With over 76% of the Chinese search market share, Baidu is the most popular search engine platform in China. It allows businesses to connect with billions of people and allows advertisers to reach millions of potential customers. Here are some reasons why it makes sense to invest in Baidu Advertising.

Important Facts About Baidu

Baidu is one of the world’s popular search engine platforms since 2000. Here are some interesting facts about Baidu.

• 665 million active users
• 44.5% of the mobile market search share
• 70 million active mobile users
• 161 million daily active users(Baidu app)

The sheer volume of impressions that your marketing campaign might get on Baidu is the most exciting thing for advertisers. As a platform, Baidu provides more advertising options like paid search with display ads and in-feed ads.

Baidu has a relatively matured structure in comparison to other search engines with more open resources and better customer support.

What Is Baidu PPC?

Baidu Pay-Per-Click is a paid advertising and online marketing solution for enterprises. Businesses can create ads with relevant keywords that will help reach the target audience. When people use targeted keywords to search for product and services, your company’s ads will appear prominently on the search engine results page. The result is there is a high probability of your ads being clicked by potential customers.

Here are some advantages of investing in Baidu advertising like PPC promotion.

Advantages of Baidu PPC Promotion

Great Visibility

Baidu has the highest penetration rate in China and it receives billions of search queries every day. In simple words, your business enjoys great visibility through Baidu PPC promotion.

Accurate Targeting of Potential Customers

Through the use of right keywords, Baidu PPC promotion allows businesses to lock the needs of the customers. The Baidu PPC promotion offers you granular control over your advertising by allowing you to select region and time which gives more flexibility and makes targeting more accurate.

Baidu PPC promotions allow enterprises to register targeted product keywords (specific names of products and services) so that their product page arrives at a higher position (on SERP) for corresponding search results. This helps the potential customer to reach the product directly, get more information and makes the transaction easier.

Pay By Click Effect

The Baidu promotion feature provides enterprises Pay-by-Click to bring potential customers. The Baidu PPC promotion offers costs statistics report to businesses that make the investment very clear.

In Baidu PPC, your business is only charged if there is a valid click on your ad. You do not pay anything for impressions. Businesses can easily control the investment and promotion in accordance with their needs. This ensures the network extension in the form of Baidu advertising will get the highest returns.

Flexible and Controllable Promotion

The Baidu promotional plan can be customized as per demand for promotion. For example, businesses can set up location and time for their ads to appear. They can also set daily or weekly promotion schedule and set a budget cap (weekly/daily) on the promotional campaign on the basis of cost line and advertising budget management.

The management background of Baidu provides you keywords daily search volume analysis known as Baidu index. You can also get keyword recommendation that includes recommended appropriate keywords, tips to improve conversion rate and reduce advertising costs.

Paid-For Brand Protection

In advertising, there are potential scenarios where other businesses might copy your ad or use the same brand names in their ad. In some cases, competitors may procure false clicks on your ads to exhaust your advertising budget.

Baidu offers several levels of paid for brand protection. When you use this paid service, competitors are not able to bid for your brand keywords.

Baidu- Brand Zone

Baidu Brand Zone allows big brands to make good impressions in search results. It is a paid service that allows enterprises to dominate search results page with information about your brand.

Baidu Brand Zone can improve the performance of brand advertising and offers a staggeringly high conversion rate. The average click-through rate is anywhere between 50% to 80%. According to China Internet Watch survey, Baidu Brand Zone provides 78% increase in purchase intent.

Do you’ve any questions about Baidu advertising? Please feel free to comment.

Weibo is one of the popular social media platforms with more than 650 million users. With such a vast audience, Weibo offers splendid marketing opportunities for businesses to engage their customers. Let’s look at some Weibo marketing strategies that are used by western companies to attract an audience and seize marketing opportunities.

Building Relationship with Target Audience

To achieve success on the Weibo platform, western companies focus on interaction with the audience. On Weibo, the interaction between the account manager and target audience takes many forms such as

· Liking: Account managers like a “post” that speaks highly about their services or products or showcases their brand. This shows gratitude and appreciation to the post that attracts audience attention.

· Comments: Account manager can directly reply to the user’s comments or comment on the user’s post.

· Repost: Account manager can repost Key Opinion Leader post about their brand or repost general user’s questions along with answers or repost positive testimonials.

· Messages: this is a private form of communication where only the sender and the receiver can see the messages. This form of communication is useful to resolve a customer’s complaints or problems.

