Management Service for SEM Bidding
For more than 12 years, Tianli has been focusing on digital marketing service for B2B enterprises, and has its own tactics for the management of SEM bidding advertising. The sophisticated operators analyze the big data from Baidu’s background every day to dig out more accurate and high-quality customers for enterprises, and keep monitoring the data of bidding words and use Tianli’s prevention method on malicious clicks to save half of the advertising costs for enterprises.
The SEM advertising actually refers to Baidu PPC advertising, one of the top choices for brands promotion. In addition to it, there are also other leading platforms for advertising. Let’s make a list of them.
When it comes to search engine advertising (SEA) in the domestic market, what we use most is Baidu for advertising, known as Baidu PPC advertising, or SEM advertising. Other commonly used ones are 360 Search, Sogou Search, QQ Search, WeChat Search, Haosou Search, etc. At present, the mainstream SEA platforms in China are Baidu, 360 and Sogou.
Among the search engines in the overseas market, Google is mostly used, followed by Bing, which is Microsoft’s search engine for advertising.
Here I would like to share with you a digital marketing service story of Mr. Han
Mr. Han came to work in Shanghai’s largest building materials market around 2000 and opened his own shop in the market in 2003. He employed seven salesmen to carry out the business, which was mediocre and could barely sustain itself. He by chance heard that promoting on Baidu can generate more business. Thinking about giving it a try, he paid RMB 3,500 yuan in advance for advertising. At that time, there were few people advertising building materials on Baidu, and the Cost Per Click (CPC) was only RMB 3 jiao, so his business flourished at once. One year later, he received more business from the network than from the seven salesmen.
The SEM advertising has its own unique advantage: It can enjoy a better ranking position on Baidu. As shown below:
When we search the word “crusher” on Baidu (crusher is a standard industrial equipment), we will find that in Baidu’s search results, there are 5 advertisements displayed on the left, and 1 advertisement on the right jointly with other relevant products. The left advertising positions are not always in the top 5. Sometimes, they alternate with the natural listings. That is to say, the Baidu advertisements occupy important positions in the whole search engine. According to a large amount of data, if an enterprise does a good job in digital marketing, 80% of its inquiries come from paid advertisements
The Advantages of SEM Advertising:
I. Top Ranking
As is seen from the picture above, the advertising position is at the top of the Baidu search results. Customers tend to choose these manufacturers who have placed advertisements. The ability to bear the advertising cost also shows the strength of the manufacturer.
II. Immediate Results
As long as you start advertising today, you may get direct customers tomorrow. It is much faster for enterprises than other digital marketing service methods such as releasing a large amount of free information and optimizing natural listings, which require technical capabilities and a certain period of time, and may take months or even years to be ranked on the Baidu homepage.
III. Wide Coverage
Let’s take the keyword “crusher” we have searched as an example. I may bid for this word only, but many of its related adwords can also be covered, such as “crusher factory”, “Shanghai crusher”, and “crusher sales company”. Compared with other digital marketing service methods, it has very extensive coverage.
The Weaknesses of SEM Advertising:
I. Technology-based Advertising
Compared with traditional TV ads, newspaper ads and media ads, the technical requirements of search engine ads are very high, and, to produce results, they must be managed by professional technical personnel. If you treat it as a kind of traditional advertising, and wish to achieve the goal simply by investing a lot of money, you will find it no effect after a while.
II. large Costs
This is compared to other marketing methods, such as email marketing, natural listings and mass postings. There is no end to the money spent on bidding advertising. For instance, it is normal in the pharmaceutical industry to invest hundreds of thousands of or even millions of money for advertising in a month
III. Vulnerable to Malicious Clicks from Competitors
Your competitors will deplete your advertising fee by maliciously clicking on your ads. When your ads are taken down, their ads can be ranked in the front. Compared with mass postings and natural listings, the Baidu PPC advertising is far from solving this problem.
The Precautions for SEM Advertising:
I. Hire a Dedicated Person to the Management. This person should have received formal training and must know how to manage the paid advertising.
II. Find Right Adwords. If you use the wrong adwords, there will be no searches or traffic even if your bid is very high.
III. Make Your Ads Stand Out. Good ad creative can make you rank higher when you are on the same ad page as your competitors.
IV. Keep a Good Ranking. Some enterprises are only willing to spend very little on advertising. Without impressions, their ads cannot be seen by potential customers. In this case, my advice is that either you give up advertising, or you try your best to maintain a good ranking so that customers can find you as soon as possible.
V. Block Malicious Clicks. Only when you have completed this step can you started placing ads. Otherwise, much of your advertising fee will be wasted in vain.
VI. Filter Out Invalid Clicks. We need to analyze whether the clicks are from other industries, learners, or even some salesmen based on the background data, and filter them out all. Only by doing so can we introduce the traffic of potential customers more effectively.
VII. Produce High-Quality Website Content. Only after we have produced high-quality website content can we facilitate Baidu PPC advertising. These two complement each other. Without good website content, customers will just come and leave, and the conversion rate cannot be improved.
How do B2B Enterprises Evaluate the Performance of Outsourcing Services?
After all, digital marketing service is a cost for enterprises. If they get high returns (like increased customers or increased sales) after the service, they will seek for a long-term cooperation. But in some industries, the cycle of converting the investment in digital marketing into sales is longer. It’s unscientific to assess the effect solely by sales. We need to introduce more detailed assessment indicators as follows:
• Acceptable Sales Leads for the Sales Department: when receiving inquiries of new customers from digital marketing service, the sales department makes initial contact with the customers, determines those who can be followed up and collects their information.
• Effective Inquiry Volume from Digital Marketing service : first of all, it’s necessary to set up a dedicated hotline for inquiries from digitalmarketing, so as to distinguish them from the ones from other channels. Secondly, after filtering out harassing and invalid inquiries, what remains are the effective inquiries. The marketing department needs to hand over these inquiries to the sales department in a timely manner. If the sales department accepts them, they become “acceptable sales leads”.
• Number of Valid Visitors to the Website: analyze the website access statistics to collect the information of visitors who have carefully browsed the website, mark them as valid visitors, and record the information
• Number of Website Visits and Visitors: evaluate the changes before and after digital marketing service by comparing the number of website visits and visitors within a certain period of time.
• Natural Listings of the Website and Mass Postings: evaluate the changes before and after outsourcing service by comparing the weekly or monthly listings of industry adwords on various search engines.
• Paid Listings: collect the paid listings of important adwords on various search engines by week or month.
• All the above indicators can be reported to clients by outsourcing companies in the form of weekly or monthly work reports.
Shanghai Tianli Internet Technology Co., Ltd. specializes in digital marketing service for B2B enterprises, and has rich experience in carrying out SEM advertising service of various search engines in China, especially Baidu. The company’s founder, Mr. Zhanghai, is the permanent Baidu PPC advertising consultant to the world’s top 500 companies. As shown below: Baidu takes the first step, Tianli realizes the second, and the client completes the third.
Related Articles:
80% of the Business Comes from Search Engine Promotion
How to do Search Engine Marketing（SEM）