Microblog Marketing: An Optional Link in Corporate Social Marketing

After the enthusiasm, microblogging marketing is going down the altar. It is not omnipotent, but only an optional part of corporate social marketing.

When microblogging marketing just emerged, one of the company's first corporate executives promised to make a bold statement: The company must lead the company in three years. At that time, his ambitions filled many people with imagination in this industry. Now that more than half of the three-year contract has passed, it is hard to say that his company, even the independent listing plan of Sina Weibo, has no prospect.

In the past two years, the impact of Weibo on the guidance of ** hot spots and people’s perceptions has been increasing, and the desire for enterprises to vocalize on them has become increasingly strong. When microblogging marketing expenses became one of the corporate budget statements, the microblogging marketing industry began to make rapid progress. An interesting phenomenon is that the "Weibo Xiaobian" position turned out, and for a certain period of time, it is no less attractive than the electric merchants whose prices have skyrocketed.

But nowadays, there have been sudden attacks on Weibo marketing, accusations of advertising, destroying Weibo user experience and making fake fans. Even the largest gold owner in the industry began to question that some companies have concluded after trying out this marketing tool: Weibo marketing has no effect.

Comparison of the two, can not help but make people wonder: What makes microblogging marketing is going down the altar? Its value to the enterprise in the end? Where will it go from here?

Grassroots booming tide

More than a year ago, it was almost impossible for you to talk to the boss of Weibo Marketing Company about the shortcomings of the industry and the difficulties that will face in the future. Everything looks good at the time: considerable profits, endless customers, and snow flakes. As a general meeting invitation, it is difficult to believe that there are such easy money-making opportunities in the world. What they are doing is nothing more than sending 140-word sentences on Weibo. As long as they are interesting enough to attract attention, there will always be people who raise money to seek an appointment.

If you go further along time, you can see where all this comes from. In August 2009, Sina began to test Weibo. In order to prevent the loss of users due to unfamiliarity with Weibo, Sina by default allows users to pay attention to some accounts when registration is complete so that their personal homepages can have content displayed. This default attention list, beginning with various stars and celebrities, Sina wants to use their influence to enhance Weibo’s popularity. Within three months of Weibo’s opening of the test, we have already appeared in grassroots accounts like joke, joke selection, global fashion, etc. They have adopted fun and playful content selection criteria and quickly gathered a large number of fans. Sina, which is plagued by user activity, is happy to see it as an encouragement, adding grassroots to the default watch list, or recommending its Weibo content. The fan-growing grassroots microblogging giant is a natural advertising platform, and the commercial value is quickly excavated. How is the effectiveness of the first advertising campaign using grassroots large scale, but the first batch of microblogging marketing companies emerged from this and started their own way to attract gold.

In the numerous media reports on the development of grassroots large-scale mania, one detail is impressive: when marketing company employees respond to customer quotes, they often add a sentence, “This quotation is only valid for one week. After this week, The price must rise by 30%." When it was around March 2011, the quotation of grassroots large-scale advertisements rose from a few hundred yuan to more than 1,000 yuan in only one month.

In April, Du Zijian, founder of Huayi Media Group, said in an interview with the media: “Our company is connected with big customers. The average number is more than 3 million. We don’t bother with 3 million or less. We don't take it live.” The company is considered one of the grassroots top three, and the number of accounts is said to have more than a dozen. Another grassroots large-scale owner and founder of the company Luluode, “Red Wine Bing” (Weibo ID), also talked about its own profitability in the media during the same period: “The revenue target for this year (2011) It is a net profit of 10,000 yuan per day.” At this time, her company did not start a business for a few months.

As more and more people enter the industry, "large size" becomes a weapon to solve all problems. If you do not have a "large" on your hands, you are embarrassed to say hello to people. At that time, it was difficult for them not to be full of their future.

However, it took only one and a half years to pass. This kind of embarrassment has almost been shattered. According to internal employees of marketing companies, the large-scale advertising quotation of grassroots has skyrocketed, and some large-scale quotation even have a downward trend. What makes them even more nervous is that the marketing methods relying solely on large-scale forwarding are facing disfavor of corporate customers, and the era of “a large-scale, golden, and high-billion” is becoming a thing of the past.

Objectively speaking, in the increasingly more pursuing precision of marketing effects, "large size" forwarding is a crude marketing method without technical content. Many large sizes are full-audience accounts (such as jokes), and it is difficult to categorize their fan characteristics (such as age, gender, income level, etc.) so that it is difficult to make an expectation of marketing effectiveness. In contrast, Weibo accounts in certain segments (such as women's fashion, luxury goods, etc.) have distinct fan characteristics and are more likely to deliver ads precisely.

The time for customers and grassroots large holders to bargain is getting longer and longer. “Give money for advice” is the brilliance of yesterday. The latter is learning to adapt. But what they can't adapt to is Sina's increasingly embarrassing attitude.