Creating Engaging Content

To create engaging content, you need to keep the target audience’s interests in mind. You can create diverse types of content and tag them into various categories. The tagged categories are helpful to thought leaders to follow and engage prospects. Here are some of the types of content used by Western companies to engage the audience.

· Sharing text with images is one popular way to interact with Weibo users. Since pictures are popular with Weibo users, they can be searched on Weibo.

· Watching and sharing videos are one of the popular activity of Weibo users. Western companies post attractive videos on a regular basis that helps in strengthening of the brand.

Here are some exciting examples of Western companies using Weibo differently to seize market opportunities.

Durex

Durex is a popular trademarked name for a range of condoms. The company leveraged the Weibo social media platform to increase its market share and sales in China. Here are some important elements of marketing strategies used by Durex on Weibo.

• Fictional Character to Interact with Fans

The company created a fictional character named “Little Dudu” to interact with fans and respond to their comments in a fun, playful, and entertaining way. The Little Dudu became a powerful tone of voice on Weibo that helped the brand stand out with authentic conversations.

• Alliances with Popular Opinion Leaders

Key Opinion Leaders with millions of followers prove helpful for brands to achieve their goals. Durex formed alliances with key opinion leaders and reached millions of their followers through repost of their campaigns, ads, and messages.

• Creation of Engaging Micro-Topics for Enhanced Interaction with Users

As a part of Weibo Marketing strategy, Durex used the features of the micro topics to attract and invite people for an interesting discussion on a topic. Durex created several engaging micro-topics to increase interaction with the users. The company created a Weibo page which had more than one million followers.

Durex used the Weibo page to share videos, articles, photos, blogs, and other rich forms of content. In a two-week period, the company posted around 139 updates. Out of these 139 updates, 60 were entertainments messages in the form of videos and graphics.

16 updates focused on providing health-related information or material related to a brand’s product. 4 posts were related to product promotion and introduction. 14 posts offered to buy incentives and coupons while 35 updates sought follower’s interaction. The posts on the Weibo page attracted a large amount of interest with lots of posts and comments from the users.

• Integration of Weibo on Other Platforms

Durex integrated Weibo with other platforms like Youko, Renren, and e-commerce platforms to align the brand with quality and business objectives.

Lancome

Lancome, a French beauty brand used Weibo to extensively build up its market position. The company created hashtag campaigns linked to style beauty and use of its products. Most of the brand’s posts were reposted several times and also received a large number of comments.

Do you’ve any questions? Please feel free to leave your comments below.

A direct marketing company can help you build your business. A company that specializes in direct marketing offers you the potential to gain further sales from existing customers or clients, and new sales from new customers.

Direct marketing involves building a direct, close relationship with your customers. A direct marketing company can help you market your product or service to the people that are most likely to buy off you.

A direct marketing company can assist you with many tasks, such as:

•    Identifying your market area and customer. A direct marketing company can help you place your customers in specific categories such as occupation, age, income, lifestyle, housing, attitudes, location, etc., making it easier to sell to these customers.

•    Maintaining loyalty with existing customers. A direct marketing company can help you keep you keep these customers loyal and away from the competition.

•    Selling more to existing customers. A direct marketing company can help you present products and services to existing customers.

•    Spending less on advertising. A direct marketing company can help you adopt a more cost-effective marketing approach.

•Providing information to assist in the sales of high-cost items. A direct marketing company can also assist you in preparing information to help the customer purchase.

A direct marketing company will analyze your business, develop a customer profile, suggest methods to reach your customer and then offer assistance in creating tools to reach your customer. An essential part of any marketing and business strategy is developing a customer profile, with a careful understanding of who your customer is, why they buy, where they buy, and why they choose to buy from your company. These behavioural characteristics of your “market,” or potential market determine all marketing, advertising and communication activities.

A direct marketing company can be a helpful way to expand your sales. Once a customer profile is developed, a company can help you strengthen your relationship with existing customers and find new customers. The company can also prepare these materials for you, from the written material, graphic approach to the distribution of the material. You can also measure the results and work out how effective a campaign has been. This could be anything from an email program, a telemarketing campaign, an electronic broadcast campaign, a social media program, print or magazine advertising program, to a carefully targeted website.

A direct marketing company can also help you in choosing the right tools for your product. With such complexity in the business environment, a company that specializes in marketing can advise you the best means to reach your customer. That could mean a variety of tools, such as database creation and management, social media campaign, advertising efforts, or perhaps even your sales force, depending upon the type of product being sold.

