In 2021, the Internet Chinese to welcome changes again.
The growth of the mobile Internet has peaked, and even the short video track that was popular last year is difficult to say. On the other hand, the century reconciliation between Tencent and Ali, the two major Internet giants, announced that the Internet has officially entered the "interconnection" time.
In the context of such a cycle conversion, the value of the search engine entrance represented by Baidu has also been re-examined. A phenomenon worth pondering is that in Q3 2021, Baidu App MAU reached 607 million, an increase of 12% year-on-year, becoming a "retrograde" in the current Internet enterprises.
The question left for people is, where did Baidu's countertrend growth come from?
On December 23, the 2021 Baidu Marketing Summit, this question was answered. Shen Ji, executive vice president of Baidu Group, said that the next wave of dividends of the Internet is "interconnection", in addition to bringing general benefits to the Internet industry, this will also open up a new situation in marketing in scientific and technological innovation, and promote the industry to run into the era of AI marketing.
Shen Ji, executive vice president of Baidu Group
The new business behind the changing user behavior
There is no doubt that the digital economy has completely reshaped people's lives.
Online consultation and drug purchase, live shopping, online office, in the past few years, with the rise of mobile Internet power, a more digital world is gradually taking shape.
On the Baidu platform, there are more than 6 billion search requests every day, which intuitively reflects the changes in user needs: in the past, people encountered small problems in physical health and were accustomed to searching for relevant health knowledge on Baidu, but now, people will want to complete it together with the service of consultation and drug purchase.
Behind these changes in user behavior, there are countless new businesses of small and medium-sized enterprises.
Yang Lin, the founder of the "veteran" moving company in Wuhou District, Chengdu, is a team veteran, and when he decided to start a business 9 years ago, Yang Lin was not familiar with the Internet and online promotion models.
In order to make up for this business "short board", in June 2013, Yang Lin began to try to cooperate with Baidu marketing under the recommendation of relatives, and learned to use the ability of Internet promotion under the guidance of the staff to let his brand and services reach more potential consumers, let online traffic feed back offline business, and find the growth point of business operations.
In recent years, with the change of mobile Internet consumption ecology and the upgrading of Baidu's marketing capabilities, yanglin's cooperation with Baidu has also shifted from the early basic search engine bidding advertising to innovative content marketing such as graphics and short videos, and then further optimized the traffic conversion effect through intelligent delivery models such as OCPCs. Accurate customer acquisition allows veteran moving companies to avoid the operational pressure of low-cost drainage, avoid falling into a vicious circle of compressing service quality and cost, and achieve long-term operation.
From searching for information to searching for services, Baidu platform has found new growth opportunities for business behind the changes in user behavior.
According to statistics, in the past 20 years, Baidu Marketing has served more than 2 million customers, providing customers with an average annual order volume of 2 billion+ or more. Users are upgrading from simply looking for content to looking for "content + services", thus extending the needs of more vertical segments.
Taking life services as an example, related demand increased by 270% year-on-year in Baidu. At present, more than 120 subdivision services can be completed on Baidu, covering multiple vertical tracks such as local life, medical and health, automobile, education, and live broadcasting.
In the past 20 years, the Internet has undergone several changes, the digital economy is dominant, content consumption is unprecedentedly developed, and the positioning of Baidu platform is constantly upgrading. In particular, in response to changes in user behavior needs, Baidu is jumping out of the inherent "search box" and extending to a larger media platform.
When the new search habit is formed on the Baidu platform, with the arrival of the new Internet cycle, for many enterprises, this is an important moment to seize new opportunities, as Shen Di said at this conference site, "Standing in the time window of interconnection, I hope to work together to seize the new dividend, grow together, and let more innovation and creation occur in our business world." ”
Develop incremental markets for marketing
How do you get more people to see your ads? Baidu is also thinking about this.
Today, advances in technology are changing the way people interact, and the way people access information and services is becoming more intelligent and diverse.
