Local portals have always faced problems of weak profitability and low return on investment. There are a few famous sayings that have been circulating in the industry:
1. Portalization and e-commerce;
2. Real estate, cars, home furnishings, and weddings are the main profitable industries for local portal websites.
3. Large industries provide revenue, while small industries provide content.
However, through terms such as portalization, e-commerce, and verticalization, we need to understand the meaning behind these methods! In fact, the core sentence is: valuable services realize their own value, and increased influence increases their own value. To sum up, it can become the "Dharma Five Fingers" for making local portal websites profitable:
Type 1: Provide valuable services
Looking back at the practice of local portal business, we most often hear the following questions:
·"Your profit model is advertising?" - Yes, the website's profit can be attributed to the advertising model, but it is a big mistake to one-sidedly believe that the products sold by local portal websites are banners, pop-ups or BANNER!
·"The price is too high!" - Is it high? If the first-screen banner advertisement does not reach 1/5 of the price of a full page in the local metropolitan newspaper, the price is not considered high!
·"No effect." - Extensive management, when there is not enough popularity, there is no effect! Looking around the vertical website, the PV is not high, but the effect is very good. What's the reason?
· "There are not enough salespeople and too few manpower." - Few? Countless repeated sales and street-sweeping sales methods are a disaster in themselves.
What is the solution?
First of all, think carefully about whether the services you provide are of value to netizens. Is your content viewed by anyone? Will your content attract people to read it every day? Can your content help netizens?
This is the meaning of mediaization: valuable content, a large amount of valuable service information, a good user experience, and even a one-stop content service experience.
Then, think carefully about what kind of service you provide to your customers. How is his advertisement deployed? How is it designed? How many people watch it? Or what does your service get him? What does he see? After selling him the advertisement, are you confident or guilty?
This is another aspect of mediatization: the presentation of information. I tried to have a gourmet food operation team carry out such service improvements: they simplified street sweeping and sales for editors to visit stores, took photos of dishes and sent them to the community, and wrote about their own experiences. Feedback from the team was that sales efficiency increased three times when the price increased by 60%.
Type 2: Gather precise purchasing power
When advertising is difficult to sell simply, many people resort to events. The most elementary activity is group buying. In this context, spontaneous group buying evolved into website-backed group buying, and the money-saving group buying behavior evolved into a profit model. At this time, we began to hear voices like this: It is difficult to promote and even harder to ensure results.
The biggest problem with this model is that the website operators have to fall into another disaster: receiving money and people to eliminate disasters, in order to achieve this unreliable word, they are busy with various promotions all day long, and even have to give up the Internet and switch to traditional media advertising. Of course, this method is euphemistically called "integrated marketing." Of course, this approach has led to very effective Internet promotion techniques.
But, can we change our thinking? We use content to attract a lot of popularity, and use content filters to filter out precise customers. In this way, our feast can attract drooling participants - merchants. I often refer to this method as the "casino model". Whether participants bet successfully or not depends on their products and services. Survival of the fittest and survival of the fittest. Products and services cannot be controlled by websites. Some people in the industry jokingly said: "We are matchmakers, and we can get married but not have children."
Type 3: Enrich service levels
What is a portal? Once upon a time, a portal was a community. We need to understand the limitations of a single community model:
·A good post is priceless, but in the eyes of customers, it is like mooncakes weighed by weight, not up to the mark. According to the 28-20 principle, what those 20% of large customers definitely need is not a few posts, but exquisite media performance.
·If there are so many small customers requesting services such as activities one by one, for the website, the income will be out of proportion to the cost. The great long tail theorem tells us that the total amount of small fish and shrimps distributed according to the long tail is likely to break the limit of the 80/20 rule and will be a very large number. Jack Ma tells us: The ones who get rich are not whalers, but shrimp catchers.
There are whales on one side and shrimps on the other, the 28/20 principle and the long tail theorem, what should we do?
Portal, stop being a single community. We have three modernizations: community-based, media-based, and e-commerce. Be an all-rounder, big and small, catch both whales and shrimps! I can do advertisements, special topics, write soft articles, shoot videos, and organize events. Playing, playing and singing, everything is available.
Type 4: Consultative Internet Marketing Services
Salespeople will be frightened when they see customers. Even if you have powerful weapons such as community, media, and e-commerce, even if you put together a good package, sales are still sales, and orders are still orders. Advertising space is limited, manpower to organize events is limited, and pinned post positions are limited.
But how did other people’s big orders come from? Service is still service.
What customers need most is ROI, and customers have countless confusions in management and sales. Only by creating value for customers can you gain your own value. This is what the Taobao team says and does.
At least, we can do something like this:
·Help customers integrate advertising and activity resources, which is integrated marketing planning.
·Help customers improve the capabilities of customer service personnel and effectively increase conversion rates.
·Help customers improve service quality and establish a good reputation.
Internet marketing is an addictive drug that you can't live without.
Type 5: Increase influence
The Internet economy is an attention economy and an influence economy. Nothing can be without popularity. Where does popularity tend to go? Fame.
The Internet economy is also a word-of-mouth economy. According to the AISAS model, search is left to Baidu and Google, while local portals compete for word-of-mouth. The model tells us that word-of-mouth is much larger than the search space!
Word-of-mouth represents at least several important things: fame, trust, popularity, and interaction.
How to gain reputation, or how to gain influence?
We can do this:
·Don’t miss every available event.
·Don’t miss every promotion opportunity.
·Carefully plan every event.
· Maximize the publicity of each event.
·Use public welfare activities to enhance the reputation of the website.
·The benevolent are invincible: create the most valuable content and provide the most valuable services.
The core words for local portal website profitability: value, service. I once summarized the mentality: conscience, intention, and perseverance. (Text/Mengli Qinhuai)