Say hello to our little friend.
Building traffic/leads to your business is tricky. Especially so in China where many of the medium are either too broadly targeted, too expensive, or simply faked numbers. So here's the logic:
AÂ quick rundown of your options looks something like this:
PRINT: Magazines will cost you about RMB 20k - 100k/page/month; while newspaper advertising will average about RMB 50k/page/day.
OUTDOOR:Good luck here, you're looking in the millions of RMB per year; for lightbox ads, you're looking at a hefty investment as well (I believe its RMB 40k/month/lightbox, with a minimum buy of 3 months, and 10 lightboxes).
Ok, what about your online options? Well you can go with online banner ads; though this is a dangerous arena. Many of the medium/small websites will charge you upwards RMB 15k/month, but almost all of these sites will lie about their traffic figures ( I know this from my own personal media buying experience). That leaves the big dogs like Sina and Sohu; their numbers are so ridiculously high they don't need to lie; but then this truth is counter balanced by selling ads for RMB 300k/day (yes... per DAY; check out Sohu's media kit).
The main takeaway? Advertising in China is expensive, sifting through piles of false data from vendors is a pain, and ROI is very difficult to track. In this increasingly social world, why do Brands continue to invest in expensive one way communications, when they could invest in 2 way, relationship building methods that are cheaper and allow tracking of advertising ROI?
A potential solution.
I've been dealing with the above problem for about 3 years now, running different campaigns for clients in China. With the economic climate seriously cutting down marketing budgets, companies are looking for better, more accountable ways of spending their money. The solution?
Well I don't have a miricle solution - but I do have a really nice case study that may point us toward the solution we seek. Bear with me as I reveal BA's tiny in-house project and what we've been able to do in about 6 weeks through China's social networks.
The results.
Usually I put the results at the end, but since this is going to be a long article, I figured I'd tell you now in case you got too bored to make it to the end.
 So here it is:Within 6 weeks we pulled in 135k traffic, 1100 email newsletter sign ups, 6000+ followers on China's social networks, and enough ad revenue from AdSense to buy the office coffee for 3 months (the last one isn't that impressive, I know - but hey, free coffee is free coffee).
The challenge.
To create a previously unknown Brand and build a significant amount of trust and goodwill from scratch.
Target China's youth market, a competitive difficult market to enter.
Use only SNS channels for advertising; we will not spend any money on banner ads or PPC.
Â
The brand.
Since we were trying to build significant numbers quickly, we went with content that was easily accessible by a wide audience.
We ended up with translating viral stories from the West into Chinese, these stories had the best chance of catching our audience, and were essentially easy to reproduce on a consistent basis. Being fun to read and a break from the daily grind for the staff also played a part in this decision.
Missniuniu's brand is simple - a cute girl tuned into the funny oddities in life. She serves as a diplomat for Chinese youth to the West's offbeat culture; stories include viral oddities, dating, and love advice. Very simple and very easy to access.
"Missniuniu" is actually BA's Sherry Xie (who has written a few articles for LRB). Since she looks a lot better in a two piece bathing suit than I do, we figured we go with her as the brand ambassador.
Missniuniu.com went through a few redesigns - with more to come in the future, but the current look/feel is as you see below - or failing that, simply check out the site.
 Â
Onward.
Newsletter growth.
Our newsletter growth (as tracked by mailchimp) has leaped upwards. I take this as a sign that visitors find value in our content and want to keep connected. This is further proven by our above industry average email rates below.
Missniuniu currently has 1100 subscribers, and emails sent to this list have a 50% open rate (vs. the standard 15.2%) and a 7% click rate (vs. standard 2.7%). Missniuniu's list then, is of relative high quality.
Â
The above stats are from an earlier campaign - we haven't sent a newsletter for a few weeks due to some odd technical problems via feedproxy, a Chinese RSS system; when we get this issue fixed, I'll re-post our results.
Social network site traffic:
71% of our traffic comes from referring social network sites; over time, we seem to be sticking in people's minds, leading to a significant amount of direct traffic to missniuniu (26%).
Out top ten referring sites are below - we began with Douban, and are now fanning out to other SNS and microblogging sites.
Our traffic is from a mix of China social network sites and micro blogging sites like twitter and fanfou; we also receive a nice chunk straight from google; it's nice to see our SEO efforts take hold so early in the life of the site.
Our Followers:
Missniuniu's followers are close to 6000. A more accurate total will need to wait after China lifts the SNS block (I can't access some of these sites now).
Of these followers, a significant amount of them re-tweet Missniuniu's posts. I'll have Sherry write up a little case study of this later in the month.
Search Engine Traffic.
Though our site is very young, we've also seen a consistent growth in organic hits from search engines. It's nothing to get too excited about - but the trend seems to indicate we are doing the right thing.
You'll notice a big traffic spike around June 18 - this was due to one of our articles gaining a quick burst of interest. It looks nice, but essentially is an anomaly. The key idea here is the general growth overall.
Geographic Reach.
Geographically, we're all over China, with a distinct emphasis on Beijing and Shanghai. This is to be expected.
Potential sales leads/revenue.
AdSense serves as an easy way to test potential click through leads to a clients website. Over the last few weeks Missniuniu has seen a consistent upward trend in clickthroughs from the main site to AdSense advertisers.
How is this significant? Generally the idea is that if you can pull visitors from SNS sites, and then serve relevant ads, you can use the community (in this case, Missniuniu) as a way of filtering leads to your company website.
The takeaway.
What's it all mean? Well its simple in its own somewhat complex way. By creating a small community (ie: Missniuniu) that serves relevant, interesting, and targeted content, we can then begin to pull visitors from satellite social networks into our community space. From there, based on our goals, we can have them do a number of things that:
Build our brand on the basis of value-add to our visitors
Create loyalty, trust, and reciprocation (or re-tweets).
Turn this "love" into actual sales, or mutually beneficial results.
The critical trick then is finding, creating, or aggregating that information; and making it accessible, relevant and interesting to your readers.
If any of this was of interest to you - and you'd like to build your own community - then let me know. I'm currently in the process of building several communities for clients for both B2B and B2C clients, and would love to talk to you about your project, and if there is anything I can do to assist.
Link to original post