If you search for “Mining Machinery Association” on Baidu at the moment, you will find several association websites. Some look like association portals, and some are more like enterprise websites. But if you look into it, you will notice that all of them come from the same enterprise. Why?
More than a decade ago, when company A was still a small company in the mining machinery industry, its owner, with unique insight, had already foreseen the future impact of network marketing on the company’s performance. He spent a lot of money building his own network marketing team and achieved exponential growth of his online business in the first two years of trial. But problems still existed according to the data analysis. More than 90% of online businesses were beyond the company’s capacity. Some orders were too big to afford, some were too small that no one was willing to do, and some demanded the cooperation of the upstream and downstream industries… At that time, the owner of company A thought of an idea: what if he gathered the resources of the whole upstream and downstream industries? In that way, he could take at least 50% of the online orders.
At that time, the Mining Machinery Association was only a branch of the China Heavy Machinery Industry Association, which of course still is. Like most small industry associations, the main job of the Mining Machinery Association was to form a council of the industry with dozens of corporate members and individuals. Every year it would arrange several meetings and publish some books and magazines. The head of the association wanted to expand its influence in the industry through some kind of business operation, but the lack of human and financial resources was a big problem.
After negotiating several times with the main leaders of the association, the owner of company A, as a director of the Mining Machinery Association, put forward his scheme that company A provided human and financial resources for comprehensive online promotion in the name of the association, and the business gained online should be undertaken by company A itself, or passed on to other companies in the name of the association. Those companies, of course, needed to pay for the sales leads, but the price was not high. For larger or complex orders, company A would work with the upstream and downstream enterprises in relevant industries.
The association used to plead with the enterprises in the industry to join the association and had a hard time charging membership fees because they considered it not worthwhile and were reluctant to join it. Now the received orders on the Internet would be given priority to the directors of the association. Finding that the performance of the member companies continues to grow because of their online business, other enterprises also rushed to join the association. More members meant more competition, and more competition meant a boost in the conversion of online business.
In the assignment of the internal businesses, the association had also made a detailed plan. The membership fees were increased and then divided into two parts, one for the association’s daily activities, and the other as the prepaid funds of the member companies. To obtain business, the company needed to deduct the expense of a single piece of information from it. The information fees of the online business were divided into several levels, ranging from 1,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan, depending on the size of customers’ orders. Whenever there was a new inquiry online, the association will publish the basic information of the order in its internal system, including: which country and region the customer was from, which kind of equipment they wanted, when they needed the equipment, etc. When the member companies saw the demand, they could apply for it in the background if they thought it fit their company, and the system would automatically charge the corresponding information fee as agreed.
The association had a much greater advantage in receiving business than a single enterprise. The business volume is doubling every year, and so was the online marketing team members which had been expanded to more than 100 people by 2019. hey could not only drum up business but also help build corporate websites and conduct online promotion on behalf of the member companies, so as to construct their own marketing platforms. In order to meet the needs of export in the past few years, the association even formed an online group with linguists who could speak minority languages to help enterprises negotiate business with customers in German-, France- and Spanish-speaking regions, which spares the member companies a lot of trouble in handling export orders. At present, the association can receive about 100,000 domestic and foreign inquiries online each year. The annual costs of online promotion, labor, and advertising add up to about RMB 40 million yuan, so the average cost of a sales lead is about RMB 500 yuan. In comparison, the annual income made up of information fees has reached more than 100 million yuan.
This isn’t over yet. The mining machinery enterprises mainly sells various stone crushers, sand-making machines, and their supporting equipment to enterprises in the mining, coal, and building materials industries. In addition to the above processing equipment, their customers normally are also in need of upstream and downstream equipment and supporting facilities such as mining equipment (like excavators) and transportation vehicles (like construction vehicles). In order to get these orders, the suppliers of mining equipment and transportation vehicles also took the initiative to join the Mining Machinery Association and pay for sales leads. More interestingly, some manufacturers of food processing equipment also joined the association. It turns out that some of the customers searching for “crushers” on Baidu intended to buy corn crushers, not stone crushers. Therefore, during the actual promotion, there were always some customers consulting about food crushers on the association websites. Naturally, the suppliers of food processing equipment were also absorbed into the association.These peripheral companies didn’t spend much on the leads, but with their participation, the association became more powerful, more influential, and more famous.
Now you may understand, as stated at the beginning of this article, why you can find multiple association websites when searching for “Mining Machinery Association”. In fact, this is just the tip of the iceberg. ver the decade, the network marketing team of the association has built tens of thousands of domestic and foreign websites in various languages, some of which belong to the association, and some belong to the member companies. What’s the point of building so many websites? Let me share a set of data with you. As I mentioned, this team can get about 100,000 inquiries on the Internet every year, among which half are from the natural listings of these websites rather than advertising.
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