A direct marketing company can help you develop a complete package to reach your customer, from the right customer profile, the right tools to reach that customer, to the evaluation of those tools.

Just think how you will respond to all the promotional emails left unread in your inbox. In most cases they would be deleted with a single click especially when most email services are segregating such promotional stuff and putting them in one place. Now consider how you will react to the direct mailed brochures delivered by the postman to your doorstep. At least there is a better chance that you would look at the big prints before dumping them in the trash bin.  Sometimes this apparent look can take further interest and can let you consider giving a call to the advertiser. Almost all evidences strongly indicate that direct mail enjoys a far greater chance than other mailing methods.

As far as direct mail for mortgage is considered, it is one of the trusted methods to generate quick leads. Obviously there are few practices you need to stick to. First of all, a well-researched mailing list is the starting point and then your mails should have an attractive design and lastly you must guide your prospects regarding the next thing to do with a clear call to action.

According to the latest response report rate published by the Direct Marketing Association the following positive impacts are observed.

•  According to the report in every 1000 mailing prospects receiving a Direct Mail around 34 people are likely make a response.

•  In conversion rate Direct Mail is the second most effective marketing behind only Telemarketing.

•  Offering the right mix of mailing contents and designs such as postcards, catalogues and larger size mail the response rate has been observed as even greater.

Let us find out seven mortgage direct mail marketing tips for garnering a better response rate.

1. Bring some variety with postcards and letters

Whether postcards would serve your mortgage direct mail campaign or a letter would do all the tricks it depends on the content, type of campaign, marketing focus and situations. Obviously, you cannot stick to a single solution for all situations. By experimenting with different direct mail formats like the postcards and the letters you can assess what actually brings you more results.

Direct mail postcards are less expensive, simple and ideal for addressing the immediate marketing needs. With space constraints they also take least time to write. The best benefit of direct mail postcards is obviously the immediate visibility as soon as it is pulled from the mailbox. On the other hand, there are few disadvantages as well. For instance, with a postcard campaign you cannot let the receiver know about your product and brand elaborately.

If your marketing campaign demands including a lot of information to make an impression on the mail recipient and generate conversion then letters are perfect choice.  Letters are always informative mailing tool that can be effective for potential prospects.

2. Clearly state the benefits in a simple and effective message

After all, simplicity is eye grabbing and resides in the forefront of the mind longer. A simple message will let the mail recipient understand the message just at a glance and just with a glance your mailing purpose is fulfilled.  Nobody has time to struggle comprehending a marketing statement and so make it simple, short, crisp and direct.

3. Give them a clear call to action for next step

In mortgage direct mail marketing the mailed postcard or letter must contain something that suggests people as what to do next. Whether you want the recipients calling the marketer’s office for a detailed explanation or they like to download a brochure from your website, you should give them suggestive call to action for the next step. Without taking them to the next step you have little chance of conversion.

4. Do not offer a guarantee of Approval

It is already a well-known regulation that mortgage plea cannot be guaranteed by any marketer. Every mortgage case is subjected to an underwriting process and without the completion of this the approval remains uncertain. Offering such a guarantee through a marketing campaign is a breach of regulations that can take you amid legal problems.  So, just stay clear of assuring such approval to your direct mail prospects.

5. Take the recipients to the respective website page

Direct mail campaign, especially when you are using postcards does not give you a lot of space to tell your customers and prospects all the relevant things. So, it is always recommended to use the direct mail campaign just to draw the initial attention and then guide them to a relevant website page where they can get the details. Do not just provide them a home page link as they may find it difficult to find their required page of information. Rather mention the exact URL of the respective webpage.

6. Make an impressive first direct mail and follow it with subsequent mails

As per the convention in direct mail campaigns the first direct mail received by the customer is referred as “control” which is followed by subsequent mails. You can consider this first mail piece as baseline. The response rate and revenue generated from this first campaign is measured and with the following campaigns the marketers try to cross this figure. To determine what works best for a campaign one can change an element in the subsequent campaign and measure against the first campaign. This is the most valid and tried method of leveraging series of campaigns and measuring the ROI of each campaign separately.

7. Focus on experienced marketers for a mortgage direct mail service

Finally, it is the years of experience of the direct mail marketing company that counts. Particularly direct mail marketers with relevant exposure and long years of experience in mortgage direct mail solutions can guide you with insights, studies and expertise driven knowledge of the field. So, for your mortgage direct mail campaign select a firm that has years of successful presence in the field with an array of satisfied clients.