a branch website. Looking back, the investment of Jixiangbao in network marketing is very small, no more than 100,000 yuan, at a rough estimate (including the consultant cost and the salary and commission of the information assistant). But it has achieved annual sales of 10 million yuan, and the online business will be in steady development for many years, which is really a money spinner.