Search marketing is undoubtedly a good medicine for small and medium-sized enterprises to solve marketing difficulties, but the current blind pursuit has covered up various misunderstandings of search marketing. How should small and medium-sized enterprise owners keep their eyes open and make better use of search marketing?
At present, the general tone of my country's small and medium-sized enterprise support policies is to "promote the integration of informatization and informatization and transform the growth mode." The role of information technology, especially Internet technology, is becoming more and more prominent. Relevant government ministries pointed out in a 2009 survey report: 31% of small and medium-sized enterprises have found suppliers through the Internet, and 24% of small and medium-sized enterprises have engaged in marketing and promotion through the Internet. They are proficient in using e-commerce for marketing. The number of small and medium-sized enterprises promoted accounted for 13% of all small and medium-sized enterprises, and the average annual growth rate of the number of small and medium-sized enterprises using e-commerce in the marketing process reached 15.2%.
These data show that most small and medium-sized enterprises that face the three major challenges of "difficulty in getting loans, difficulty in marketing, and difficulty in finding talents" have realized that online marketing can be of great help to them in solving marketing difficulties and finding business opportunities. Compared with the expensive advertising of online portals, the way small and medium-sized enterprises use Internet marketing is more inclined to search marketing based on click charges. This has also triggered a boom in search marketing over the past three years.
“Bitter” Search Marketing
As an emerging field, search marketing is destined to go through an upward spiral. Behind the strong demand for search marketing, many small and medium-sized business owners are suffering from soaring prices and increasingly low input-output ratios. If they don't do it, they are waiting for death. If they do, they seem to be seeking death. Nowadays, the mushrooming of SEO/SEM services proves to some extent that the medicine of search marketing is becoming more and more bitter.
Recently, news from the Internet industry has confirmed this concern of small and medium-sized business owners. On March 18, Dangdang announced that it would stop placing various advertisements including search keywords on Baidu from April 1. Immediately afterwards, JD.com also proposed to reduce advertising costs, including advertising on Baidu search ads.
After the news was released, industry insiders generally believed that this decision was a difficult one for the two well-known e-commerce companies. The reason is that the huge traffic brought by Baidu search cannot be ignored by e-commerce companies in fierce competition; at the same time, the price of Baidu search is rising so fast that even money-burning e-commerce companies are overwhelmed.
Some professionals said that in the past, the keyword bidding situation of Baidu search was clearly marked. Anyone can query it. Enter a keyword, how much the price is, which companies are buying, etc. It is clear. However, since Baidu Search implemented the "Phoenix Nest" plan, the explicit bid has become a hidden bid. Customers cannot see information other than their own. It is a black box bidding, and the unit price is naturally raised higher and higher. Fortunately, there are other options besides Baidu, such as NetEase Youdao, which relies on the huge users and rich resources of NetEase portal and its cost-effective advantage to provide another choice for many enterprises.
Now many small and medium-sized business owners may feel that they are facing a dilemma similar to Dangdang and JD.com. But the biggest difference between small and medium-sized enterprises is that e-commerce companies need traffic, and the traffic economy is not empty talk for them who are listed on the market. As long as small and medium-sized enterprises have actual business opportunities, even excessive traffic will bring unnecessary operating cost pressure to the enterprise.
Business opportunities are fundamental
Seizing effective business opportunities is the essential pursuit of small and medium-sized enterprises in search marketing. Thinking from this point of view, I believe small and medium-sized business owners will realize that there is no need to go to Baidu to search for popular keywords and burn money compared with well-known big brands. In fact, many search marketing experts are already calling that no matter which search engine a netizen searches for, as long as they search for the same keywords, they are potential customers of advertisers, and there is no distinction between the two. Therefore, we should make good use of the services of some non-mainstream search engines, such as NetEase Youdao and Sohu Sogou, and achieve low-investment and high-return marketing effects by cleverly setting keywords and purchasing their special services.
In fact, some other search engine services are also taking advantage of their own advantages to provide more thoughtful services to small and medium-sized enterprises. Take NetEase Youdao, which has relatively distinctive product integration, as an example. Careful netizens will find that on the well-known NetEase portal, except for some sensitive pages, NetEase Youdao search advertising spaces are directly embedded at the bottom of every page. Compared with Baidu's pure search positioning, this kind of integrated search advertising with news pages can, firstly, bring more traffic, and secondly, it can explore the value of precision marketing. For small and medium-sized business owners, purchasing NetEase search engine promotion ads is actually using a pay-per-click model to purchase the best text advertising space on the portal. It is a very cost-effective deal!
In addition, such as the integration of NetEase Youdao search and dictionary, and the integration of Tencent Soso and QQ, while these models greatly facilitate the use of netizens, I believe they will also have a big impact on the traditional web search model, thus causing search traffic and redistribution of forces.
In the final analysis, small and medium-sized business owners should grasp the fundamentals of search marketing. There is no difference in the business opportunities brought by mainstream or non-mainstream search. Cost-effectiveness should be the primary consideration for central enterprises to devote themselves to search marketing.