The “platform” here not only refers to a single application platform, but also includes the resource collection that can be integrated and used by marketing decision-makers. The major battlefield of mobile marketing in 2015 mainly focuses on the following five major platforms:
The WeChat platform in 2015 has made many efforts in the cultivation of content ecology and corporate account. On the one hand, it has directly resulted in the boom of content entrepreneurship and also displayed its imagination and attempt to B2B market. But in my opinion, WeChat’s input in the construction of the marketing support system is insufficient.
The threshold of releasing ads in Moments has reduced from several millions of yuan in the beginning of the year to 50,000 yuan of automatic ad releasing, which has indeed increased the number of clients. However, this can hardly meet the continuous marketing demands of advertisers from the control of ad frequency and ad display form. It is even more disappointing from the perspective of the orientation capacity of data and data development capability. All the data mining and processing are like a black box to companies, where they can only see the results. They cannot use them to have any insight into the behaviors of consumers or combine with their own data.
Tencent Social Ads basically see no change in terms of the ad form in the ecology of WeChat. As an ad platform, WeChat’s values of innovation are under-developed. This conforms to WeChat team’s attitude to marketing values. But this is really regretful given the importance of WeChat platform in the modern commercial environment. But compared with Facebook’s development, I don’t think that ad and marketing values should be the business modes that can be neglected for a long time by WeChat.
Of course generally speaking, there is huge room for innovation in WeChat service ecology. From the perspective of marketing, WeChat is still the digital channel in China with the highest penetration rate and open rate. It is an overwhelming trend to combine with the traditional CRM in 2015. Some clients of Social Touch have tried a deep integration of the automatic marketing and marketing of CRM with WeChat. The value brought by the integration is also amazing. Deep integration will call for a huge amount of IT work and a professional software platform as its foundation. In 2015, Social Touch is the client in WeChat channels with the largest input resources. With an actual expenditure exceeding 10 million yuan, it has realized the effective, automatic, and digital management of millions of consumers, which realizes and transforms the business models of companies in the mobile Internet.
I have been optimistic about Sina Weibo for years and I will continue to be so (Please refer to the articles in the past three years, even though Sina Weibo was mostly doubted from the end of 2014 to the beginning of 2015.). In 2015, the number of daily active users at Sina Weibo has exceeded 100 million. The three consecutive years of activeness and revenue growth have won the recognition of the mainstream business media and some front-line clients again.
The reasons why I have been optimistic about Weibo are very simple. First, currently no social media platform can compete with Sina Weibo in terms of the threshold of content creation, content mobility and content abundance. Second, Sina Weibo is in fact the best platform in China in terms of the data openness, abundant label data, and deep use power. This has far excelled WeChat, which has fully represented the development direction of advanced productivity.
When other platforms hesitate in data openness and business explorations due to the ignorance and fear to the openness, the level and depth of the commercialization of Sina Weibo has been far ahead. This has enabled Sina Weibo to play the role of incubating new vertical social platforms, such as Second Camera, Xiaokaxiu.com, Fensitong.com, and WAX. These innovations have ensured that the strategic value and competitiveness of Sina Weibo will last for a long period of time.
Another value of Sina Weibo is shown by the capability of converting the information flow and data orientation capability into ads, which can undoubtedly be ranked the first among other platforms in terms of the client type and the average conversion effect. I met some people who speak ill of Sina Weibo. They would say, “You can choose not to believe in the data of active users. You can judge by the use habit of people around you. But you have to understand that the growth of advertisers and input data is objective. Everyone respects their own budget. You can doubt the platform, but you cannot doubt the intelligence of your fellow competitors.”
Apart from Weibo and WeChat, vertical platforms such as Headlines Today and momo have further improved their advertisement systems in 2015. However, advertisers now pay more attention to the so-called Hero resources in these Hero APPs, including various startup pictures and major ad banners. These resources are basically sold by the number of days. Brand advertisers has invested a large budget due to the certainty and coverage rate of the resources.
