The third stage of social marketing in China

The concept of "social marketing" in China evolved from a cutting-edge concept of evangelism in a blog written by opinion leaders and professional researchers to the high-frequency vocabulary used daily by each brand and corporate marketing manager, It only took a few short years.

But in this not too long period of time, the industry and the general public understand the definition and concept of "social marketing" in fact has been changing: What is social marketing? The key business conduct social marketing What are the models? What are the success stories in social marketing? What are the criteria for judging success? The answers to these questions have been constantly discussed and constantly changing.

Moreover, coupled with the social marketing as a platform for development is also in constant evolution, Sina microblogging from the big red to questionable and then the current low-key but frequent commercialization, so that we always see Clear whether this is a story of hurt Yong or a Revival story. Tencent WeChat public account of the product details and imagination of the space amazing, and then do not come to Beijing in a decade Zhang Xiaolong how to deal with the business in the WeChat stormy marketing needs, and now there is no historical precedent can be inferred doubt. Looking at the second echelon, Yi Xin, reciprocity, micron and other mobile social networks, at the beginning of the birth designed a variety of marketing open interfaces and product mechanisms, veteran Douban, Qzone, everyone is also meditating how to Conform to the tide of social marketing. Looking at the United States, the video social network Vine, photo social networks Pinterest, Instagram and so on are rapidly introducing relevant advertising and data interfaces to quickly attract the market for social marketing budget. All in all, this is telling brands and business owners that social marketing is still in a process of evolving, continuous improvement, with only one goal in mind: to continually improve the impact of social marketing on businesses Value realization and efficiency improvement.

To see the past development history, we can grasp the direction of future development. As China's social marketing from birth to today's full participants, and thousands of customers have conducted cooperative practice, but also the systematic development of social marketing in the world conducted some in-depth study, but also in this area invested I want to share my own summary of the stage of development that social marketing in China had experienced in the past after I started to innovate various product technologies and marketing methods with a capital of 100 million and an enthusiastic person who recruited more than 300 social marketing people. And why do I think that China's social marketing practice is already entering a new phase.

The first stage: large forwarding stage

From the very beginning of the product form of Weibo, the market's understanding and demand for social marketing are mainly focused on rapid information proliferation. The "grassroots" as a proliferation node quickly became the best choice to meet this need. While these grassroots large numbers also have a unique growth potential in the early days of poor content on social networks, the grassroots creators sought after by the media as entrepreneurs in a nascent business model. Therefore, many companies at the time of the understanding of social marketing is to buy large forwarding. For example, in the early days of a large-scale e-commerce platform, thousands of large quantities were purchased for each event. The average monthly purchase amount was in the million yuan level. Therefore, the market also appeared a large forwarding advertising exchange platform, the monthly flow of billions of dollars peak.

High-quality large forwarding indeed to advertisers can bring lower exposure costs. However, the corresponding problems follow: firstly, the final exposure of large-size forwarded is hard to be counted, and the consumption attributes of many large-sized fan groups are difficult to accurately describe, for example, a large number of joke accounts can basically be regarded as Is a general channel to gain visibility. At the same time there are many brush zombie painted large, so that advertisers can not determine the quality of their accounts. Coupled with the contents of the forwarding of advertising is completely in an unmonitored state, so a large number of fraud and counterfeit products occasionally spread, so the platform quickly realized that the large transmission market must conduct advertising content audit management, otherwise it will give the platform Bring huge risk, at the same time direct sales of advertising resources is the platform itself indivisible business model. Therefore, Sina platform for Grassroots launched a series of management measures, also introduced its own "micro-task" platform to regulate the market, which touched a number of stakeholders, many of whom have become a firm microblogging platform sing power. WeChat quickly learned from the beginning of the open microblogging experience, the development of large restrictions firmly. This behavior allows more business managers to understand clearly, social marketing is not to buy large for forwarding, so far, the golden age of large come to an end.

