The picture above is the homepage of a corporate website that belongs to Saip, the protagonist of the success story about marketing we are going to tell today. Please keep in mind the logo just above.
This picture above shows the first screen of the first result page when searching for “junction box”, an electrical product, on Alibaba which is a well-known B2B information platform for industrial products in China. Please note that in the brand category column, the company’s brand “Saipwell/Saip” ranks first, followed by ZTE and Philips. Among the searched products, the first and second product images are from Saip (there is a Saip logo the same as what is shown on the corporate website on either of the product images) If you keep browsing the second, the third screen, and so on, or browsing the remaining pages, you will find Saip’s products and logos everywhere. Though Saip may not be well known offline, I dare say it is definitely one of the top brands with high popularity online and especially on Alibaba. It is even more famous than Chint Electric, Philips, Bull, ZTE, and other big brands.
This is the credit of Shanghai Saipwell Electric Co., Ltd., which is affiliated with Saip Electric Group. It is a new type of sales company with more than 100 salesmen, of which more than 60 are responsible for online business. The company has made each of the online salesmen a TrustPass member of Alibaba (Note: unlike Baidu that only allows a company to set up one advertising account, Alibaba permits one company to establish more than one store). After professional training in store management skills, each salesman has his own duty and cooperates with each other, steadily securing more new customers on the Alibaba platform.
This is just for the domestic market. For the international market, Saip has also set up dozens of Alibaba overseas stores and placed relevant advertisements. Saip has to pay Alibaba millions of yuan every year for services and advertising in the domestic and international markets. No wonder it has become a well-known brand in the electrical field on Alibaba. In return, Saip also achieves sales of hundreds of millions of yuan every year through Alibaba marketing.
Seeing this, some business owners might ask, “Does it mean that for industrial product companies, marketing on Alibaba must be better than on search engines?” They are thinking it wrong, because many of the business resources on Alibaba come from search engines like Baidu. For instance, when I search for “ABS waterproof junction box” on Baidu, the results are as follows:
The second link is from Alibaba. Please note that it still uses Saip’s product image with its logo as a showcase. That is to say, as a well-known B2B information platform in China, Alibaba can absorb a large number of resources from such search engines as Baidu and 360 to its own platform. In other words, Aliabab has been leveraging search engines for marketing.
“Fine. As it is said, ‘All roads lead to Rome’. Since carrying out network marketing can help produce business easily, can I, as a traditional enterprise, achieve the same outstanding performance as they do by copying their large-scale network marketing team and copying their marketing model on the platform?” It’s hard to tell. For example, it is often heard that a certain women’s clothing store of large scale on Taobao can generate more than ten million yuan or even one hundred million yuan in sales a year. But we also heard that many counterparts closed their store or were in poor operation. The point is that you have not yet adapted to the rules of online marketing. There’s something wrong with the transformation of traditional enterprises in the Internet age.
I once asked Mr. Wu, the owner of Saip, “If there is a new customer from the Internet in need of a junction box, will you accept this order? If so, will it be profitable?” He said, “We will take this order. And we will get benefits.” I asked many of the business owners in traditional industrial product field the same question, and they answered, “We definitely won’t accept small orders. It’s a loss-making business.” The difference lies here: You don’t have a new type of online sales team and service team, but Saip does.