Mobile DSP is a highlight pursued by capital in 2015. Procedural purchase is indeed forming a booming advertisement platform. The current challenge lies with the unsatisfactory quality of the flow connected by mobile DSP and the difficulty with the realization of data orientation capability. But it still has a good prospect in the long term.
In fact, in 2015, mobile ad alliance has kept improving. The previous method of “Banner + long-tail flow” has been gradually recognized by the market as the primary form of mobile ads. A superior form is an emerging mobile advertisement alliance featuring “native ad of information flow + head/waist media”. When resources of good quality refuse RTB exchanges, various network alliances and private trade fairs have won the favor of advertisers even more in 2016.
When it comes to “mobile marketing”, the above five special “mobile platforms” are the platforms that I think should be considered. Videos, searching and e-commerce are also platforms with a huge flow on mobile terminals. However, the marketing logic of these platforms follows that of PC. Therefore, they cannot be regarded as “mobile platforms” to a certain extent. In addition, a batch of companies with the business model of flow distribution of social accounts are also channels of marketing resources that cannot be neglected. But since the resources are similar and it is difficult to standardize and program trades, it is hard to say which platform has become a representative or which channel is a must. Finally, it is undoubtedly that app stores become important channels for APP marketing. But due to the single type of clients served, app stores cannot be listed as mobile marketing resources on platforms.
Apart from the purchase of hard advertisements, the charm of mobile marketing lies in that it has kept innovating the pattern of obtaining low-cost traffic. These explorations will usually bring phenomenon success and become the focus of the industry.
Where is the mobile traffic? Or, where is the low-cost and high-output traffic? This question is not only an interest to marketers, but also a puzzle to various innovative media and startups for days and nights. To me, new traffic in the mobile climate in 2015 has the following three sources:
The so-called emotion/hotspot traffic refers to the phenomenon that when the communication amount of an incident or the emotions it represents reaches a certain threshold in the social networks, it will be enlarged to be a traffic black hole and result in the flood-in effect. Everyone’s attention is swept in and there is finally a huge amount of reading, forwarding and discussion.
Take two cases as an example. The first is the ranking list of hit topics on Sina Weibo, which has been half commercialized. Its core value is that a topic with a good participation foundation, once listed on the list, will continue to create a bigger effect of self-communication. Therefore, as for some hot commodities, such as film, TV play, and games, this effect will bring more traffic and success with half the effort.
Another case is that various social hotspot issues will bring huge traffic every once in a while, such as the discovery of Kepler Star, the triumph of AlphaGo, and the arrival of a festival. Then, various brands will release contents relevant to the incident, which is despised by many marketers or Internet workers, because some indeed has done a poor job in this and people also have aesthetic fatigue after so long.
However, I have used the data of our clients to do some quantitative data analysis. Results show that the front-line marketers do this not fully because of the despotic power of stupid bosses. They do this because they have indeed discovered in their work that the traffic effect generated by hotspot issues enables most of the ads to gain the corresponding emotion or hot topic traffic effect. The amount of reading and interaction is indeed better than the ordinary marketing.
The poster of “Tang Yuan (the combination of Tang Wei and Gao Yuanyuan, the same pronunciation as rice dumpling)” for Pantene at the Festival of Lanterns
However, it is not an easy job to continuously and successfully produce contents that become hot topics or gain emotion traffic. Even for the most creative content team in the market, the actual success rate is also lower than 50%. This is like shooting an arrow at night and luck is a more important element.
One of the big challenges for marketing management is the certainty of success. Otherwise, CMOs would be nervous all the day. Therefore, with the wisdom of marketing practices in 2015, more and more rich advertisers choose the marketing in combination with IP to obtain mobile traffic.
What is marketing combined with IP? Simply speaking, it is to use contents that have evidences and traffic to do integrated marketing. As long as the chosen content are in the mainstream, such a marketing method is highly likely to enable advertisers to enjoy the traffic bought by the IP contents.