"Advertising" has appeared more than just in traditional channels. People can imagine more scenes, wake up in the living room in the morning through the voice to wake up to ask about the weather conditions, recommend dressing guides, or find suitable parking lots nearby and suitable places to eat through Baidu Maps on the way to the car.
In Baidu's view, the new growth opportunities of enterprises are hidden in these new scenarios.
According to Baidu, at present, in the intelligent application, the number of interactions that users have through Baidu voice technology has reached 15.5 billion times a day, and the video distribution volume in the Baidu system has accounted for more than 75%.
At present, Baidu marketing is still broadening and digging into the scenarios that users can provide services, such as the recent hot meta-universe, Baidu is creating related solutions so that more companies can participate in this popular concept. The aforementioned small degree smart speakers, Baidu maps and other products, as Baidu's flagship products launched for many years, are also constantly exploring to make the marketing scene wider, and even Apollo's driverless car, with the continuous landing of Baidu's intelligent transportation program, will also provide new marketing scenarios in the future.
This allows marketing itself, as in the past, to be limited to mobile and PC, and to try more ports. The development of this scenario can lead enterprises from the stock market to the incremental market.
"In the current Internet ecosystem, enterprises need to seize the dividends of interconnection, intelligence and digitalization to seek growth." Ding Canbiao, general manager of Baidu Commercial Products, said, "Baidu has been thinking about how it can better help enterprises achieve growth. In the future, on the one hand, it is necessary to help enterprises open up more new marketing scenarios on the Internet, and on the other hand, to provide better digital operation infrastructure to help enterprises achieve digital transformation. In addition, with the improvement of digital business infrastructure, advertising technology will also bring some new dividends. ”
Not only the richness of terminal scenarios and technologies, but also the current prevalence of grass planting economy, people's daily consumption is inseparable from content. Based on this, Baidu is also constantly improving its own content ecology and building a content system such as Baijia. This move can stimulate demand in more content scenarios. The personalitization strategy launched by it can also allow the Baidu platform to build a deeper trust, meet the deeper interaction needs of users, and connect more users and KOLs through search.
"In the process of helping enterprises to develop new marketing scenarios, one of the most important tasks of Baidu is to grasp the dividends brought by Baidu's content ecology, so we have launched many products related to content marketing, including Duxingxuan and knowledge marketing that everyone is familiar with." Ding Canbiao added. It is foreseeable that Baidu is building a closed loop of content interaction, user operation and marketing conversion.
On more business tools, the hosting page, as the position operation platform of Baidu marketing merchants, provides enterprises with a one-stop marketing closed-loop solution, so that more small and medium-sized enterprises can use a lower threshold to obtain functions such as store transactions and full-link data monitoring, and the launch of this product has also been warmly responded by partners.
There are also a series of marketing acquisition, structured product data docking and other operational efficiency tools for advertisers, such as Aifanfan and Aibu, which are making Baidu more and more thick, and the commercial services it can provide are also increasing.
At the technical level, technology has always been Baidu's gene, especially artificial intelligence, which is the core advantage that Baidu has been deeply cultivating for more than ten years. This allows Baidu to rely on the intelligent marketing system of Baidu Brain 7.0 at the marketing level to help enterprises achieve the intelligence of the whole link of marketing, further optimize the delivery efficiency, and improve efficiency and quality.
Growth is corresponding to the upgrade of product solutions. Through the upgrade of product solutions such as hosting pages, love procurement, and driving mentioned above, Baidu Marketing is committed to providing a scientific measurement system to empower enterprises to grow sustainably.
The upgrading of the three major capabilities of scene power, technical power and growth force is undoubtedly Baidu's continuous cultivation of its own internal strength in response to market changes and enterprise needs, and by creating a more perfect marketing infrastructure, enterprises can better complete their own marketing actions on the Baidu media platform.
In fact, invisibly, Baidu is no longer the Baidu it used to be.
