Digital Marketing—An Elephant, Are You Looking at It or Touching It
What is Enterprise Digital Marketing and its Related Knowledge
Because of my job, I have to deal with some private business owners very often. When asked what is enterprise digital marketing, they often reply dismissively, “You mean becoming a paid member of Alibaba, right? For this, I have to pay extra 3,000 yuan a year, but it doesn’t work at all.” Or they would say, “I know, it’s just spending thousands of money on Baidu for advertising without any business coming.” Or, “I bought a piece of software to send messages, but I didn’t get many business calls. Instead, I got a bunch of harassing calls...”
No wonder business owners will feel like a blind man guessing an elephant. Because upon most occasions, they are merely in contact with salesmen from a certain digital marketing company, such as Baidu salesmen, when promoting their bidding products, will not say how good the effefct of Alibaba is, and vice versa. It is not the unpromosing effect of these network technologies but the bussiness owners’ lack of knowledge on digital marketing, relevant personnnel to manage and limited cooperative digital marketing means that resulted in the poor performance.
What is Enterprise Digital Marketing: Broadly speaking, any marketing work carried out by enterprises using network technology should be called enterprise digital marketing.If you list the effective digital marketing methods, there will be more than a dozen as follows: Newsjacking advertisements on large websites, search engine advertising, search engine natural listings, free release of information, paid membership marketing, blog marketing, forum marketing, online retail, online agency sales, mass mailing advertising, Weibo marketing, mass messaging on chatting tools...For most enterprises, the effective way of online marketing is still to collect information, promote and operate its brand on search engines like Baidu and Google, B2B platforms like Alibaba and HC, B2C platforms like 58.com and Ganji.com, and other large websites.
The enterprise digital marketing can be divided into digital direct marketing and broadcast marketing
The digital direct marketing means that the salesmen collect information of potential customers on the Internet, and contact them through direct calls, faxes or chatting tools (QQ, MSN, email, etc.) to negotiate business.The broadcast marketing (digital marketing in a narrow sense) means that the digital marketer build a targeted corporate website, publish corporate information, make the information easily found by potential customers through certain promotion and online advertising, and take the initiative to negotiate business with companies.
As this book is written for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs and salespeople, not for academic purposes, we will try to use less professional terms in the following texts, and use more common words that everyone is familiar with.In this chapter only the basic terms and concepts we are going to use will be explained.
Search Engine: At first, it was only a network tool used in universities to find academic papers, and was later popularized in the society to search for various information, including corporate information. The world-famous independent search engine is Google, and the most influential independent search engine in China is Baidu, with Soso, Bing and Sogou ranking next. Non-independent search engines are internal search engines built on some large portal websites, such as Taobao and Alibaba. These are also our main channels for digital marketing. For the convenience of illustration in the following text, we are going to take Baidu as an example for independent search engines, and Taobao as an example for non-independent search engines.
B2B Website: A large-scale comprehensive or industry portal website established by some network companies, providing a platform for buyers and suppliers to publish information and communicate. It is like an industrial product wholesale market in the city, which meets the supply and demand between enterprises. The most representative website is Alibaba.
B2C or C2C Website: A retail website established by some network companies or individuals, which brings together one or multiple merchants to provide individuals with goods or services. It is similar to the supermarkets, shopping malls, and specialty stores in real life. The most influential one shall be Taobao.
URL, Dedicated Domain Name, and Dedicated Website: I have seen many business owners claiming that they have a corporate website. However, in fact, they are just paid members of a large website with only one top-level or second-level domain name. This is how I noticed that many people lack the knowledge of the importance of doing domain registration to acquire an individual website. When the enterprise gives considerable publicity on this domain, it is actually a promotion of the large website. However, if one does domain name registration, his website will mostly focus on promoting itself. Once the cooperation goes wrong, it will bring about a lot of trouble, since the official website of yours has already been printed on all of your business cards and brochures. Therefore, all corporates are suggested to do domain name registration in order to get their individual websites to save them from troubles. The negative effects are immeasurable. Consequently, the concepts of URL, domain name, and website must be clarified. URL is the address of certain information on the Internet. With this address, people can find the information; the domain name is the name of a website, of which the top-level domain name is the highest-level one. It consists of three parts: www.aaaa.bbb, where “aaaa” can be a string of English letters or numbers of any length, and “bbb” is the suffix of the domain name, mostly “com”, “cn” or “net”. Most corporate websites or large portals use such domain names. So these domain names are what we would recommend you when doing domain name registration. In addition to the top-level domain name, there are second-level, third-level, fourth-level domain names, and so on. From the domain names listed above, one may consider doing domain name registration a laborious work. However, once you’re done with domain name registration, the benefits of an individual website is considerably promising. They are subdomains assigned by some large websites to their members. For example, Alibaba’s global website is the top-level domain name, shown as www.alibaba.com. Its Chinese website is a second-level domain name, shown as china.alibaba.com.The website of a paid enterprise (Shanghai Xiongying Industrial Co., Ltd.) below the Chinese website is a third-level domain name, shown as xying3118.cn.alibaba.com. When the enterprise publishes a piece of product information, it is shown on http://detail.china.alibaba.com/buyer/offerdetail/113577132.html. This can no longer be counted as a subdomain, nor can it be remembered. It can only be regarded as a URL. Even if the enterprise owns a dedicated domain name (or top-level domain name), it is still not a dedicated corporate website. Only when there is an independent space for storing website information and when the domain name is pointed to this space can it be considered a dedicated website. Here, I would like to talk about the importance of doing domain name registration again, which can also be asked in a question, and that is, why we put so much emphasis on dedicated websites? Because after having been doing domain name registration for so many years, it is proven that only the promotion and optimization of dedicated websites following domain name registration is the most effective.
Web Links and Backlinks: Whenever we surf the Internet, we are exposed to web links. When we are browsing a website page, the mouse sliding over the content we are interested in, our cursor will change from an arrow to a finger. With a slight click, it will jump to another page. This is a link.The second page is backlinked by the first page. Theoretically, if a website is backlinked by many websites, it means that this website is very important.
Keywords: The word you use when searching for or publishing information. It can be a product name (e.g. plier), service content (e.d. decoration), or a processing term (e.g. blister packaging). When searching for potential customers, you can easily locate them by using accurate keywords; when you publish information, the reasonably optimized keywords can make it easy for customers to find you.
Search Results: When you enter the words “imported toys” in the Baidu search bar to find a company specialized in these products, you will find the following results:
On the top left are the URLs and advertisements of three companies, and there are also URLs and advertisement of several companies on the right. These companies have paid advertising fees to Baidu, and the cost for each click is about 5 yuan. Except these, the other URLs on the left do not need to pay advertising fee to Baidu. The companies with good website promotion effects will rank high. Other search engines have similar layouts. The enterprise digital marketers need to analyze and study the search results every day.
SEO：The abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer. The former is a verb, which usually refers to natural listings; the latter is a noun, referring to the technical personnel engaged in search engine optimization.
Mass Posting: It means publishing free information on various websites. It is one of the most important means of enterprise digital marketing. In some industries, it is even more successful than paid digital marketing.As you can see, in the picture above, the sixth URL on the left: It is exactly the free information published by Shenzhen Shengyang International Logistics Co., Ltd. at china.eb80.com.
SEM: The abbreviation of Search Engine Marketing. It is also regarded as the digital marketing for small and medium enterprise in a narrow sense. It not only includes the SEO and mass postings mentioned above, but also includes search engine advertising and extended website affiliate advertising.