After the outbreak of Weibo users' growth, Sina’s attitude towards Weibo’s large size has been transferred from encouragement to control. In March of this year, Sina launched a “sweeping powder” (remove zombies) on Weibo, and it was alleged that the rate of grassroots dumping was basically above 10%. In May, accounts such as joke selection and microblogging hilarious list were banned by Sina because of content plagiarism. These content-based accounts have been publishing microblogging for a long time, and their ability to create content has been severely declining, and their advantages have been difficult to sustain. These two measures hit the two biggest weaknesses of Weibo itself. What worries marketing companies is that Sina’s launch of a complete advertising system is imperative. They will be forced to compete for customers with the platform side, and this war has no chance of winning.

Looking back, the value of Weibo’s large size was indeed exaggerated. It lacked any sustainable core competitiveness.

Industry fever and calm return

Weibo is a river and lake, but also divided schools.

Grassroots large-scale marketing emerged at the earliest time and was called the content school. With the deepening understanding of the characteristics of Weibo, there have been successive generations of schools of operation, planning, and technology. In the industry frenzy, the factions fought with each other.

Since “brushing Weibo” and brushing teeth have become a must for Internet users to get up early, microblogging brand marketing capabilities have been recognized by more and more companies, and the need for companies to establish official Weibo (hereinafter referred to as “office micro”) has also become increasingly prominent. Select the official micro agent for microblogging marketing company operations. On the one hand, companies think that marketing companies have rich operating experience and the effect will be better than their own management; on the other hand, marketing companies also promise to use grassroots micro-grass they control as micro-influenced fans. So the official micro-generation operation market came into being. The operating price ranged from RMB 3,000 to 300,000 per month. The industry's largest single I heard in the interview came from Coca-Cola. It was alleged that the company had sold it at a price of RMB 18 million per year, but the news could not be verified.

There are advantages and disadvantages to the operation of the government’s microgenerational operations The marketing company can really bring fans into the official micro account, but the fans brought by the large size can hardly determine whether it is the target customer of the company. In addition, the individual responsible for the agent maintenance officer is not an employee of the company. The understanding of the company's culture and products is not easy. It will affect the formation of official micro-style and the timely release of major news.

The most common way for planners is event marketing. This is not new. Event marketing has been popular since the forum. At present, we are familiar with the object of guest, Durex, Haidilao, Meitu Xiuxi are successful corporate microblogging event marketing cases, many marketing companies will involve this business more or less. Even the “Du Fu’s busy” incident that appeared to be without any commercial purpose some time ago was also planned by Sina to increase the activity of Weibo.

However, industry insiders interviewed by "Business Value" frankly stated that it is difficult for the school to develop in the long-term because there are too many uncertainties. First of all, information overload on microblogs has led to distracted crowds, ** hot spots are easily transferred, and today’s hot spots may not even be visited tomorrow; secondly, Weibo users’ vigilance is increasing, and event marketing is overused, making them Attention and participation are increasingly difficult to capture. Once users discover that they are being marketed, they will have a repelling psychology. Third, the essence of event marketing lies in the quality of the product. A successful event marketing is based on the product itself. Assume that the scenario helps companies simulate the must-use customers and spread the selling points instead of creating events. Therefore, the difficulty in planning and doing microblogging marketing is increasing. The bad phenomenon that follows is that event marketing has a tendency of violence and corruption.

As for the technical school, the marketing company analyzes the composition and characteristics of the fans of the company's officials and helps the company to make marketing plans based on the data. This method seems to be scientific, but was destroyed by the proliferation of false fans: marketing companies to achieve the goal of adding powder, often using fake powder, zombies powder charge, which has almost become unspoken rules of the industry, some companies official powder The proportion can even reach 50%. Official micro-effective fans have significantly reduced, technical analysis data is also difficult to be accurate, and technology schools seem to be difficult to play.

However, microblogging marketing has another technological evolution path. Some individuals with expertise in the subdivided areas started operating Weibo and gathered a group of fans with similar interests around themselves. The personal attributes of these fans are more accurate, the purchasing power is also more vigorous, and the marketing value is greater than the full audience type account. The rise of private personal accounts has spawned marketing companies similar to account alliances, which draws together a group of personal accounts to conduct targeted dissemination of corporate customers’ products by analyzing their fan characteristics and activity, such as through the account of women's beauty. Distribute cosmetic information and then divide revenue and account holders. It is claimed that some individuals have been divided into monthly income of 100,000 yuan.

This type of marketing company has relatively high technical requirements. One of the technicians I contacted accounted for more than 60%. At the same time, because it does not need to expend energy on cultivating the large size, it has certain advantages when it comes to quotation. The impact of the group is relatively large.