From barbaric growth to crevices
A significant change is that the difficulty of traffic growth, the diversification of user needs, and the involution of competition have made the Internet transition from barbaric growth to a period of inevitable gaps.
The Internet dividend has faded, small businesses have borne the brunt of it, and many enterprises generally feel "struggling" in business operations. Even large enterprises have growth difficulties, so much so that Ali has more than once expected Tencent to open up its ecology in public, and it has shown a desire for WeChat traffic. Even the once-popular short video and live broadcast platforms have both announced that their growth has fallen into a bottleneck this year, and it is difficult to make a breakthrough, and they are more or less doing deep ploughing based on the existing stock market.
The digital economy landscape is stabilizing, and the question left for companies is actually how to compete for the world in the gap.
What Baidu marketing is doing can be understood as helping enterprises find these gaps, with the help of AI technology, with more abundant commercial products to improve the operational efficiency of enterprises. Including from the acquisition of traffic to the level of user operation, to fully realize the overall value-added and retention of people's hearts and minds of the brand, stimulate the new potential of the brand, help enterprises accumulate brand equity and realize asset realization, and break the internet marketing dilemma in the new era.
On the Baidu platform, there are more and more small businesses based on these capabilities provided by Baidu, opening up a better development situation and solving their own livelihood problems. For more large enterprises, Baidu is exploring how to help them evolve and upgrade.
That is to say, enterprises must not only do a good job in sales conversion, but also do a good job in brand building, so that corporate advertising can achieve a true sense of product and effect.
During this year's Summer Olympics, Baidu and Yue Fresh Team, combined with the concept of "Olympic Spirit, Champion Quality" of the national diving team, further achieved a breakthrough in the quality of product technology. Using the Baidu AI marketing ecosystem, they boldly tried a cross-border game, through the design of Olympic custom bottles, AR games, VR factories, etc., online use of Baidu AI marketing ecosystem, offline use of Yue fresh ground advantages, linkage promotion. Record the daily training of the national diving team, use the Baidu cloud assistance system, and show the daily training of the dream team. This move not only made the 20 million Yue Fresh Olympic limited bottles sold out in one fell swoop, but also let the Yue Fresh brand leave a high-quality, high-tech brand impression among consumers, which can be described as a lot of work.
There are many similar stories on the Baidu platform, which is a common problem faced by enterprises, but it is also an opportunity for the Baidu platform, which has also enabled Baidu itself to achieve deterministic growth by tapping more incremental market space for enterprises. To some extent, it answers why Baidu can continue to grow at a time when the Internet dividend has disappeared.
As of the third quarter of this year, Baidu's MAU reached 607 million, an increase of 12% year-on-year, which is a huge leap in the current situation where the growth of Internet platforms is generally flat. The proportion of daily login users also reached 79%, a record high.
In addition, Baidu's core online marketing revenue also increased by 6% year-on-year in the third quarter, contributing more than 60% to total revenue. This most critical business has also been steadily rising in the change of user needs and the improvement of their own capabilities. Wang Fengyang, vice president of Baidu Group, also said in an interview, "The transaction scenarios that Baidu APP can carry are becoming more and more abundant, and it has become an information and service hub in the Internet world. “
By upgrading its marketing capabilities, Baidu is becoming a more open public platform. As Chen Gang, deputy dean and professor of the School of Journalism and Communication of Peking University and director of the New Media Marketing Communication Research Center of Peking University, said, "Human beings are about to enter the digital living space, consumers will restore their essence as 'living people', Baidu is an important part of the digital living space, and it is also an irreplaceable 'super public marketing platform'." ”
Chinese search for 20 years, the pattern of the digital economy has undergone earth-shaking changes, for a platform, the most important thing is to seize every change of the times, with these keen innovations, to help more people. Obviously, in the context of the current Internet industry", Baidu has taken its steps, and it depends on how the public follows. But it is conceivable that in the context of interconnection, more innovative business models will undoubtedly emerge more and more, and seizing this opportunity is to get tickets to enter the new battlefield.