The second stage: content marketing (dick hand) stage

When business owners realize that just looking at social media as a fast-moving medium has not really uncovered the core objective of social media's close relationship with consumers, there has been an emphasis on the marketplace Creative, content trends, many brand owners that the essence of social marketing is through good creative content to continue to promote real spontaneous consumer forwarding and participation, coupled with the activities for fans, so that more people continue to become a brand Loyal fans.

The formation of this idea was mainly influenced by the rapid growth of some of the most influential fans of Weibo accounts on the connotation of the brand. Some famous brands also took advantage of hot topics to introduce innovative content topics, triggering the success of mass communication Experience affected. Of course there are representative accounts Durex and Nike.

The emergence of this trend, in fact, closer to the social marketing of traditional brand marketing an important subversive: that is, the marketing content of fragmentation and real-time. This change greatly eliminates the form and pace of content production that traditional creative companies and public relations firms are good at, leaving a large number of brand owners to find themselves needing to rethink their supplier choices for content creation.

However, if social marketing only stays at the level of content marketing, there will be several difficult problems to be solved: 1. Not all brand content can easily realize the marketing of creative content. This makes a very long period of time, corporate content marketing microblogging ability to become a luxury, a large number of SMEs or brands with far-reaching connotation and culture of Internet before this trend is difficult to start; 2, content marketing exposure As well as the formation of the forwarding, of course, has a positive meaning, but excessive content depends on creativity, in fact, this is a high-risk, can not be managed to optimize and increase investment in marketing activities; 3, content marketing value, Similarly difficult to quantify, and even many companies have a considerable part of the content of the account is not related to the brand itself and consumer value, many followers just focus on the attention of a segmented account to maintain the concern.

The third stage of social marketing software, data management stage

In 2013, the rapid rise of WeChat's public accounts made it necessary for brands and business owners to continue thinking. The heavy content before social marketing played a small role in the WeChat platform. In addition, millet's undoubted success in the field of social marketing, but also continue to promote people to analyze and think: from the content marketing point of view, millet social content can be described as mediocre, and Xiaomi's fan management was obviously obtained The huge value, from the perspective of return on investment, millet's social marketing gains are clear, measurable and huge.

Launched on WeChat, brands and business owners found that it was impossible to embark on meaningful marketing practices without adding the minimum fan interactive interface and HTML5 page development through technical means, not to mention the need to achieve accurate downgrades of fan groups or As with internal CRM, CMOs spend a lot of time discussing platforms, interfaces, downstream, upstream, FakeID, data cleansing, identity correlation, etc. with technology companies or their own IT departments, Words that can not appear.

This phenomenon has greatly promoted the understanding of enterprises and brand owners that software marketing and dataization must be done for social marketing. In the early years, the marketing department's attitude toward purchasing technology and software was merely to get some level of analytic data reporting, and things are changing now. Gartner, the international IT market analysis authority, predicts CMOs will become more demand centers for purchasing software and technology than CIOs and CTOs in the next five years.

The reasons for further software and data management of social marketing are clear: Brands and businesses are increasingly aware that in addition to the content itself, communication and dialogue through social media and a large number of consumers are an important part of the work. Consumption Social data and brand-related dialogue history, we must realize the real social relationship management through further management and mining. In addition to the social advertising system that Weibo is launching and constantly improving, Will greatly increase the exposure of the brand content of the efficiency and precise arrival, without the need for over-reliance on content creativity. But all of these workflows can not be managed and processed with human brain and excel charts because of a large amount of fragmented data, which requires a lot of automation technology. And more importantly, many enterprises in the social media The relevant data is a very large amount of data, if you can not establish the timely collection of these data, processing, management and use of capacity, companies will not be able to enter the real competition in the next stage go.

to sum up

From the simple pursuit of forwarding and digital games, to the beginning of return to content and creativity, and then to further social marketing from a systems management and data management perspective, which is an educated and baptized process for all marketing practitioners in the social age . This process is also in line with the syllogism that people must accept when embracing a new concept of management, "emphasizing short-term interests - the essence of the return to the pre-change - the sublimation of value from re-rationalization to value creation." Social marketing will continue in China's long-term prosperity, let us work together to meet the new stage of social marketing.