However, no matter what genre it belongs to, Weibo marketing is attached to the Weibo platform and makes money from advertisers. Unknown changes in the microblogging platform's policy, the overall control will be more and more strict, and advertisers have increasingly doubted the microblogging marketing. In fact, the industry is experiencing cooling.

Marketing companies began to seriously consider their positioning and future. They are increasingly willing to call themselves "social marketing companies" rather than "microblogging marketing companies." Some company's business has even expanded into the field of APP production.

Their platform choices also tend to be more diversified. It is understood that some marketing companies have seen a significant decline in the proportion of their business on Sina Weibo. Some of the businesses have been transferred to platforms such as Renren and Tencent Weibo. Tencent's multi-product platform is getting more and more attention from them. In cooperation with Tencent, in addition to Weibo, there will also be a package plan such as WeChat and QQ Space.

“Now it is time to say goodbye to the stage of Weibo marketing. Weibo is just a media channel. Just like there is no special TV marketing or newspaper marketing, Weibo should become part of the overall social marketing of the enterprise. Blend together, not separate things."

The nature of microblogging marketing

The nature of Weibo is a one-to-many tool for real-time information dissemination. The marketing using it should also be based on this understanding and follow the general laws of marketing. However, it is a pity that this essence is often overlooked.

Companies (advertisers) often have unrealistic ideas about microblogging marketing, thinking that everything can be solved with “large-scale turnarounds.” Even more deadly, they often do not understand that they want to get from Weibo. what. In general, the purpose of marketing is nothing more than two, brand communication and increase sales, and on Weibo, these two actions are contradictory. Take the Weibo campaign as an example. The former is more suitable for users to forward and make information flow horizontally. The latter is more suitable for users to click on the link of the purchase page to make the information flow vertically. If both want to have both, the fan participation cost is too high and often does not work well. In addition, event prizes may also attract fans' excessive attention, making them ignore the real purpose of the event.

Another question: Should companies not be official? What is the extent of this? At present, there are two views in the industry: One thinks that companies must occupy the commanding heights of microblogging, because microblogging is a big battlefield, any individual can express their opinions on the above, which means that you put more advertisements in CCTV, there will be users in It's not that the number of people on Weibo has fallen, and that **** may happen at any time. Another view is that official micro is an official outlet for major news. There is no need to pursue a number of fans. Marketing can choose existing accounts that are consistent with their target audience. It takes a lot of cost and energy to forward the official micro-training to large size.

For marketing companies, they are happy to see companies choose the former, and generations of operators are a poor person. However, the number of fans they made promised not to believe it. The acquisition of official micro-fans needs to meet two conditions: First, it must give the fans a reason to pay attention, that is, what value it can bring to fans, and advertisements are sent every day. This is not a value; secondly, the acquisition speed of official micro-fans, Depending on the density of the target audience on Weibo, the higher the density, the greater the number of potential fans. There is a very vivid example. A company selling cast iron sewer pipes for companies who once wanted to do marketing on Weibo was discouraged because the target customers had to own the villas and would like to use cast iron pipes. This kind of person is very much on Weibo. rare.

If the marketing company agrees on the company's unrealistic goals in the contract, counterfeiting will often be a forced choice for them. The objects available for falsification on Weibo include, but are not limited to, fans, reposts, and comments. High-level fake powder even has daily humanities features such as updating microblogs and posting personalized reviews. They only have one physical body. This is the real reason why some Weibo events are lively, but companies complain that they have no effect. Falsehood was regarded by many people in the industry as the number one “killer” that damaged the development of the industry.

Of course, as the bottom-level framework, the development of the Weibo platform determines the final size of the industry. Sina Weibo is the main battlefield, but according to its current situation, the situation is far from optimistic. According to media reports, the number of new users on Sina Weibo has dropped from 20 million per month to about 10 million compared with the same period of last year. At present, the number of its users is about 324 million. Data from internal Sina shows that Weibo has 20 million active users per day. In February of this year, Sina’s fourth quarter 2011 financial report also showed that Weibo users exceeded 300 million, and the proportion of active users was about 9%. This means that the users of Sina Weibo will slow down and their activity will decline. The Weibo marketing attached to it will be trapped together.

In addition to the data recession, the commercialization of Sina Weibo has also had an impact on marketing companies. Last May, Sina CEO Cao Guowei summarized the six possible business models for Weibo: interactive precision advertising, social games, real-time search, wireless value-added services, e-commerce platforms, and digital content charging. But obviously, Sina’s main focus is now on advertising. This is an important reason why many microblog marketing companies have begun to expand their business expansion and make multi-platform choices.

During the interview and the publication of this article, the marketing company interviewed repeatedly called and stressed that he did not want to be named, which is evident in the official taboo of Sina.

Regardless of whether it is from a business company, an advertiser, or a platform provider, the microblog marketing industry is still far from mature. However, the reality has begun to force the industry to make a transition. This may be a good thing to clarify the chaos in the industry.