This explains why the WeMedia entrepreneurship suddenly booms in WeChat. With the improvement of the flow efficiency of social media information, the cost threshold of IP creation has been greatly reduced while the realization cycle becomes shorter due to the high demand in mobile traffic. Take part of the business data of Social Touch in 2015 as an example. The price of premium ads in WeChat Subscriptions has kept growing, because the supply of contents falls short of demand. More and more subscriptions have asked for 100,000 or 200,000 yuan for one embedding ad. Of course, the life cycle of these subscriptions may not necessarily last long. We have invested over 30 million yuan in advertisement placement in subscriptions a year. Having a close look at the list of subscriptions during the first and second half of the year, you will discover the huge changes with the names of subscriptions.
The marketing of IP has also become an interesting phenomenon in 2015 due to the increase of IP value. The success of IP cannot only be ensured by the previous mode of “super star – large input – strong publicity”. Serving as the marketing brain for Go Princess Go, Social Touch has gained the understanding that the risk and complexity for IP to succeed is far more serious than before in the new climate. This calls for detailed analysis and planning, real-time strategy upgrading, and certain luck. Only then can they enjoy the high benefits brought by high risks.
Poster of cooperation between Whisper and the Princess
We finally come to the core opinions of this article. The core essence of mobile marketing in 2015 has been exposed to the business world more clearly. Creativity and content are important carriers attached to traffic. However, media with a large scale, high certainty and biggest potential is the traffic of people relevant to brands.
There are three methods to operate people’s traffic:
WeChat business
Undoubtedly, WeChat business is the first mode to use mobile Internet traffic for innovation and realize huge business values. Of course, many WeChat businesses wander in many grey commercial areas, including bi-level distribution, inferior products, oversell, agency stores and brainwashing. With the continuous improvement of consumers’ understanding capability, the previous crude method of misleading consumers’ judgments has gradually become invalid. But by the end of 2015, some sales companies under big brands like COFCO Group and Mengniu Dairy have brought new changes to this mode.
Recruitment of experts in healthy lifestyle for COFCO Group
The innovation of WeChat business modes lies that it has indeed found the way and method to realize personal traffic. The first batch of WeChat businessmen succeeded mainly because of the realization by the low-cost and high-efficient traffic in Moments. But its limitations are that people are regarded as goods shelves and there are huge conflicts with the demand of dignity by normal people in their social intercourse. WeChat businessmen eager for quick success and instant benefits can hardly balance the two relationships.
Community
Community has become a buzz word in 2015. From brand to WeMedia and Internet celebrities, everyone is talking about community and everyone sees the value of community.
Simply speaking, the value of community lies in installing a traffic-born engine on a business mode. The engine can: 1) meet the traffic demand of business modes; and 2) constantly increase the traffic scale to match the upgraded business mode.
The difficulty lies in how can community be built up. The establishment of community, in particular, still needs to perfectly match the business mode and form an overall forward loop. Now two types of communities have achieved success. The first type is to rely on high quality contents to attract people, maintain the community scale and promote the sales of peripheral products relevant to contents. The second type is to rely on personal values and the influence of these values to gather like-minded people and form the driving force for sales. The most powerful is of course the community that combines both. As a saying goes, “No one can compete with the Internet celebrities who can write.”
Social CRM
WeChat business and community may represent part of the new business mode innovations. But to the giant stock of traditional business, there are huge uncertainties and limitations with these two marketing modes. But the key concept is right, namely how to find a new organization form to enable more people to contribute their WeMedia traffic and help companies realize their own marketing goals.
To a certain extent, this concept is a big opportunity of shared economy in the field of marketing. When mobile Internet makes each of us the owner of traffic, this society needs an effective platform to match everyone’s traffic with company demands. This matching includes not only the matching of traffic scale and price, but also the matching of accuracy, traffic quality, brand value and social values. It also includes the complicated value exchange mechanism meeting the benefits of various parties.
Social Touch is basically the first company to propose and define the concept of SCRM. As for the introduction to SCRM, please refer to the previous article titled What in Hell is SCRM. After several years of business practice, I would like to share with you the SCRM-ripple management method of Social Touch with you here.
First, the core idea of Social Touch’s SCRM-ripple management method is that the relationship between companies and the public is no longer divided by the consumption habits of the consumers, but rather divided by the social relation dynamism between companies and the public and the social influence of the public.
The ripple relationship figure of Social Touch
Second, the operation methods for people in different social relationship dynamisms should be totally different. Employees or stakeholders of companies need the content operation to emphasis on the brand building of companies and closely connect the company values with their social currency values. Company KOLs have a huge influence and a stronger demand for benefit sharing. The key to operation is the operation of ordinary consumers, the maintenance of stickiness and the continuous upgrading of benefits.
Finally, the operation-dependent software of SCRM can realize the large scale of automation, the data-analysis-based upgrading and the response to various cheating behaviors.
As a B2B company, Social Touch has used the staff version SCRM and achieved an outstanding ROI. The unit price of high quality clicks on mobile terminals is only 20% of that on searching engines. The price of sales leads is reduced by 90%. The amount of reading of WeChat articles and the number of fans have all dramatically increased.
Stellar map of the communication power of SCRM staff at Social Touch
In the past, CRM was only a defensive marketing method in the marketing of some industries. But in the mobile social era, SCRM will become a necessary marketing mode that is mainly offensive and defensive as well for 80% of the companies. To some extent, the mobile marketing without SCRM system is still very superficial.
This is the best of times and also the worst of times for marketing managers.
This is the best of times, because marketing managers have never been so valued by CEOs like today before. CEOs can never talk with CMOs in the mindset that “I know much more than you”.
This is the worst of times, because the position of marketing management needs constant learning, trial and explorations with the quick changes. The successful method last year may not work this year and you may not copy other people’s secrets to success.
To me, marketing management calls for changes with the marketing organizational capability from advertisement purchase to creative contents to technology-driven operation.
In the very beginning, the capability of ad purchase is the most important capability. With the cost-effective media resources, the odds of success will be about 80%. As long as you can become the top bidder, the marketing results will basically be good.
With the advent of the creativity era, big idea has become the pet phrase of CMOs. They often say, “this idea is not big enough. We want bigger and bigger ideas.”
Then, CMOs suddenly discover that a big idea is nothing. No hot topic can last more than one month on social media. It’s pretty good to last a few days. A whole set of content creation system and capability is needed to feed the black holes of attention for social media.
Another obvious and important trend in 2015 is that content is actually not the most important element. More and more CMOs realize that the marketing operation capability is in the biggest shortage. This capability needs to break up the boundaries of paid media, self-owned media and earned media and also needs to break up the boundaries of brand creativity, public relations, WeMedia operation, CRM management and e-commerce management. The core is to set up the “user-centered mobile marketing system” featuring “user acquisition – user image – user transformation – user sharing – user appreciation”. In this way, companies can fully realize and continue to manage the hundreds of thousands of and millions of consumer relations and combine the media budget closely with the user value.
In 2015, Social Touch has finally completed the basic competence system demanded by the mobile marketing ecology.
Since establishment in 2011, Social Touch has been determined to become a new service provider of marketing solutions. There are many outstanding creativity companies and technical companies. But there is basically no company in the market that can be good at both aspects and become a new type of company which marketing managers can rely on for creativity with good technologies.
Therefore, after 4 years of development, Social Touch now has 800 marketing talents, among which over 300 have the working experience in marketing creativity. They become marketing creators that are better in technology. Another 300 have the working experience in technology, software and data and so they become technical talents who know the essential demands of marketing. They work closely with each other under the same roof of Social Touch. Social Touch now can provide the end-to-end integration services from “operation of creative contents” to “SCRM SaaS software” to “programmatic ad purchase”. More importantly, Social Touch has well helped clients accumulate the data, coherently apply the data, and realize the “user-centered mobile marketing”, so that companies can master the core capabilities to marketing success in the mobile and social era.
